Rauschenberg Quotes

Curiosity is the main energy...

An empty canvas is full.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two. - 1959, from a catalogue

I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.

I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.

Value the process.

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

[Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008] helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop, At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.

A pair of stockings is no less suitable o make a painting of than wood,nails,turpentine,oil,and fabric.

I didn't want painting to be simply an act of emphasizing one color to do something to another color, like using red to intensify green, because that would imply some subordination of red. I didn't want color to serve me.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.

Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

Indexical drawing (“index” in the sense of Pierce’s semiotics: a sign whose signifier and signified have a real and often physical relationship to one another prior to interpretation. Like, you might explain when introducing the assignment, smoke coming out of the window of a burning house, lipstick on a wine glass, or the Cage / Rauschenberg tire-track print made by a moving car)

RAUSCHENBERG’S BED How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes unsleepable site of anarchy What body holes expressed their exaltation loathing exhaustion what horse of night has pawed those sheets what talk under the blanket raveled what clitoris lain very still in her own subversion what traveler homeward reached for familiar bedding and felt stiff tatters under his fingers How a bed is horizontal yet this is vertical inarticulate liquids spent from a spectral pillow How on a summer night someone drives out on the roads while another one lies ice-packed in dreams of freezing Sometimes this bed has eyes, sometimes breasts sometimes eking forth from its laden springs pity compassion pity again for all they have worn and borne Sometimes it howls for penis sometimes vagina sometimes for the nether hole the everywhere How the children sleep and wake the children sleep awake upstairs How on a single night the driver of roads comes back into the sweat-cold bed of the dreamer leans toward what’s there for warmth human limbs human crust 2000

Pop art from the sixties lingered on as a movement, mutating and becoming more ironic as it drifted further from its origins. Compared to some of the dour work of the conceptualists and minimalists, one felt that at least these artists had a sense of fun. Warhol, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, and their kin were about embracing, in a peculiar, ironic way, a world with which we were familiar. They accepted that pop culture was the water in which we all swam. I think I can speak for a lot of the musicians in New York at that time and say that we genuinely liked a lot of pop culture, and that we appreciated workmanlike song craft. Talking Heads did covers of 1910 Fruitgum Company and the Troggs, and Patti Smith famously reworked the über-primitive song “Gloria” as well as the soul song “Land of 1,000 Dances.” Of course, our cover tunes were very different from those we would have been expected to play if we had been a bar band that played covers. That would have meant Fleetwood Mac, Rod Stewart, Donny & Marie, Heart, ELO, or Bob Seger. Don’t get me wrong, some of them had some great songs, but they sure weren’t singing about the world as we were experiencing it. The earlier, more primitive pop hits we’d first heard on the radio as suburban children now seemed like diamonds in the rough to us. To cover those songs was to establish a link between one’s earliest experience of pop music and one’s present ambitions—to revive that innocent excitement and meaning.