It's almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that I'm most interested in. Nearly everything that I've done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that.
Robert Rauschenberg Connected to the Carolinas
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No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- 'I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)
- year
- 1968
no citation recorded
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“It's almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is t…” Robert Rauschenberg. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-01FAE97D1B. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/01fae97d1b
More from Robert Rauschenberg
I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines, by the excess of the world. I thought an honest work should incorporate all of these elements, which were and are a reality [referring to the use of photo-silkscreens, made from published photographs of persons, events, disasters, Rauschenberg started to use in his art, after 1961]
Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.
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 didn't 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.