106
RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
enough so that everyone doesn't have to be on each other's feet. When
you go to make something, nothing should be clearer than the fact
that not only do you not have to make it but that it could look like
anything, and then it starts getting interesting and then you get
involved with your own limitations.
INTERVIEWER:
As an artist, do you feel in any sense alienated from
America today or do you feel that you are part of a whole world in
which you are living?
RAUSCHENBERG:
I feel a conscious attempt to be more and more related
to society. That's what's important to me as a person. I'm not going
to let other people make all the changes; and if you do that, you can't
cut yourself off.
This very quickly gets to sound patriotic and pompous and pious;
but I really mean it very personally. I'm only against the most obvious
things, like wars and stuff like that. I don't have any particular con–
cept about a utopian way things should be.
If
I have a prejudice or a
bias, it is that there shouldn't be any particular way. Being a complex
human organ, we are capable of a variety; we can do so much. The
big fear is that we don't do enough with our senses, with our activities,
with our areas of consideration; and these have got to get bigger year
after year.
INTERVIEWER:
Could that be what the new theater is about? Is there a
kind of educational purpose now - to make us more responsive to our
environment?
RAUSCHENBERG:
I can only speak for myself. Today there may be eleven
artists; yesterday there were ten; two days ago there were nine. Every–
body has his own reason for being involved in it, but I must say that
this is one of the things that interests me the most. I think that one
of my chief struggles now is to make something that can be as
changeable and varied and alive as the audience. I don't want to do
works where one has to impose liveliness or plastic flexibility or change
but a work where change would be dealt with literally. It's very
possible that my interest in theater, which now is so consuming, may
be the most primitive way of accomplishing this, and I may just be
working already with what I would like to make.
INTERVIEWER:
How will our lives - our ideas and our responses - be
different after continued exposure to the new theater?
FtAUSCHENBERG:
What's exciting is that we don't know. There is no
anticipated result; but we will be changed.
