If you only know Robert Rauschenberg for his combine paintings, juxtaposing his name next to
the concept of emptiness might sound absolutely ridiculous. Combine paintings, a term coined by
Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg’s romantic partner, were first made by Rauschenberg in the 50s.
By combining many different materials and objects in a painting, these artworks would
become a hybrid between 2 dimensional paintings and 3 dimensional sculptures.
These paintings are the exact opposite of empty. If we look at Canyon made in 1959,
one of Rauschenberg’s most famous combines, we can see a cardboard box, a tube of paint, a mirror,
a picture of his son, a suspended pillow and finally, the notorious stuffed golden eagle. The
animal’s corpse, which was given to Rauschenberg by the artist Sari Dienes, seems to fly out at
the viewer. If we could qualify a painting as empty, this definitely couldn’t be one of them.
But Rauschenberg did more than just his combine paintings. At the beginning of the 50s,
he made a series of five white paintings, three of which are exposed at the SFMOMA,
the MET and the MOMA. These white paintings aren’t just called white paintings, that’s literally
what they are: white paintings. It’s just white house paint applied with a paint roller.
Listen, I’m not going to pretend that I like these paintings. They’ve been
of great significance in the history of art, but these paintings just don’t appeal to me.
John Cage, one of Rauschenberg’s colleagues, did however see an interest in them and called them:
“Airports for the lights, shadows and particles”. What he meant by that is, because these paintings
are so empty, looking at them slows you down and forces you to look around you and pay
attention to your environment. Every shadow on the canvas, every speck of dust floating between you
and the painting, you finally notice them. It’s a similar feeling to when everything around you
suddenly becomes silent, and the silence makes you more aware of every little sound surrounding you.
It’s a visual silence, nothingness, emptiness. As John Cage said, these paintings have:
“no subject, no image, no taste, no object, no beauty, no message, no talent, no technique,
no why, no idea, no intention, no art, no object, no feeling, no black, no white, no and.”
But, surprisingly, I don’t think that these white paintings are the best
embodiment of the concept of emptiness in Rauschenberg’s work. But what can be more
empty than a white canvas? What did Rauschenberg paint which can be emptier than an empty painting?
Well the question shouldn’t be what did Rauschenberg
paint, but what did Rauschenberg erase?
Before answering that question, we need to look at another artist from the 50s: Willem de Kooning. De
Kooning moved to America from the Netherlands in 1926, and had his first solo exhibition in 1948 at
the age of 44. He was one of the most successful and recognized abstract expressionist in New York
and he was even part of the Irascible 18, I made a video about this picture.
So the reason why I’m talking to you about Willem de Kooning is because, in 1953, Rauschenberg stood
at de Kooning’s doorstep with a bottle of Jack Daniels. He was there to ask de Kooning to give
him a drawing that he could then erase. If you want to hear the whole story in Rauschenberg’s
own words, I’ll link an interview of his in the description. De Kooning, though he didn’t like the
idea, still gave Rauschenberg a drawing, but he gave him a drawing which was particularly hard to
erase, so hard in fact that it took Rauschenberg about a month to erase the whole thing.
His goal here wasn’t to attack abstract expressionism,
or to dismiss popular artists of the time. His goal was, in the same spirit as dadaism,
to redefine and rediscover the limits of art. As I have pointed out in the video I made on Duchamp,
he was interested in asking you, the viewer, if what he presented and exposed was art.
Rauschenberg, like Jasper Johns, was a key figure in the neo-dada movement,
and he’s asking you, by framing the Erased de Kooning Drawing, if this is art.
Rauschenberg himself called this erasure poetry, but is it art?
So finally, how is this emptier than a white canvas? After all, if we look close enough,
we can see faint lines from where de Kooning’s drawing once stood.
Even though there isn’t much, there’s much more to see here than here. The Erased de Kooning
Drawing is more textured and it might give us more to look at, but it remains an absence.
Look at it this way, imagine an empty room. Here, look at Vilhelm Hammershøi’
Interior with windsor chair made in 1913. I modified this painting to prove a point.
The original painting has an empty chair as its subject. Which version conveys best emptiness?
One is literally empty, there’s nothing but space. The second however,
is emptier than empty. It’s a vacuum. The absence of someone sitting on that chair,
the idea that someone did sit there, but left, makes us even more aware of this emptiness.
This person getting up and leaving this chair created, in their action, not only a void,
but an absence. Rauschenberg ultimately did the same thing by erasing that drawing
and created the one thing that is emptier than emptiness itself: an absence.
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