I watched an interview with Robert Rauschenberg. Willem de Kooning was the most successful of the Abstract Expressionist painters. Many young artists of the period were in awe of his painting and drawing. ‘Everyone was working like de Kooning except for me and they already didn’t take my art work seriously, which made my work even friendlier, because in no way could I be considered a competitor. So I was no threat. Well I love to draw, and as ridiculous as it may seem, I was trying to bring drawing into the ‘all whites’. I kept making drawings myself and erasing them and that just looked like an erased Rauschenberg, or I mean it was nothing, so I figured out that it had to begin as art, so it had to be a de Kooning then, if it’s going to be an important piece. You see how ridiculously you have to think, in order to make this work, so I bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and went up and knocked on his door, praying the whole time that he wouldn’t be home, and then that would be the work, but he was home, and after a few awkward moments I told him what I had in mind, and he said that he understood me, but he wasn’t for it and then I was hoping then he would refuse and that would be the work. He couldn’t have made me feel more uncomfortable then, he took the painting he was working on off the easel, I don’t even know if he was doing this consciously, and put it against the already closed door….okay I want it to be something I’ll miss. I said, ‘Please it doesn’t have to be that good. I didn’t actually say this, but that was how I was feeling. He said ‘I’m going to give you something that will be really difficult to erase, and I said, thank God, then that will be the work. And then he gave me something that had charcoal, oil paint, pencil, crayon. I spent a month erasing that little drawing. and on the other side is another that isn’t erased, the documentation is built in. They think it was a gesture, a protest against Abstract Expressionism, because you see it’s a very complicated story and I don’t think most people would think this way, so it is hard for them to think of that. Or an act of destruction, vandalism is the other alternative. And asked for you it is? It’s poetry
This lead me to research the work that Rauschenberg was referring to as his ‘all whites’.
In the summer of 1951 Robert Rauschenberg created his revolutionary White Paintings at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. At a time when Abstract Expressionism was ascendant in New York, Rauschenberg’s uninflected all-white surfaces eliminated gesture and denied all possibility of narrative or external reference. In his radical reduction of content as well as in his conception of the works as a series of modular shaped geometric canvases, Rauschenberg can be seen as presaging Minimalism by a decade.
I think it was psychological, in the sense of what was there for him to but challenge the reigning master, even though he loved de Kooning and thought he was the greatest living artist, and then of course it created this great scandal, how could you erase this great masterpiece, not only did you presumable take something out of the history of art, but you also defaced property.
“By selecting de Kooning, Rauschenberg chose perhaps the most prominent painter among the Abstract Expressionists, and his act would be widely interpreted as a symbolically patricidal gesture. Cage compared Rauschenberg’s erasure with L.H.O.O.Q., a work Duchamp made by drawing a moustache on a postcard of the Mona Lisa. Like Duchamp’s gesture, Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing has been hailed as a landmark of postmodernism because of its subversive appropriation of another artist’s work, and it has also been understood as a rejection of the traditional practice of drawing as the foundation of painting.
My first thoughts on viewing the image online was that I was a bit underwhelmed. It does arouse my curiosity and I feel frustration at not being able to see the original drawing. There are some faint marks left, the paper isn’t totally blank and I found myself just staring at it trying to guess what had been there. I think it is an important part of art history. Interestingly, I was more excited by the assertion from Ruschenberg that if de Kooning hadn’t been home, then ‘that would have been the work’, and then if he hadn’t agreed to giving him a drawing, ‘that would have been the work, and so on. That is a very interesting concept to me, and somehow I can understand it better that the erasure of the drawing.
http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/singular_forms/highlights_1a.html
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