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Perpetual Inventory Author(S): Rosalind Krauss Source: October, Vol Perpetual Inventory Author(s): Rosalind Krauss Source: October, Vol. 88 (Spring, 1999), pp. 86-116 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779226 . Accessed: 01/05/2013 15:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Wed, 1 May 2013 15:51:29 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PerpetualInventory* ROSALINDKRAUSS I wentin for myinterview for thisfantastic job. ... Thejob had a greatname-I might use itfor a painting-"PerpetualInventory." -Rauschenberg to Barbara Rose 1. Here are threedisconcerting remarks and one document: The firstsettles out from a discussion of the various strategies Robert Rauschenbergfound to defamiliarizeperception, so that, in Brian O'Doherty's terms,"the citydweller's rapid scan" would now displace old habits of seeing and "the art audience's stare" would yield to "the vernacularglance."I With its vora- ciousness,its lack of discrimination,its wanderingattention, and its equal horror of meaningand of emptiness,this leveling form of perception,he wrote,not only accepts everything-everypiece of urban detritus,every homey object, every outr6 image-into the perceptualsituation, but its logic decrees that the magnetfor all these elementswill be the picturesurface, itself now definedas the antimuseum.2 This conceptual context, made newlyprecise by O'Doherty in 1974 but nonethelessfamiliar by that time to Rauschenberg'saudience, does not prepare us forO'Doherty's additional avowal that there is "somethingthat, for all his apparent clowning,he [Rauschenberg]believes in profoundly:the integrityof the picture plane."3 Comingas it does fromthe aestheticvocabulary that Rauschenberg's project would seem to have made defunct, this notion of the picture plane and its integrity,coupled with the idea that they inspire "belief,"sounds verystrange * Originally published in RobertRauschenberg: A Retrospective,ed. Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson (New York:Solomon R. GuggenheimMuseum, 1997). Reprintedwith permission. 1. Brian O'Doherty,American Masters: The Voiceand theMyth (New York:Random House, 1974), p. 198. An excerpt of this textwas published earlier as O'Doherty, "Rauschenbergand the Vernacular Glance,"Art in America61, no. 5 (September-October1973), pp. 82-87. 2. O'Doherty,American Masters, pp. 188-225. 3. Ibid., p. 204. OCTOBER 88, Spring1999, pp. 87-116. ? 1999 RosalindKrauss. This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Wed, 1 May 2013 15:51:29 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 444' ,,, K '41 RobertRauschenberg looking through thearchive of the Miami Herald. 1979. This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Wed, 1 May 2013 15:51:29 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 88 OCTOBER indeed. For thisvocabulary, linked to a definitionof the pictorialitself as irreducibly illusionistic-an illusionismthat was thoughtby such criticsas ClementGreenberg to be residual withineven the most abstractand flattenedpainting4-evokes a plane whose integrityis constantlybreached and just as continuallyresecured. If by the mid-1960sthe pictureplane was somethingto which Donald Judd was eager to say good riddance, declaring the canvas field as nothingmore than one side of a "specificobject,"5 that experience of the impenetrability,the literalness, of the two-dimensionalsurface had been made possible largelyby Rauschenberg's work itself.The stuffedgoat that stands astride the floor-boundpicture field in Monogram(1955-59), placidlybearing witness to the transformationof visualsurface into-as Rauschenberg put it--"pasture,"or the eagle that projects from the solidlywall-like Canyon (1959), had in Judd's eyes written"finis" to centuriesof pictorialillusionism with its littledance of opening and closing,its performance of a kindof transcendentaltwo-step. The art historythat Rauschenberg, as well as O'Doherty,knew only too well, the lessons thatJosef Albers had afterall drilled at Black Mountain College, turned on the yield of meaningto be harvestedfrom that fertilityof the picture plane. Althoughstill schematically present in the reversiblegeometries of Albers's squares, the model of thisfield as the ground of meaning is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the kind of Renaissance painting in which a tunnel of deep perspective-an allke of trees,say--is just about to arriveat its destinationin the horizon's vanishingpoint, when somethingat the veryforefront of the picture- the lilythe angel of theAnnunciation is handingto theVirgin, for example-blocks that whoosh into depth. All the pressureof the painting now convergeson this object,since it must"hold" the surface,preventing its "violation"by an unimpeded spatial rush. Because this "holding"is perforceof a two-dimensional,emblematic kind,it stands in utmostcontrast to the illusionisticvista's offer of a real stage on whichimaginatively to projectreal bodies. But then such "holding"becomes a way of holding up two conflictingmodes of being for comparison-real versusideal, secularversus sacred, physical versus iconic, deep versusflat-all the whileperform- ing the magic trickof turningthe one into the other,since it is the deep space that is the illusion, and the flattenedwafer of the surface-boundicon that is touchablyreal. It is in thismystery of transposition,in thiscrossover between flesh and idea, that the meaning of a picture plane that has sealed over its spatial puncture,thus reassertingits "integrity,"announces itselfas both the source and expressionof "belief." 4. See, forexample, ClementGreenberg's statement, "The firstmark made on a canvas destroysits literaland utterflatness, and the resultof the marksmade on it byan artistlike Mondrian is stilla kind of illusion that suggests a kind of third dimension" (Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (1960), in Greenberg, The CollectedEssays and Criticism,ed. John O'Brian, vol. 4, Modernismwith a Vengeance, 1957-1969 [Chicago: The Universityof Chicago Press,1993], p. 90). 5. DonaldJudd, "SpecificObjects," Arts Yearbook 8 (1965), pp. 74-82. This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Wed, 1 May 2013 15:51:29 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PerpetualInventory 89 FraFilippo Lippi. Annunciation.Circa 1440. All this seems worlds away,of course, from the goat calmly grazing the pastureof Monogram,or the tread marksasserting twenty-two feet of unmitigated literalnessin AutomobileTire Print (1953), the pointof whichseems to be thatalong thisstretch of road thereis no break thatwould allow the old-timemetaphysics of tension and release to occur. Where is there a place in this workfor humanist painting's notions of "belief" suspended and refound in a reconfirmed "integrity"?6And yetO'Doherty was notjust a consummatelyintelligent critic but 6. In his extremelyimportant essay "Other Criteria,"Leo Steinbergquoted Greenbergin taking issue withhis prejudicialcontrast between Old Masterart-"Realistic, illusionist art had dissembledthe medium,using art to conceal art"-and the Modernistalternative, which "used art to call attentionto art."Insisting that any art, Old Masterand Modernistalike, uses "artto call attentionto art"and thereby preservesthe integrityof the pictureplane, Steinbergcalled fora taxonomyof spaces opened up within that plane by differenttypes of painting.His textthen develops the oppositionsbetween nature and culture(or optical and mental) and, in relationto the latter,the characterizationof the flatbedpicture plane in Rauschenberg'swork for which the essay is so widelyknown. But in this association of the terms"flatbed" and "pictureplane," it is importantto see that the flatbeddoes not preservethe old metaphysicalimplications of "integrity":"If some collage element,such as a pasted-downphotograph, threatenedto evoke a topical illusionof depth, the surfacewas casuallystained or smearedwith paint to recall its irreducibleflatness. The 'integrityof the pictureplane'-once the accomplishmentof good design-was to become thatwhich is given.The picture's'flatness' was to be no moreof a problem than the flatnessof a disordereddesk or an unsweptfloor. Against Rauschenberg's picture plane you can pin or projectany image because it willnot workas the glimpseof a world,but as a scrapof printed material" (Steinberg,"Other Criteria,"in OtherCriteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art[New York:Oxford University Press, 1972], pp. 55-91; quoted materialfrom pp. 68, 88). This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Wed, 1 May 2013 15:51:29 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 90 OCTOBER also someone who engaged personallywith Rauschenberg,both at those places where theywould have intersectedin the 1960s art worldand in the "morgue"of the New YorkTimes, where the two examined old photoengravingplates together forRauschenberg's 1962 initialforay into printmaking.7 2. My second example is not, perhaps,as counterintuitiveas the first,but it nonethelessstrikes the same kind of discordantnote fromwithin Susan Sontag's "One Culture and the New Sensibility,"her
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