Lot Essay
In 1963 Rauschenberg made the following statement about his work for the Pop Art Redefined catalogue:
I find it nearly impossible to free ice to write about jeepaxle my work. The concept I planatarium [sic] struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed [sic] to the logical continuity lift tab in language horses and communication. (Quoted in J. Russell, exh. cat., Pop Art Redefined, New York)
This statement was intended to suggest the process by which Rauschenberg had achieved the aesthetic breakthrough of his Combine paintings and contemporaneous drawings. The basic message of the sentence is interrupted by bizarre connectors and interjections that both disturb and amplify the essential idea, allowing the distractions of life to leak into the content of the sentence. In this same way, Rauschenberg collected a plethora of material in his Combines, giving each part parity and creating from them a "flatbed picture plane" (L. Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art, New York, 1972, p. 90).
Steinberg has elaborated:
I once heard Jasper Johns say that Rauschenberg was the man who in this century had invented the most since Picasso. What he invented above all was, I think, a pictorial surface that let the world in again. Not the world of the Renaissance man who looked for his weather clues out of the window; but the world of men who turn knobs to hear a taped message, "precipitation probability ten percent tonight," electronically transmitted from some windowless booth. Rauschenberg's picture plane is for the consciousness immersed in the brain of the city. (Ibid., p. 90)
Rauschenberg used a solvent to lift a printed image from a magazine or book to place the image, reversed, into his drawing. The small boxes which he had constructed early in his career from personal memorabilia and detritus could now be transferred to paper, drawn upon and modified. The effect was extraordinary: Rauschenberg's inventiveness in the juxtaposition of images was unlimited and his ability to combine images from disparate sources was checked only by the supply of images he could find. This process led directly to Rauschenberg's silkscreen paintings and to a method of working that he has continued ever since. It relied on what Brian O'Doherty has called the "vernacular glance:"
The vernacular glance is dumb in terms of what it can't do, but extraordinarily versatile in dealing with experience that would be totally confusing otherwise. It can tolerate everything but meaning (the attempt to understand instead of recognize) and sensory deprivation--voids and absences. It is superficial in the best sense. (B. O'Doherty, Art in America, Sept.-Oct. 1973, pp. 82-86)
Fast Slip takes images that Rauschenberg had used in his Dante illustrations of 1963 (see Lot 4) and recombines them; they do not assume the mythological meanings he had given them in the Dante drawings but act instead as components of a personal iconography.
In 1986 Lawrence Alloway wrote the following about Rauschenberg's drawings:
Rauschenberg resisted his own improvisatory gifts in the combine paintings, accepting found objects in all their facticity. In both the transfer drawings and the silkscreen paintings he asserted a sober sense of the given reality of camera-derived images. It is in the transfer drawings that Rauschenberg's inventiveness is seen undistracted, with a plentitude of images, lyrical in their manual transcription and in both source and facture literally close at hand. (L. Alloway, Robert Rauschenberg Drawings, 1958-1968, New York, 1986)
I find it nearly impossible to free ice to write about jeepaxle my work. The concept I planatarium [sic] struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed [sic] to the logical continuity lift tab in language horses and communication. (Quoted in J. Russell, exh. cat., Pop Art Redefined, New York)
This statement was intended to suggest the process by which Rauschenberg had achieved the aesthetic breakthrough of his Combine paintings and contemporaneous drawings. The basic message of the sentence is interrupted by bizarre connectors and interjections that both disturb and amplify the essential idea, allowing the distractions of life to leak into the content of the sentence. In this same way, Rauschenberg collected a plethora of material in his Combines, giving each part parity and creating from them a "flatbed picture plane" (L. Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art, New York, 1972, p. 90).
Steinberg has elaborated:
I once heard Jasper Johns say that Rauschenberg was the man who in this century had invented the most since Picasso. What he invented above all was, I think, a pictorial surface that let the world in again. Not the world of the Renaissance man who looked for his weather clues out of the window; but the world of men who turn knobs to hear a taped message, "precipitation probability ten percent tonight," electronically transmitted from some windowless booth. Rauschenberg's picture plane is for the consciousness immersed in the brain of the city. (Ibid., p. 90)
Rauschenberg used a solvent to lift a printed image from a magazine or book to place the image, reversed, into his drawing. The small boxes which he had constructed early in his career from personal memorabilia and detritus could now be transferred to paper, drawn upon and modified. The effect was extraordinary: Rauschenberg's inventiveness in the juxtaposition of images was unlimited and his ability to combine images from disparate sources was checked only by the supply of images he could find. This process led directly to Rauschenberg's silkscreen paintings and to a method of working that he has continued ever since. It relied on what Brian O'Doherty has called the "vernacular glance:"
The vernacular glance is dumb in terms of what it can't do, but extraordinarily versatile in dealing with experience that would be totally confusing otherwise. It can tolerate everything but meaning (the attempt to understand instead of recognize) and sensory deprivation--voids and absences. It is superficial in the best sense. (B. O'Doherty, Art in America, Sept.-Oct. 1973, pp. 82-86)
Fast Slip takes images that Rauschenberg had used in his Dante illustrations of 1963 (see Lot 4) and recombines them; they do not assume the mythological meanings he had given them in the Dante drawings but act instead as components of a personal iconography.
In 1986 Lawrence Alloway wrote the following about Rauschenberg's drawings:
Rauschenberg resisted his own improvisatory gifts in the combine paintings, accepting found objects in all their facticity. In both the transfer drawings and the silkscreen paintings he asserted a sober sense of the given reality of camera-derived images. It is in the transfer drawings that Rauschenberg's inventiveness is seen undistracted, with a plentitude of images, lyrical in their manual transcription and in both source and facture literally close at hand. (L. Alloway, Robert Rauschenberg Drawings, 1958-1968, New York, 1986)