Richard Kostelanetz
A CONVERSATION WITH
ROBERT
RAUSCH ENBERG
INTERVIEWER:
In high school you had a reputation as a person
who could draw or at least do certain kinds of drawings.
RAUSCHENBERG:
I never thought of it as much of an ability. I thought
everybody could do it a little bit. Some people could draw a little
better than other people, but I never took drawing or painting any
more seriously than that.
Later, [Josef] Albers told me I couldn't draw - that my whole
childhood was wasted. I had an awful time pleasing him. I was too
messy for collage, and I was too heavy-handed in my drawings.
INTERVIEWER:
H e would like open spaces and thin lines.
RAUSCHENBERG:
The Matisse kind of thing.
He would teach a course in form, which he gives year after year,
refining it more and more, and a course in the performances of color
- a really clinical method. We worked in drawing from the same
model week after week. Once a week or once every two weeks, some–
one in the class at Black Mountain would pose for us. Then, he would
talk about the valleys and the mountains and things like that about
the figure. Other than that, it was an aluminum pitcher - a shiny
volume without a straight line and you couldn't do any shading. It
is really the outside and inside that you got to say. You do it
with
INTERVIEWER'S NOTE:
Although painting is Robert Rauschenberg's dominant
interest, throughout his career he has kept an informal connection with
theater. Back in the summer of 1952, at Black Mountain College, he par–
ticipated in John Cage's "prehistoric" happening, an untitled event that
established an American precedent for subsequent theater of mixed means.
From 1955 to 1965 he designed sets and costumes, as well as controlling
the lighting, for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; and in the early
sixties he collaborated in theater pieces by Yvonne Rainer and Kenneth
Koch.
Pelican
( 1963) was his own first piece; and when he all aut
abandoned painting in 1965, he initiated a series of mixed-means theatrical
works-among them
Spring Training
(1965),
Map Room I
(1965),
Map
Room II
(1965),
Linoleum
(1966) and
Open Score
(1966) for the New
York Theater and Engineering Festival.
Mr. Rauschenberg was born in 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas.
