Robert Rauschenberg

"Josef Alberss [a former art teacher of Rauschenberg, on Black Mountain College ] rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense. (around 1949 during Black Mountain College, fh)."

"[I] could not design forms and colors that would achieve some preconceived result.. .I wasnt going to hire them. I was more interested in working WITH them than in their working for me."

"[I have] various tricks to actually reach that solitary point of creativity. One of them is pretending I have an idea. But that trick doesnt survive very long because I dont really trust ideas – especially good ones.. .Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown. It is then that I begin to work.. ..when I dont have the comfort of sureness and certainty. Sometimes Jack Daniels helps too. Another good trick is fatigue. I like to start working when its almost too late.. ..when my sense of efficiency is exhausted."

"Its almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that Im most interested in. Nearly everything that Ive done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that."

"I like the aliveness of it [theater] – that awful feeling of being on the spot. I must assume the responsibility for that moment, for those actions that happen at that particular time. I dont find theater that different from painting, and its not that I think of painting as theater or vice versa. I tend to think of working as a kind of involvement with materials, as well as rather focused interest which changes."

"I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness. [around 1965]"

"Outside the big idea that there is art I dont think of others paintings. But I defend the idea of art and know that it is made up of all these paintings. Classic pictures are objects that may or may not influence what youre doing, just like anything else. Like the radio.. .But it hasnt anything to do with your own art or the artists intention."

"I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world."

"It is completely irrelevant that I am making them. Today is their creator."

"I didnt even know that there was art until I left Texas when I was eighteen. The only painting I knew (and I didnt know it was a painting until much later) was Hope [of George Frederic Watts, 1886] the woman sitting on the globe with.. .that green [of the painting Hope] you only get in reproductions]! I think that negates the idea of a painters relation to official – old master art. It was neutral ground – that one picture – I responded to visual things.. .Hope was just sort of visual thing there, not art."

"I dont feel any direct relationship between what I do and existing art. Though there is unavoidable progression: the things all paintings have in common are paint, and color, and some means of application. With the standard you can make any two pictures appear either alike of different. I dont think whether theyre alike or different is really very interesting."

"I have another feeling that in working with a canvas, and with something you picked up off the street and you work on it for three or four days or maybe a couple of weeks and then, all of a sudden, it is in another situation. Much later, you go to see somebody in California, and there it is. You know that you know everything about that painting, so much more than anybody else in that room. You know where you ran out of nails.. .At the time I did that early piece, I didnt know it was the lower right-hand corner that had the new element – that that part would grow and that other parts would relate more to the past."