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fore, once you discovered the result of that idea, then you could go
on to another.
RAUSCHENBERO:
You could speculate whether it would be interesting
or not; but you could waste years arguing. All I had to do was make
one and ask, "Do I like that?" "Is there anything to say there?" "Does
that thing have any presence?" "Does it really matter that it looks
bluer now, because it is late afternoon? Earlier this morning it looked
quite white." "Is that an interesting experience to have?" To me, the
answer was yes. No one has ever bought one; but those paintings are
still very full to me. I think of them as anything but a way-out gesture.
A gesture implies the denial of the existence of the actual object.
If
it had been that, I wouldn't have had to have done them. Otherwise
it would only be an idea.
INTERVIEWER :
Claes Oldenburg said that he has a dream that someday
he would call all his things back, that they had not really gone away.
RAUSCHENBERO:
I have another funny feeling that in working with a
canvas, say, 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.
INTERVIEWER:
You can look at it then as a kind of personal history.
RAUSCHENBERO:
It's not like publishing, for each one is an extremely
unique piece, even if it is in a series. I like to look at an old work and
discover that is where I first did a certain thing, which may be some–
thing I may just happen to be doing now. At the time I did that earlier
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.
INTERVIEWER:
Have you ever started something that you couldn't finish?
RAUSCHENBERO :
Yes, but I really try hard not to. I work very hard to
finish everything. One of the most problematic pictures I ever made
was something I was doing for a painters' picture series in a magazine.
I had started the radio sculpture thing, which became
Oracle [1965].
My mind was more in sculpture or objects free of the wall. I found I
was uncomfortable from the new difficulties metal afforded, because
I really didn't know what to do with it. So I figured that if I was to
be scrutinized, I'd do a painting instead. I said I'd do it, and I try to
do what I say I will do. That painting went through so many awkward
changes, unnecessarily.
It
was large, it was free-standing. Then I put
