In their writings, both musician John Cage and art critic Leo Steinberg agree that Rauschenberg's art changed the course and history of art in a profound way.
Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Cage's essay asserts that a new type of aesthetic awareness has come into existence, based on the notion that beauty is present everywhere and is generated by a new way of looking and seeing that requires participation of both, the artist and the spectator. He refers to Rauschenberg’s strategy to use ordinary things in his art because even the most mundane object can possess beauty if viewed from a new perspective.
Multiplicity and New Way of Constructing the Meaning in Combines
Describing one of Rauschenberg’s paintings, Cage insists that it is not a composition but ‘a place where things are’ and any element of the work can be removed and replaced by another one. This suggests a departure from the carefully calculated arrangement to produce a unique visual effect in modernist paintings where each individual component contributes to the overall unity.
Referring to combines, Cage uses the term ‘multiplicity’ to signify that each thing contained within them is a valid subject. This enables flexibility and openness of interpretation. In fact, Cage questions existence of any meaning at all in Rauschenberg’s work.
New Way of Painting
Cage refers to the artist’s work not as hitherto traditional conceived painting designed to hang on a wall but as flat rectangular surfaces, created on canvas stretched on the ground that can be presented as a painting, thus suggesting a new mode of working process.
Cage’s text stresses the spontaneity of the creative process where there is ‘no tendency towards gesture or arrangement’. This aspect of activity implies the trend towards the defining role of physical (three dimensional) space and real time in Rauschenberg’s work as well as the active role of the spectator.
For Cage, Rauschenberg’s art had the power to open up his own visual sensitivity. In a wider context, the text implies that such innovative art as Rauschenberg’s can potentially alter the aesthetic awareness of the wider spectatorship by refocusing from the interior on the exterior and change the way we see the world.
Leo Steinberg's Interpretation of Rauschenberg's Work
Leo Steinberg acknowledges that the significant change introduced by Rauschenberg lies in the new working practice whereby the artist constructs his work as a horizontal surface. This re-orientation signals a radical departure from naturalistic painting that was hitherto conceived as representation parallel to the viewer’s field of vision from the Renaissance to Abstract Expressionism.
The new mode of picturing no longer corresponds to the transparent vertical plane extending into an illusionistic dimension but rather it has evolved into an opaque (not illusionistic) horizontal work-surface. Steinberg regards ‘the tilt of the picture plane from vertical to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture.’
New Way of Experiencing Art
Steinberg likens the new pictorial surface to work surfaces associated with common activities of everyday life, emphasizing the aspect of making rather than just seeing. Steinberg attributed to Rauschenberg the foundation of the new artistic language generating ‘a different order of experience’. Transferring a painting from vertical into horizontal position produces a new reading.
The horizontal serves as a receptacle for collecting and presenting factual information from the external world rather than an optical dimension reflecting the artist’s emotions. The hard horizontal surface of the new pictorial plane allows for the inclusion of all kinds of objects and thus enables greater heterogeneity than strictly medium-specific modernist painting.
According to Steinberg, the type of pictorial surface that allowed the art to return to the real world was Rauschenberg’s principal innovation which changed the relationship not only between the artist and image but also between the image and viewer.
Sources
- John Cage, 'On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and his Work' (1961), in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Blackwell Publishing 2003
- Leo Steinberg, 'The Flatbed Picture Plane', from Other Criteria (1968/72), in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Blackwell Publishing 2003
Zuzana Minarikova - I live in London and work in publishing in Bloomsbury which is an exciting part of London, full of museums, galleries, bookshops and ...
