I first met Rauschenberg through Dorothea Rockburne. and I went out and I was going
around openings, just looking for people and telling them that I needed a job.
And Dorothea said, "Oh, there might be something where I work."
And she didn't say where she worked.
So she said, "Be here," And it was Bob's.
And this is, you know, Robert Rauschenberg.
He was a big deal.
But you're there making coffee, you know, and fending people
off on the telephone.
And I was very good at that, I could pick up the phone and I could identify, you know,
"Oh, Ileana," you know?
And he would go, you know, he answered "no.”
I was Bob’s assistant from the late 60’s and I had the job for about four years.
It was the longest I ever had a job.
I had to set this painting up for Marcello Mastroianni or...I can’t remember...it was
either Julie Christie or Fae Dunaway.
And they were supposedly interested in.. but he just looked totally bored.
I mean, the way he always looked.
Lots of people would just, like, drop by.
It was a very relaxed sort of situation.
People had coffee and drinks and he had this big iron stove and you know, there was a kitchen
table and, you know, a couple counters and the phone.
I mean...there are a lot of young artists hanging out at the house.
I mean there are a lot of young artists hanging out at the house.
some days there'd be a lot of dancers, like Yvonne…and Yvonne Rainer or Lucinda Childs.
And then another day, there'd be painters, like Alex Hay.
And I remember Alex working on some big projects,
I mean, he was, like, very supportive of younger artists and very generous.
My job, basically, was I was supposed to make it so that he could just walk in the room
and start working.
I rarely saw him work.
I mean, it seemed to me, at that time, he was working mostly at night.
And things would just sort of appear, you know.
I had never seen, before or since, someone concentrated so intensely.
I mean, he was just like, "Look at these things," and you could tell he was working out how
they could be working.
And, you know, he was working.
After he did white painting, he did black paintings.
These were very plain…
I mean, to show that at that time was pretty radical.
The story was that Newman objected to them so they didn't get shown in the Betty Parsons
Show.
Barnett Newman was an abstract expressionist.
Basically, one of the first minimalists, and a giant personality, and a giant painter.
And if Newman was objected to it, they must've been pretty radical
Bob wanted to re-do his White Painting project.
I mean, he had done it, and then most of the panels were used up in Combines that he did.
He just used those canvases in other projects he was working on.
So they didn't exist anymore.
basically, you know, but we stretched it out, we got canvas that was very close to the canvas
that he had originally used.
And he said, "When you paint them...just make sure that the paint doesn't show.
I mean, there's no expression, there's no brushstroke, just...make it totally anonymous."
The whole point was that anybody can make them.
You know, that was...
I mean, that's the way he felt about it.
And this was like in, you know, the minimalist thing was starting up and I always thought,
it was like, "Bob," such-and-so, wanted to do, like, show he'd been there or, you know,
keep his finger in the pie or whatever.
Why is Rauschenberg important?
He opens it up.
He's pointing out the importance of art, and yet at the same time, he's leaving himself
in a position to explore unpretentiously.
And it's like there's no pretense, just incredible
intelligence.
It's an intelligence that is between art and life.
But also, I see collage as a big influence.
there's an immediacy about collage.
The paint in a lot of Bob's paintings, they're like, collage elements.
There was a certain kind of imagery that can get really complex in Rauschenberg's.
You know, I mean, you say, "Oh yeah, there's the wheel, yeah.
There's a bicycle, there's..."
He had all this stuff he really liked, you know, was really drawn to.
When he wants to put it together, he can really put it together.
when he first got some money, he bought a car and drove the whole coast of Eastern United
States, looking for some place to go or to be.
I remember, you know, one day he just got this call and it was from an agent in Captiva,
Sanibel, Florida.
And he went down the next, you know, couple of days, would look at the property and decided
to go for it.
He got the place, you know, it was a house on the beach.
And then just started building it up.
And then finally he just came back once and said, you know, "I'm letting you all go."
He said, "None of you need this job anymore."
And he was really right.