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In her autobiographical novel, poet Sylvia Plath aptly described the New York City summer of 1953 as “queer” and “sultry.”1 Kids cooled off under spouting fire hydrants while Marilyn Monroe sizzled in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Least surprisingly, the New York Yankees defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers in a subway World Series. And, as Plath noted, it was the summer that atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were electrocuted at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
Temperatures continued to reach the high double digits in late August and early September. Painter Robert Rauschenberg probably ignored the heat better than most native New Yorkers. A few months earlier, he had returned from a seven-month trip to Italy and North Africa, and he had been raised in the sticky heat of Port Arthur, Texas. He was now living in an attic studio in an “ancient derelict building” on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan. The heat there must have been oppressive, with the discomfort compounded by the smell of fish at the nearby Fulton Street Fish Market. But the space was abundant and appealing, with cathedral ceilings, white walls, and wood-plank floors. The rent was only ten dollars a month, but there was no running water. Rauschenberg showered at friends’ apartments, lived on pennies a day, slept on fish crates, employed a bucket in the yard as a sink, and scrounged the neighborhood for materials for his artwork. One imagines Rauschenberg happy, focused not only on the paintings that would be exhibited at the Stable Gallery, beginning on the fifteenth of September, but also on other art projects that would help to establish his reputation.2
One day that fall, Rauschenberg headed uptown to ask a huge favor from Willem de Kooning, who was then the toast of the art world. His series of paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery had stunned and thrilled the critics. These paintings retained the passionate brushstrokes common to abstract expressionism while depicting recognizable female figures. Some of them presented women with horrific, devouring mouths, perversely based on models appearing in cigarette advertisements. Two leading art critics, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, despite the fury of their disagreements over the nature of painting and the role of the painter, celebrated de Kooning. He was, Greenberg exulted, a genius.3
The “genius” resided in a rear top-floor apartment on Tenth Street. As Rauschenberg climbed the stairs, he moved slowly, hesitantly, summoning up his courage. He was more an acquaintance than a friend of de Kooning. A generation younger than de Kooning, Rauschenberg had been making a small mark on the New York art scene. In 1951, he had exhibited work at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Rauschenberg stood about six feet tall, hair cropped short and kept neat; he had gentle, southern manners that failed to paper over his intense ambition. His creativity and energy were boundless. Yet he was a contradiction, according to his friend the dancer Carolyn Brown: an artist that wanted to have fun with his work but who also was “wildly competitive.”4
As he knocked on the apartment door, Rauschenberg “prayed the whole time” that de Kooning “might not be at home.” But de Kooning opened the door, probably attired in his usual outfit of rolled up blue jeans, splattered with paint. He had a mop of light, tussled hair, with a powerful torso atop a sagging midsection.
Rauschenberg came bearing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s as a welcome gift. For an enthusiastic alcoholic such as de Kooning, whiskey was like manna from heaven. Rauschenberg hesitated to bring up the startling purpose of his visit, counting on small talk and booze to ease the path. Finally, Rauschenberg came out with it: Might de Kooning give him a drawing so that he could erase it? “I know what you’re doing,” responded an “annoyed” de Kooning, who presumed that Rauschenberg wanted to engage in an act of symbolic patricide, declaring his own avant-garde credentials by defacing the work of an established figure.5
Nevertheless, de Kooning ambled over to where he kept portfolios of his drawings. Slowly, almost methodically, he pulled out one drawing after another, examining each and then finding it unsuitable. The appropriate drawing, de Kooning announced, had to be of high quality: “I want to give you one that I’ll miss.” And, importantly, it needed to be “very hard” to erase. After leaving Rauschenberg dangling for what seemed an eternity, de Kooning finally handed him a drawing, done in crayon, charcoal, ink, grease, and pencil.6
Rauschenberg headed home to work on erasing the de Kooning. One month of hard labor and many disintegrated gummy erasers (estimates vary from fifteen to forty) later, the task was completed—more or less.
Rauschenberg failed to eradicate all traces of de Kooning’s drawing.7 The master had wisely bequeathed to the upstart a work that resisted decimation. In addition, traces of another drawing on the verso managed to gently peek through. Perhaps, too, Rauschenberg desired to leave wisps of de Kooning’s presence in the new work. He had his new romantic partner, the artist Jasper Johns, frame the piece in gold leaf and hand-title it Erased de Kooning Drawing. “I erased the de Kooning,” Rauschenberg related, “not out of any negative response.”8 Both de Kooning and Rauschenberg in their drawings often included sediment from erasures in the finished work. At once an homage to an established artist and declaration of independence, Erased De Kooning was, as art historian Leo Steinberg put it, “a sort of collaboration.”9
It was a realization of Rauschenberg’s appreciation for diminishing the various lines, in this case literally, between original material and newly created work. When pushed to characterize this new creation, Rauschenberg referred to it, quite simply, as “poetry.”10
As the heat of summer lingered into the fall, Rauschenberg entered into a collaboration with John Cage. The pair shared a conceptual and performative bent. Indeed, the importance of Cage to Rauschenberg’s art and spirit cannot be underestimated. If nothing else, Cage allowed Rauschenberg to feel, he said, that “the way I was thinking was not crazy.”11
Crazy or not, they rendezvoused at Rauschenberg’s Fulton Street apartment building on a Sunday morning, when traffic on the busy thoroughfare would be minimal. The plan was simple. Rauschenberg had glued together about twenty sheets of drawing paper into one long train, about twenty-three feet long, which he then proceeded to lay out upon the street. Cage, in his beloved Model A Ford, drove over the expanse of paper while Rauschenberg slopped black paint on a back tire. The result was a long piece of paper covered with tire marks. The marks were not uniform, given the unevenness of the tires and surface, the differing amounts of applied paint, and other factors.
One interpreter suggested that, rather than being a conceptual artwork or even “a new formal design,” Automobile Tire Print was actually a comment on Fulton Street, which was home to many small printing businesses. In this view, Rauschenberg captured in the print the chaos and pulse of mobility, in a form that unfolded like a Chinese scroll.12 Ever enticingly enigmatic, Cage remarked about the work, “I know he put the paint on the tires. And he unrolled the paper on the city street. But which one of us drove the car?”13 Perfect: Cage musing about who drove the car of creativity.
In almost all of Rauschenberg’s work in 1953, and beyond, there lurked the allure of interpretation, of finding meaning in his objects, performances, quirks, and paintings. The challenge, however, was that Rauschenberg’s art supported any number of equally valid interpretations—so many, in fact, that they might be so open to interpretation as to remain forever resistant to it, early examples of artworks that, in Sontag’s famous phrase, were “against interpretation.” These artworks sparkled with plurality and possibility.14 In sum, exemplary of the New Sensibility then emerging.
Nowhere was this sensibility more apparent than in Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, which were part of the Stable Gallery show that opened in September. Those paintings had played a role in Cage’s Theater Piece no. 1 at Black Mountain in September 1952. In fact, Cage later stated that the seeming emptiness of the White Paintings had inspired him to compose 4’33”. More probably, Rauschenberg’s White Paintings had nudged Cage along with his own experimental piece. Suggestions of such a turn had festered in Cage’s mind for close to a decade. Rauschenberg and Cage, clearly, were riding in the same Model A car of invention and paradox.
The White Paintings consisted of flat white house paint applied with rollers onto canvas. Although a white painting, White on White, had been done by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich in 1918, Rauschenberg was unaware of any precursor work.15 According to one commentator at the time of the Stable Gallery show, the White Paintings were “worthless”: “Four blank white walls the landlord provides will do as well.” Rauschenberg had “committed a gratuitously destructive act.”16 Another critic declared the white canvases “beyond the artistic pale.” Eleanor Ward, owner of the gallery, removed the guest book because it was filled with numerous “awful” comments.17
Rauschenberg obviously viewed his work differently. The White Paintings, he proclaimed, were “probably more beautiful than anything else I have done.”18 How are we to take such a statement? The works showed, in contrast to the abstract works then in vogue, no slashing gestural marks, few subtle changes in color tonality, and little evidence of the personal anguish of the painter translated onto the canvas. Certainly, as in Erased De Kooning, there was at least a hint of spoofing, an attempt to poke fun at painters’ highfalutin notions about the sanctity of art.
Rauschenberg believed that the White Paintings were doing “something interesting.”19 The painting did not exist to call attention to itself, certainly not as a sacral object. It demanded an active response from the viewer, and he noted how flecks of dust or dirt could change its appearance—hence why Rauschenberg called these canvases “hypersensitive.”20 More important, the white canvases reflected movement as well as light and shadow. One could look at them as at a mirror, gaining more than just a turned-around reflection. Depending upon where and when one gazed and where one stood, the paintings offered different possibilities—an artistic exemplum of Einstein’s concept of relativity. And democratic, too, in their pluralism and openness. “One could look at them,” Rauschenberg claimed, “and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”21
The White Paintings wanted to alert viewers to more possibilities than those entombed on the picture plane. Cage called the paintings “airports for lights, shadows, and particles.” The painting existed not to call attention to themselves. “Before such emptiness, you just wait to see what you will see,” remarked Cage.22 And that could be both beautiful and enlightening.
As with Erased De Kooning, they resisted interpretation by dismissing essentialism and fixed meaning. Rauschenberg admitted, “I would like to make a picture that no two people would see the same thing.”23 Like Cage’s 4’33” there could not be a passive response to the work; thoughts, insights, disgust, interest, and the natural environment merrily intruded into the now imaginary space between the viewer and the work.24
The irony of the White Paintings evoked another kindred spirit, a man who was the doyen of the postwar New York City avant-garde, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp’s work first alighted on American shores in 1913 when his semi-cubist work Nude Descending a Staircase had startled the crowds at the Armory Show in New York City. That show had combined examples of edgy modernist art from Europe with works by American artists. Duchamp’s piece caused the greatest controversy. The painting depicted movement, but no matter how much viewers squinted at the piece, they failed to detect a nude—probably much to their disappointment. Duchamp seemed to be sneering at his audience, playing a joke on their sense of perception and propriety.
In another piece, Duchamp presented as a work of art an enamel urinal, which he had bought at a plumbing supply store. He signed and dated it “R. Mutt 1917.” Since the early 1940s, however, Duchamp had been living quietly in Greenwich Village with his wife, spending much of his time playing chess. Although he declared that he had abandoned art, he was secretly working on a monumental piece (Étant Donnés, a three-dimensional assemblage) and serving as a guru to young artists and an advisor to wealthy patrons.25
Rauschenberg first glimpsed Duchamp’s work in the winter of 1951, when a recreated version of Bicycle Wheel was displayed at the Janis Gallery. As with much of Duchamp’s art, Bicycle Wheel was what it appeared to be, a bicycle wheel perched atop a mass-produced stool. The materiality and the beauty of the objects—unadorned by the artist—flowered. With Duchamp’s dry wit and ironic juxtaposition, the artwork became a conceptual object that upended notions about what properly constituted art. Duchamp coyly tweaked the pretense of art, something that appealed greatly to both Cage and Rauschenberg. He was a provocateur, a conceptual jester of high seriousness whose work was always fascinating, sometimes more. Rauschenberg found Bicycle Wheel “more beautiful than anything in the exhibition.”26
Rauschenberg’s work echoed Duchamp’s critical imperatives as much as Cage’s. Duchamp was cognizant of the connection. He had attended Rauschenberg’s show at Stable, where the White Paintings were exhibited alongside works called Elemental Sculptures. The sculptures were made out of found objects and detritus, pieces of wood, mossy rocks, and strands of heavy rope, all of them united by Rauschenberg’s appreciation for the material world that surrounded him, indicative of what one art historian referred to as his “vernacular glance.”27 One of those structures—Music Box—was a rough-hewn box, studded with nails and included some pieces of rock. When he encountered the piece, Duchamp picked it up, shook it, and with characteristic wit announced: “I think I recognize that tune.”28
Was Rauschenberg—and Cage for that matter—less than original, simply resurrecting a Dadaist/Duchampian sensibility? To a degree, certainly. All artists recycle ideas, pay homage to and rebel against their precursors. Cage and Rauschenberg, certainly, were conversant with modernist giants. They followed, in part, the rebellious spirit of modernism while also poking fun at it—taking it to extremes. In a sense, they were adherents of the view that T. S. Eliot famously presented in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: artists place themselves within traditions and by their work change the nature of that tradition.29
Conceiving of oneself as an avant-garde artist demanded rebellion against the established art of one’s moment, as well as an embrace of newness. To question the meaning of art, to introduce serious play against uptight seriousness, to thumb one’s nose at art institutions and the cash nexus, and to bring perception down to the materials involved in the artwork was, if not entirely original, then at least significant and startling within the context of American art in 1953.
To be acknowledged even narrowly as an epigone of Duchamp—the master of creativity and provocation—was, if nothing else, a high honor. And, in that spirit, Rauschenberg pushed his art ever further. He faithfully voiced the avant-garde ideal in his well-known statement “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made.” But he then undermined somewhat the obliteration of the lines by claiming: “I try to act in the gap between the two.” What and where that gap is remained poorly clarified.30
Rauschenberg’s work focused on the diminution of gaps. Consider another piece at the Stable Gallery show, Dirt Painting (for John Cage). The work, at first glance, was Duchampian in its agonistic relation to artistic creation—it dissolved the boundary between the natural and the created worlds. Dirt Painting consisted of dirt mixed with an adhesive so that, in Cage’s description, “it sticks to itself and the canvas.” The muddle of materials was then placed in a box to be hung from the wall, just like a normal painting.31 Mold and lichens grew on the dirt surface, giving it, as art critic Walter Hopps aptly noted, the look “of field-structured Abstract Expressionist painting.” But in this case, nature itself was doing the brushwork. Similarly, Rauschenberg’s Growing Painting, consisting of dirt and vegetation in a wood frame, which was shown at the Stable Gallery, was a living thing, and Rauschenberg returned to the gallery to water it regularly.32
Dirt Painting and Growing Painting, as art historian Branden Joseph notes, captured “temporality” and “duration.” They are about how the natural world moves, quite apart from the action of artist and spectator. Another aesthetic was at work with Rauschenberg, one that would become central to the New Sensibility—an acknowledgment and embrace of boredom. Boredom hinges on repetition or long duration, as in Warhol’s prints and films (chapter 12). Rauschenberg accepted willingly the unfinished, in-process, growing, never-standing-still aspects of his art. To all but the most directed of viewers, however, they were precisely the opposite, capturing in an art gallery the old saw about “watching the grass grow.” The art of boredom, Rauschenberg and Cage claimed, opened the viewer up to new possibilities, to a sort of Zen of perception.33
Running throughout Rauschenberg’s artwork in 1953 was a sense of serious play and disrespect for the cash value of the artwork. Rauschenberg was not ideologically opposed to making a living from his work; he was disappointed when works from his initial show had failed to sell. Yet he was known to be generous in giving works away. Indeed, he was also quite capable of destroying artwork as a mode of artistic expression, of his disdain for the sacralization of the artist and his or her work.
Rauschenberg had spent a good part of the first half of 1953 traveling in Europe and North Africa. He wangled a couple of shows at the conclusion of his sojourn. He had been collecting various objects—odd items from flea markets, natural materials from the North African desert, rusty metallic objects, and much more. He placed some of these objects in boxes; others, like an Italian washboard, were hung on the wall. Rauschenberg considered these objects as being “fetishes,” imbued with an almost religious cast.
One of his shows, at the Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea in Florence, in March 1953, had been scathingly reviewed by a local critic. Rauschenberg, so the story goes, perhaps impressed by the insight of the critique or by the passion behind it, decided to destroy the offending artworks. He joked that in doing so he would save the expense of shipping them home. With the help of his artist pal Cy Twombly, he lugged the art to the bank of the Arno River and proceeded to dump the works into the water. A couple of the works floated to the surface, and they were saved, packed in his wicker trunk to be sent back to New York City.34
Rauschenberg’s rather flippant attitude to his art coexisted with a devotion to creating work that allowed, as it were, the materials themselves to speak. He cherished objects and materials, as was apparent in the White Paintings. At this time, he began working on two sets of new paintings, either entirely in red or entirely in black, which mimicked—without the possibility of reflection—the paintings he had completed in white.
In a series of paintings done in black, Rauschenberg began his movement toward “combines,” toward building up the canvas with all sorts of objects. These paintings spoke to texture, complexity, physicality, and depth. He took newspapers, sometimes a single sheet, sometimes an entire paper, sometimes pages that were crumbled, and attached them to the canvas, using them as the surface upon which he applied copious amounts of black paint. On occasion, hints of content from the newspapers unintentionally peeked through the paint: “Saturday, March 3, 1952” or “Damage 20 Jets … Battle in Korea.”35 These built-up surfaces not only gave a sculptural feel to the works; they also allowed the play of light upon them to shift colors and intensity, creating a landscape that was at once haunting and beautiful. But some viewers, as Carolyn Brown recalled, found the work “a shocker.”36
Rauschenberg wanted the Black Paintings to be about nothing more than the beauty of the black pigment. He would be dismayed when a later commentator found these works suggestive of “fecal matter,” in “the smeared quality of the paint, the varying degrees of viscosity, and the color—shit black and brown.”37 Such “clichés of associations,” Rauschenberg responded, might lead him to erase or change the picture.38
Within a couple of years, all sorts of objects—ranging from electric fans to buttons to a stuffed eagle—would protrude from his paintings. All was held together in a fantastic combination of materials, design sense, and daring—with an “absence of hierarchy.”39
Perhaps no one appreciated Rauschenberg more than Cage. In honor of the Stable Gallery show, Cage listed some key points of the artist’s approach: “No subject / No image / No taste,” and more. “I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing in these paintings that could not be changed,” Cage continued, “that they can be seen in any light and are not destroyed by the action of shadows. Hallelujah! The blind can see again, the water is fine.”40
Rauschenberg desired to efface himself, to reject idea, beauty, and subject in the work of art. This was striking and problematic. Art historian Moira Roth called out Rauschenberg and Cage (as well as Jasper Johns and others from their circle) for practicing an “aesthetic of indifference.” How, Roth wondered, had Rauschenberg and Cage produced artworks that were so deficient, silent, and ignorant of the historical context in which they were produced? How, in a period when one was expected to be simply for or against Communism, mere months after the United States had exploded a hydrogen bomb, with the body counts from the Korean War still undetermined, had these artists employed “neutrality as their springboard”?41
One answer, which Roth and others have offered, was that Rauschenberg and company were well aware of their historical context, a time when McCarthyism raged, homophobia was rampant, and the H-bomb loomed.42 In such a world, especially for gay artists such as Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns with an anarchist or radical bent, the danger of speaking out forthrightly was apparent. They were silenced, moved to efface themselves from the artwork. A box filled with dirt adorning a gallery wall, paintings that were simply white, a long roll with tire marks upon it—all could be viewed as politically impotent, jokes without bite.
Art historians therefore easily place Rauschenberg in the same Cold War discourse as abstract expressionists. According to this hypothesis, the existential individualism and abstraction associated with painters such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and others perfectly fit the era. Because they were ideologically neutral and artistically radical, they were easily appropriated, made into signs that exemplified American freedom without challenging American imperialism, racism, or economic inequality. Indeed, the radical nature of these works of art served—in the uses put to them by custodians of American culture and foreign policy—as proof positive that in the United States freedom of expression and unfettered creativity reigned. They became objects to be exported abroad and consumed at home for display in corporate offices or advertising.43
Although Rauschenberg later in his career would energetically take up political causes, in 1953 he demonstrated little political consciousness. Perhaps his sensibility had been numbed by horrible experiences he had working as a hospital orderly during the Second World War. There he had encountered human beings literally torn apart by warfare; others whose minds had been erased by the pain they had suffered or the horrors that they had witnessed. “Every day your heart was torn out,” Rauschenberg grimly recalled, “until you couldn’t stand it.” He added, “I learned how little difference there is between sanity and insanity and realized that a combination is essential.”44
In the face of such inhumanity and horror, in a world awash with repression and destruction, perhaps the only comfortable stance for an anarchist and gay man such as Rauschenberg was to mock slyly the possibility of erasure (of himself and the human race) in Erased De Kooning or White Paintings. His imperative was to go as far as he could with his art, to push his sensibility in new directions. It was all about, as he stated, “checking my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of a greater freshness.”45
Certainly Rauschenberg in 1953 was following his muse, with muscular intensity. He was, in many ways, a determined and delightful naïf. Rauschenberg had only been aware for a decade that art could be a serious enterprise. Growing up in Port Arthur, poor but solvent, had denied him the experience of museums and highbrow cultural activities. Only after his service in the Second World War had he come into contact with Dada and surrealism, with the collage boxes of Joseph Cornell and the conceptual rigor of Duchamp. He was like a kid in a candy store, stuffing his face with all sorts of goodies, on a sort of artistic sugar high.
His openness to varied materials—apparent in Elemental Sculptures—expressed appreciation for the simplicity of the primitive, and hence was a critique of the present. Or the work can be read as recognizing that all civilizations end up as detritus. In the plurality of his approaches and materials, in the blurring of distinctions between high and low, Rauschenberg embraced chaos and multiplicity, offering them as potential solutions to the order imposed by an increasingly bureaucratic, instrumentalized reason.46 The stasis or entombment of a finished work of art was also something that Rauschenberg delightfully challenged, as in works that actually grew as they hung on the wall.
Rauschenberg’s willingness to dance along the edge of excess, to challenge the harrumph of satisfaction common to mainstream artists, his ability to combine ebullience and ambition, and his fervid creativity and democratic openness figured as critical features of a camp sensibility, still an underground phenomenon, until Sontag made it famous in the 1960s. Camp excess and immaturity, at least in the minds of Cold War liberals, were taken as signs of political weakness and homosexuality. Rauschenberg turned these presumed weaknesses into the stuff of an artistic sensibility that would come to dominate the art world. What is more camp, after all, than white paintings, multiple panels of them being offered for sale in a respectable art gallery?
If Rauschenberg in 1953 bore the markings of the New Sensibility, it had not yet been exhibited in full. Like Cage, he refused to go the route of confessionalism in his artwork, first, because he lacked any desire to hitch his star to that emerging aspect of the American cultural sensibility—“I don’t want my personality to come out through the piece”47—and second, because he and his gay comrades—Cage, Cunningham, and Johns—had, each in his own manner, already subtly expanded artistic possibilities in their often ironic works of art. They were the vanguard of a New Sensibility, soon joined, as we will see, by a variety of other gay creators: Patricia Highsmith, Allen Ginsberg, and Andy Warhol for starters.48
In 1953, Rauschenberg was staying temporarily in Cage’s apartment. On one wall was a piece of his from an earlier Parsons Gallery show that he had given to Cage as a token of respect. Cage was stunned, even angered, when he returned to his apartment and noticed that Rauschenberg had painted over the original in black. After he had calmed down, Cage came to appreciate the gesture and love the complexity of the black surface. As he once put it, “It’s a joy in fact to begin over again.”49 How appropriate, given the essential perception and desire that tumbled through Rauschenberg and Cage’s shared sensibility—that art was a process, the work ever open to revision, to new possibilities. And that going too far in the direction of experiment was not a crime but a requirement for the artist.