Robert Rauschenberg, Cardbird V, 1971

"'Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics.'"

"The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. 'Screwing things up is a virtue,' he said when he was 74 . . . . 'Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.'

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, 'to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.'"

"'I wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing.'"

"In an interview with critic Calvin Tomkins, Rauschenberg said: 'I had been working for some time at erasing, with the idea that I wanted to create a work of art by that method. Not just by deleting certain lines, you understand, but by erasing the whole thing. Using my own work wasn't satisfactory . . . I realized that it had to be something by someone who everybody agreed was great, and the most logical person for that was de Kooning. . . . [F]inally he gave me a drawing, and I took it home. It wasn't easy, by any means. The drawing was done with a hard line, and it was greasy too, so I had to work very hard on it, using every sort of eraser. But in the end it really worked. I liked the result.'"

"'Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.'"

"There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected sites; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation."

"'The marvel of transposing a fact of nature into its almost complete and vibratory disappearance.'"
- posted by cjb @ 8:46 PM