Perpetual Inventory Author(S): Rosalind Krauss Source: October, Vol

Home , Canyon (Rauschenberg), Monogram (artwork), Susan Weil

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

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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.

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RobertRauschenberg looking through thearchive of the Miami Herald. 1979.

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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.

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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).

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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 report from the frontlines of the 1960s.8Taking issue withC. P. Snow's notorious two-cultureargument, in which science and humanismhave driftedinto two separate worlds,with the occupants of the one regardingthe occupants of the other as a set of unrecognizable,nearly inhuman mutants,Sontag claimed a single "advanced" culture for both science and art, with their common enemy now in literature.If electronic music is the model for this "one culture,"she argued, so is the practice of a kind of painting and sculpture made collectively on the principles of industrial fabrication (Minimalism,Pop), as is the understandingshared by both science and art that theirhigh degree of specialization (the twelve-tonerow, abstraction) will demand a certainperiod of apprenticeshipon the partof theiraudiences. It is in such a contextthat Sontag then drewup a listof textualsources that she saw as basic to this new nonliteraryculture: Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Andre Breton, Norman O. Brown,John Cage, R. BuckminsterFuller, Siegfried Gidieon, Claude Levi-Strauss,Marshall McLuhan, FriedrichWilhelm Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.9Most of the names-the obvious phalanx of 1960s intellectualrealignments-are expected,of course. Breton'sis somehowaberrant, however,striking one as it does as lyingat an oblique angle to the line thatconnects Artaud to Nietzsche or Fuller to Levi-Strauss.Breton's commitment to poetry,his insistentliterariness, and the fastidiousnessof his tastesall seem to drivea wedge between him and thiscompany. Even though Barthes's1967 enunciationof "The Death of the Author"includes the Surrealists'attacks on meaningand the collective nature of theirpractice as importantsteps along the path leading awayfrom the writeras the focus of meaning to the reader as its new locus of unity,10Breton's allegiance to psychoanalysisseems to put him specificallyout of play. For the psychoanalyticseems not only to cling to the importance of the source of emission (the writer)but also to privilegechains of association that,in theirdependence on furtherassociations to decode them,continue to assertthe

7. Brian O'Doherty,Object and Idea: An ArtCritic's Journal 1961-1967 (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1967), p. 115. 8. Susan Sontag, "One Culture and the New Sensibility,"in Sontag, AgainstInterpretation (New York:Farrar, Straus & Giroux,1966), pp. 293-304. 9. Ibid., p. 298. 10. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1967), in Barthes, Image, Music, Text,trans. Stephen Heath (New York:Hill & Wang, 1977), p. 144. This textwas firstpublished in AspenMagazine, nos. 5-6 (Fall-Winter1967), an issue edited byO'Doherty.

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privatedepths of experience underwritingthese connections.Furthermore, it is the verynature of such connectionsas metaphoricthat makes them alien to the "newsensibility" Sontag invoked.The ideas of literalness,of deadpan, of the ruthless "cool" thatled FrankStella to declare, "Mypainting is based on the factthat what can be seen there is there.... What you see is whatyou see,"11seems to join the whole post-AbstractExpressionist cohort in its rejection of psychologicaldepth and emotiveness. Rauschenberg's own distaste for such qualities can be summed up in his frequentlyrepeated instance of "the sad cup of coffee,"his emblemfor the endless psychologizing of the artist's means and hence the promiscuous spread of metaphor withinthe older (Surrealist-influenced)generation. Speaking of the talk at the Cedar Bar or the Club, he complained,"They even assignedseriousness to certaincolors," and then, turningto the waythe New Yorkartists had infected Beat poetry:"I used to thinkof thatline in Allen Ginsberg'sHowl, about 'the sad cup of coffee.'I've had cold coffeeand hot coffee,good coffeeand lousycoffee, but I've neverhad a sad cup of coffee."12 Indeed, Rauschenberghad been verytroubled by the receptionof his black paintings (1951-53), which criticsand viewersalike assumed were to be understood at thatemotive level. "They couldn't see black as pigment,"he complained. "They moved immediatelyinto associationwith 'burned-out,''tearing,' 'nihilism' and 'destruction.'.. . I'm never sure what the impulse is psychologically,I don't mess around with my subconscious."For good measure, he added, "If I see any superficialsubconscious relationships that I'm familiarwith-cliches of association- I change the picture."'3

3. This brings me to my thirdexample, dropped by Rauschenberghimself when speaking of his silkscreenpractice in the early 1960s. He was addressinga painting thatjuxtaposes photoreproductionsof an armytruck, mosquitoes, and, in a somber banner along the midsection, Diego Velhizquez'sVenus and Cupid (RokebyVenus) (1650), an aggressiveX-mark thickly painted in whiteover a part of it. Explainingwhy he called the picture Crocus(1962), he said, "Because the white X emergesfrom a grayarea in a ratherdark painting, like a new season."14 "Like a new season" comes strangelyfrom the lips of someone who cannot imagine a "sad cup of coffee."But then by the early1960s, Rauschenberg was also the artistwho quite astonishinglyhad alreadydecided to devotea good partof two

11. Bruce Glaser,"Questions to Stella and Judd," ed. Lucy R. Lippard, in MinimalArt: A Critical Anthology,ed. GregoryBattcock (New York:E. P. Dutton, 1968), p. 158. Reprintedfrom Artnews 65, no. 5 (September1966), pp. 55-61. 12. Quoted in CalvinTomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and theArt World of Our Time(Garden City,N.Y: Doubleday,1980), p. 89. 13. Quoted in DorothyGees Seckler,"The ArtistSpeaks: Robert Rauschenberg,"Art in America54, no. 3 (May-June1966), p. 76. 14. Quoted in Tomkins,Off the Wall, p. 201.

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 Rauschenberg. Detailof Crocus. 1962.

and a halfyears of his life to the canto-by-cantoillustration of Dante's Inferno,a workwhose veryfabric is woven fromthe rich strandsof multipleassociations, one famousbranch of which invokesjust this figureof renewal:"In the turning season of the youthful year when the sun is warming his rays beneath Aquarius/and the daysand nightsalready begin to near theirperfect balance; the hoar-frostcopies/then the imageof hiswhite sister on the ground."Rauschenberg's astonishinglyaqueous transfer-drawingdevoted to Canto XXIV responds to this image, Dore Ashton tells us, by way of "a compartment,sealed away fromthe snakes and electric eels below, to house a tender painting of the hoar-frosted trees."15 That Dante's textserved as a motivatingforce behind the X metaphorically fecundatingCrocus is likelybut not necessary.The same allegoricaluse of the seasons stretchesfrom one end of English poetryto another,from Geoffrey Chaucer's evocation of the showersof April piercingthe droughtsof March,to T. S. Eliot's

15. Dore Ashton,"Rauschenberg's Thirty-four Illustrations for Dante's Inferno,"Metro (Milan) 2 (May 1961), p. 58. In preparing to writean extended commentaryfor the deluxe edition of the drawings,published by HarryN. Abrams,Ashton spent "hours and hours ... in his [Rauschenberg's] studio readingover John Ciardi's translationand gazing at the drawings.... Rauschenbergand I read the poem together,speaking about Dante's ineffablepride, his slywitticisms, his digs at his artistic rivals... his lyricalabandon, his extraordinaryfeeling for the particular,his forthrightlanguage, and above all, his greatartistic inconsistencies." Quoted in Dore Ashton,"Art: The CollaborationWheel: A Commenton RobertRauschenberg's Comment on Dante," Artsand Architecture80, no. 12 (December 1963), pp. 10, 37.

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"Aprilis the cruellestmonth, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land...." Crocusis quite a metaphoricthought for someone who does not wantto accept the conno- tationsspun offfrom the color black.

4. The document I want to inserthere comes fromaround the time when Rauschenberg was making Crocus,for it includes a reproduction of Renascence (1962), another of the veryfirst works in the black-and-whitesilkscreen series he began earlyin the fall of 1962. Called "Random Order,"it is part manifesto,part diary,part poem. It consistsof fivepages in the firstissue of the magazineLocation, publishedin spring1963, but probablyhanded in to the editors,Thomas B. Hess and Harold Rosenberg,in late winter.The "coverpage" (p. 27) givesthe titleand reproducesSundog (1962). The nexttwo sheets (pp. 28-29) showan assortmentof photographstaken by Rauschenbergand affixedwith maskingtape to a paper

t-D ij bfrf w m-. a a re v t u si

"RandomOrder." Location1, no. 1 RandomOrder Ro PTR RA ANt (Sping1963), p. 27. by )S IRP(.

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support to present a messy grid of vignettesbetween which Rauschenberg's dyslexiclettering meanders in a complex of affirmations.These are followedby two almost full-pageimages: the painting Renascenceon the left (p. 30), and a Rauschenbergphotograph captioned "Viewfrom the artist'sstudio" on the right (p. 31). Representingtwo very different notions of seeing througha window,these pages juxtapose Leone Battista Alberti's model of perspective, signaled by Renascence'svolumetric cube (if a pictureis like a windowthrough which we look at what is painted, the viewed materialis itselftightly contained on the stage of the pictorialconstructionl6), with the photographedwindowpane as surrogatefor

16. The analysis of Leone Battista Alberti's and Piero della Francesca's model of perspective conceived as a closed, volumetricbox, constructedwith its sides as absolutelimits and specificallyfore- closinganything that could be thoughtof as "off-stage"space, is made in Hubert Damisch, TheOrigin ofPerspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge,Mass.: The MIT Press,1994), pp. 350-52.

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the camera's aperturein what seems to invoke the indiscriminateappetite of the "vernacularglance." If I have called thisdocument a manifesto,this is because it made its appear- ance at the time Rauschenberg'swork was undergoinga shift,one thatmarked all his immediatelysucceeding work and the vastmajority of whathe wenton to do in the followingyears. This was a shiftto photographynot onlyas the image bank on which his pictorial practice would then rely-whether in the form of the silkscreenedpaintings of the early1960s, or theirrenewed version in the veil-like Hoarfrosts(1974-76), or in the guise of audience-activated works, such as Soundings(1968) and Revolvers(1967)-but as a new conception of the pictorial itself.17The ground for this shiftwas obviouslyprepared in Rauschenberg'slong apprenticeshipto the media image via the Dante drawings.But since the solvent- transfertechnique of those drawingsmaintains the actual scale of theiroriginal media sources, photographic informationcould not be married to the greatly increased size and mode of address of Rauschenberg'spainterly practice until he gained access to the photomechanicalsilkscreen process. This, then,provided the possibilityboth of greatlyenlarging the scale of his source materialand of making that material's photographic nature far more obvious than it had been in the Dante series,where, due to the vagaries of the transfertechnique, it had largely been muted by the veil-likecharacter of the image. Furthermore,Rauschenberg seems to have wanted the continuityof the mirrorlikephotographic surface to stamp its characteron his newlyrevised sense of his medium, therebyreplacing the collage condition of his Combines withthe seamlessnessof the photographic print. This was the departure,at the opening of the 1960s, that seemed to call for some kind of acknowledgment. If "Random Order" is such a declaration of Rauschenberg'snewly "photographic" medium, contrastingit and (Renaissance) paintingwould seem entirelyin order,so thatits contingencycould be compared to painting'scompositional program, and its frame,a chance cut fromthe ongoing fabric of the whole world, could be set against painting's contractionaround a gravitationalcenter.

17. Settingaside the factthat Rauschenberghad begun a serious practice of photographyitself in the late 1940s and would continue to make photographsthroughout his career,a reconsiderationof the medium of painting as "photographic"involves a particularleap, which this essay is involvedin exploring.Rauschenberg's few blueprint photographic works of 1950-51 mightseem to have performed thisleap, and, indeed, the greatinterest in them mightelicit the response thathe was not startingout in a new directionat the outset of the 1960s but ratherreturning to one he had initiatedearly in his career. I should say here that the statusof these worksin Rauschenberg'soeuvre is not clear to me. They do signal the kind of reorientationof the workto the horizontalitythat Steinbergnamed "the flatbed picture plane"; thus, they team up with Bed (1955), Erased de KooningDrawing (1953), and AutomobileTire Pint. And like the lattertwo works,or, for that matter,the WhitePaintings, they signal (or maybeinitiated) Rauschenberg'spursuit of the index as a wayof marking.But Rauschenbergdid not returnto the photogramtechnique as a strategyfor fusing the photographicindex withpainting's scale and pictoriallogic, perhapsfor the veryfact that he made these collaborativeworks together with Susan Weil,then his wife.

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But, as we willsee, of the variousoppositions set up within"Random Order," the obviousone betweenphotography and painting,or ratherbetween photography and Renaissancepainting, does not seem to apply.Instead, one of the major oppo- sitionsseems to be betweenthe aural and the visual,with sound annexingitself to languageand thusyielding a furtheropposition between speech and vision. This occurswith the two-pagespread's first textual grouping, which is written above and along the side of itsopening photograph-a truckseen head-on,looming out of the night.In it we read: "Withsound scale and insistencytrucks mobilize words,and broadside our cultureby a combination of law and local motivation whichproduces an extremelycomplex random order thatcannot be described as accidental."18In the contextof all the otherimages-the twoviews out the window to facingbuildings and a roofscape;the kitchenarea witha glimpse of paintings lyingon the studio floor beyond; the toilet; the stairs; a potted plant19-which continuallyplace us inside Rauschenberg'sBroadway loft, this idea thatthe truck deliversboth noise and words sets up another opposition: that between exterior and interior,public and private.Even ifwe had not read CalvinTomkins's description of Rauschenberg's loft--"Tall,grimy windows let in the distinctivelywhite lightof downtownNew York-also the roar of truckson Broadway"20-wewould feelthe intimacyand interiorityof the space of thesepages, which only the auditory aggressionof the truckas signifierof the outside violates. If this sense of privacypromotes the conditionsof a diary,they are invoked even more by the associativeprogression of the textitself, as one thoughtseems to suggestthe next,without any authorialplan or argumenthaving been established beforehand.To have pronounced "randomorder" next to the truckseems to have provokedRauschenberg to writeon the oppositeside: "Everystep is change,"which in turncalled forclose-ups of stairsand theirrisers. That, then,brought on a com- mentabout the volumetricquality of a stairwell-"a sculpturalmasterpiece clearly, economicallyand dramaticallydefining space"-which then moved the author's thoughtsto otherspatial volumes. And the one thatcame immediatelyto his mind, providedin turnwith its own photograph,an out-the-windowview, is the following: An air-filledsense of volume can be had by looking out one window, throughthe space, to anotherwindow and into it. This can be amplified

18. This head-on shot of the truckmade its wayinto at least two of the black-and-whitesilkscreens: Buffaloland OvercastII (both 1962). (The spellingin all quotes from"Random Order" is Rauschenberg's.) 19. Of these images, two were made into screens. The roofscape with water tanks appears in Almanac,Overcast I, and OvercastII (all 1962), and Barge (1962-63), Die Hard, Shaftway,Transom, and Windward(all 1963). The potted plant can be seen in Almanac. Speaking with Barbara Rose, Rauschenbergsaid of these photographs:"I needed some verysimple images,like perhaps a glass of water,or a piece of string,or the bathroomfloor with a roll of toiletpaper on it. They didn't need to have anyimmediate emotional content.I needed themto dull the social implications,to neutralizethe calamities that were going on in the outside world" (Rose, Rauschenberg[New York:Vintage Books, 1987], p. 74). 20. Tomkins,Off the Wall, p. 211.

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by realizing the source of this vision is at a differenttemperature, brightnessand willbe subjectto change as it moveson. Air volume can be compressed and flattenedto the extent that a brushload of paint can hold it to a picturesurface. The frame,the piercing vista, and the "integrity"of the original surface restoredby a brushload of paint have landed us, then, in the midstof the very "picture plane" in which O'Doherty would so counterintuitivelyclaim that Rauschenbergbelieves. And when Rauschenberg'sstatement itself yields in turnto the photographicmetaphor written on the other flankof the image-"A dirtyor foggywindow makes what is outside appear to be projected on to the window plane"-what we have is not the opposition between the indexicallyproduced image (the photograph,onto the surfaceof which thingsfall like cast shadows) and the iconicallyconstructed one (the painting),but, somehow,magically, their conflation.And whatremains as well is the oppositionannounced at thevery outset of the text:the differencebetween the delicatelysilent visual spaces and the brassily verbalone of the flowof words.

5. It is this opposition between silence and sound, vision and speech, that this essay is, I suppose, circling around. For the silence of the visual was what Rauschenberghad been insistingon in his resistanceto the metaphoricexpansion of the color black, that is to say the transformationof it from a physical and unarticulated material ("they couldn't see black as a pigment") to an invisible networkof language. It is also thissilence thatconnects the understandingof the WhitePaintings (1951) as screenson which to "trap" (no matterhow ephemerally) the shadowsof passersbyto the underlyingnotion forthe later silkscreens,which Rauschenbergthought of as functioningsomething like "photographicsensitized" surfacesthat register the flittingof informationpassing through the space in front of them.21[Rauschenberg himselfhas emphasized the continuitybetween his WhitePaintings and his desire to work on photosensitizedgrounds. Rauschenberg: "Thefirst photo drawings were done in Cuba in 1952 duringa workingvacation from Black Mountain,where I was studyingwith Albers (he neversaw them).Silkscreen was [later]a waynot to be victimized and limitedin scaleand colo,but still have access to current worldwideinformation. I did not[then] know about the commercial process of silkscreen and had triedto photosensitize grounds to work on. "] 22

21. Rauschenbergsuggested that his ultimateproject along these lines would be "a project that I have in mind where the wallswill absorb whateverimages appear in thatroom" (Rose, Rauschenberg,p. 77). In an essay on Rauschenberg,John Cage emphasized that "the whitepaintings caught whatever fell on them," calling them "airports for the lights, shadows, and particles" (Cage, "On Robert Rauschenberg,Artist, and His Work,"in Silence:Lectures and Writingsby John Cage [Hanover, N.H.: Universityof New England Press/WesleyanUniversity Press, 1973], pp. 108, 102, respectively;reprinted fromMetro [Milan] 2 [May 1961], pp. 36-51). 22. During the editing process of this essay,Rauschenberg read it and on April 1, 1997, sent me several comments that functionas expansions or associations to the text. The present remarkwas

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The bridge fromthe barest monochrome canvas to the most richlyphoto- graphicconcatenation is built,then, on the concept of the index, namely,a type of mark made causally,so that it must be conceived as the physicaltrace of its referent.In structuralterms, this is whatlinks the cast shadow to the footprint,or the broken branch to the medical symptom,or the photographto the wind sock. But, as if in punishmentfor their utmost degree of truthvalue, these witnessesto what is passing or has passed are struckdumb; for the index, although a sign, is uncoded and is thusdeprived of speech. It is in thismatrix of connectionsbetween shadow and photography,on the one hand, and index and silence,on the other,that Rauschenberg was effortlessly enactingthe semioticanalysis that was onlyexplicitly theorized in the early1960s, when Barthesbegan to publish on photography.That importanttexts by Barthes bracketRauschenberg's turn to silkscreenis convenientbut fortuitous.Not much art-historicalweather can be made fromthe factthat "The PhotographicMessage" appeared in 1961, the year before Rauschenberg found the photomechanical silkscreenmedium-through the example of AndyWarhol, who had begun using it in August 1962-(although news photographshad alreadybeen servingas his source for the transferdrawings over the preceding fewyears), and "Rhetoricof the Image" was published in 1964, the year Rauschenberg's success with the silkscreensled to his winningthe Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale,which he celebratedby telephoningto New Yorkto have all his screens (about 150 of them) cut fromtheir frames and burned,thereby definitively ending the series.About all thatcan be said about thischronological convergence is thatthe media saturation of dailylife had made the ubiquityof the photographica subjectof some urgency, whetherfor theory or formaking art. And yetwhat interests me is both the waythese parallel practicesturn on the index's muteness,what Barthes characterizedas the scandal of its constitutinga "message withouta code," and the growingrealization that in its photographic formthis mutenessis nonethelessabuzz withconnotations, so that,yes, Virginia, there is alwaysand everywhere(and especiallyonce photographed) a potentially "sad cup of coffee."

6. Barthessets out fromthe photograph'sstatus as pure denotation,as anal- ogon, in "The PhotographicMessage." Stenciled offthe world itself,it appears to have onlyone message to convey,which is identicalto the realityfrom which it was taken. The photographicmessage seems to reduce itselfto the brute gestureof pointing to something in physical space and pronouncing the single syllable "this."But behind such a mythiccondition as objective,neutral, and all but silent lies a whole varietyof connotationaldimensions, which, though they cannot code elicitedby this section and relatesnot onlyto the continuityof his own connection to the index, but to the issue of Warhol'spriority in the use of the commercialsilkscreen process, frequently repeated in the literatureon the subject.Rauschenberg's other comments appear in bracketswithin this essay.

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the photographin the manner of digital languages,can open up its visual continuity,partitioning it into a scatterof signifiedsor meanings.Some of these result fromhow the photographis produced (its cropping,lighting, exposure, printing); others arise fromthe culturalmeanings investedin certain gestures,such as the pose a subject is directedto, or caught in the act of taking,or again the cultural knowledge summoned by clothing stylesor the typographyon signs included withinthe image. This constant, covertlyperformed segmentation means that "thephotographic 'language' ['langage']is not unlikecertain ideographic languages whichmix analogical and specifyingunits, the differencebeing," Barthes stressed, "that the ideogram is experienced as a sign whereas the photographic'copy' is takenas the pure and simpledenotation of reality."23 So strongis the experience of pure continuity,uninterrupted like the flowof realityitself, that the photograph has the power to subsume even the coded, linguisticnature of its own caption into thisblank, denotational status:"It is not the image whichcomes to elucidate or 'realize' the text,"as in older formsof illustration,"but the latterwhich comes to sublimate,patheticize or rationalize the image."For, parasitic as it is on the photograph,"the textis onlya kindof secondary vibration,almost without consequence" in relationshipto an "objective(denoted) message,"and "connotationis now experienced only as the naturalresonance of the fundamentaldenotation constitutedby the photographicanalogy."24 Beginningin 1961, then, the structuralparadox Bartheswas exploringwas that of a connotational systemhiding behind the seeminglyunbroken facade of denotation'sobjectivity, its naturalness,its "innocence."In "Rhetoricof the Image," he wenteven furtherin developingan analysisof the wayconnotation striates the image, allowing himselfto do so by confininghis demonstration to a specific photographused as an advertisingimage, the various connotative"messages" of whichcould reasonablybe understoodas intentional.Always returning to the way the denotative"fact" of the photograph closes over these readings to naturalize them-"the discontinuous connotators are connected, actualized, 'spoken' through the syntagmof the denotation, the discontinuous world of symbols plunges into the storyof the denoted scene as though into a lustral bath of innocence"25-he triednonetheless to systematizethe connotationalswarms. The system,he suggested,always moves fromthe particularto the general, fromthe green,yellow, and red foundin the Panzani advertisingphoto, for example, to the connotator "Italianicity,"itself generalized onto a certain axis, that of nationalities,which can in turnbe seen as partof a structurallyoppositional network that organizes a whole associativefield. This common domain was identifiedby Barthesas thatof ideology,which "speaks"itself through a rhetoric,no matterin what medium the speech is conducted, whetherin image, articulatedsound, or

23. Barthes,"The PhotographicMessage," in Image,Music, Text, p. 28. 24. Ibid., pp. 25-26. 25. Barthes,"Rhetoric of the Image,"in Image,Music, Text, p. 51.

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gesture. These differentsupports for the "speech" affectthe substance of the signifiers,he said, but theydo not affectits form, by which he meant the functional organizationof the signifiedsin relationshipto each other.And if rhetorics,that is, the set of connotators,have form,Barthes speculated, "it is even probable that there existsa singlerhetorical form, common forinstance to dream,literature and image."26For the psyche,structured like a language, also seems to move fromthe specific(as in the dailyresidue fromwhich dream images are in part fabricated) to the general (the dream's highlyrepetitive "kernel"), such that"the furtherone 'descends' into the psychicdepths of an individual,the more rarifiedand the more classifiable the signs become. What could be more systematic,"Barthes finallyasked, "than the readingsof Rorschachtests?"27

7. Which bringsus back to Breton,the focus of mysecond counterintuitive example, and, more specifically, to the Breton who, like Rauschenberg in "Random Order,"insisted on insertingthe supposedlysilent testimonyof docu- mentaryphotographs into the pages of his diarylikenovels Nadja (1928) and L'Amourfou(Mad Love,1937).28 Thus in Nadja, no sooner does Breton tell us that he is sittingin the Manoir d'Ango in August 1927, writingthe account of his relationship with the quixotic, clairvoyant,mad Nadja, than we have a photograph of the manor house, with its dovecote and courtyardonto which a dead pigeon falls,announcing the closure of the storyin the past (Nadja's) and the opening onto a futureBreton has yetto live,much less to record. (That futurewill enter the book's finalpages.) The account itselfcontinues with diary entries and photographic documents, the entries turning on the "predictive" nature of Nadja's relation to futureevents (and Breton'sto her), somethingBreton understood as the workingof Surrealism'sconcept of objectivechance. Among the usual explanations as to whyBreton would have proceeded in thiscurious way are thathe was usingphotographs as a means to dispensewith the descriptionsthat litter naturalistic novels, as Bretonhimself claimed at one point, and to authenticatethe nonfictionalstatus of his narratives.("Provide me with the real names,"Breton famously wrote, "prove to me thatyou in no wayhad free reignover your heroes."29) These have been sweptaside by Denis Hollier,who has argued that the heart of the matterlies in the two formsof the index converging in these pages: (1) the photograph,which can only be a precipitateof the real, and (2) the diaristic,first-person narrator, whose verbalposition is equally (deicti-

26. Ibid., p. 49. 27. Ibid., p. 47. 28. During a conversation withYve-Alain Bois, in which we were discussing the enigmatic yet suggestivecharacter of "Random Order" as a manifesto,he said that these sheets somehowreminded him of Nadja, a commentfor which, as willbe obvious,I am extremelygrateful. 29. Andre Breton,"Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucityof Reality"(1924), trans.Richard Sieburthand JenniferGordon, October69 (Summer1994), p. 134. Previouslypublished as "Introduction au discourssur le peu de realite"(1924), in Pointdujour (Paris: EditionsGallimard, 1970).

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cally) dependent on reality,in thiscase upon the actual, existentialconditions of saying"I." So thatwhich is at stakein a worklike Nadja is not a change in the referent,a passage from imaginary to real characters as one would do by leaving the novel for historiography. Rather it is a change in the mode of enunciation; the passage to the real mustbe inferrednot bya change of object as much as by the entry onto the stage of the subjectand its index.30

And whatthis means is thatthe writerleaves the backstageof the novel to go sitin the theaterwith the restof the audience. Placing himselfon the same side of the page as his reader,the writernot only casts his own shadow onto the field of the book, but allows the eventsunfolding in a futurehe cannot foresee to cast theirs onto the same space. If,for the plasticarts, the indexicalprinciple had meant that "a real shadow,falling onto Mir6's SpanishDancer, opens the internalspace of the workto the contextof its reception,mixing it withthat of its beholder,"then "in the same way,what [Michel] Leiris called the literaryequivalent of the shadow of the bull's horn should propel the autobiographical text in the shared space of history."31What is crucial about thisspace is thatit is open; ifBreton calls Nadja a book thatis like a door leftajar, he means thatwhen he began to writeit he knew no more than did his reader,who by book's end would walk throughthat door. "The one who writeshas no privilege,"Hollier writes,"no advance over the one who reads. He doesn't knowany more about it than the other."32 Leaving things "open" has been Rauschenberg's most frequently used expression in describing his artisticstance; whateverhappens, he must always conspire to leave the situationopen, so that, like Breton,he will be surprised.33

30. Denis Hollier, "SurrealistPrecipitates: Shadows Don't Cast Shadows," trans. Rosalind Krauss, October69(Summer 1994), p. 126. 31. Ibid., p. 124. 32. Ibid., p. 129. 33. In her summaryof Rauschenberg'saesthetic stance, Seckler introduced her long interviewwith him by sayingthat although Rauschenberg "does not recall having paid much attentionto abstract expressionism'sphilosophical premises in existentialismand Zen, he apparentlytook seriouslythat part of its moral positionwhich emphasized riskand openness and keeping the artist'sactivity-with all its precariousbalancing-clearly in view."In the interviewitself, Rauschenberg stated this by saying,"This insistenceon the piece operatingin the time situationit was observedin is another one of the waysof tryingto put offthe death of the work"(Seckler, "The ArtistSpeaks," pp. 74, 84). Cage also quoted a typicalexpression of Rauschenberg'sdrive foropenness: "I am tryingto check myhabits of seeing, to counterthem for the sake of greaterfreshness. I am tryingto be unfamiliarwith what I'm doing" (Cage, "On RobertRauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,"p. 106). Or again, Rauschenbergsaid severaltimes to Philip Smiththat he wantedto be open to eventsin order to createan artthat would not "tellyou something that you already know" (Smith, "To and about Robert Rauschenberg,"Arts Magazine 51, no. 7 [March 1977], p. 121). The most frequentlyrepeated version is Rauschenberg's refrainabout his "collaborationwith materials" (see Calvin Tomkins,The Bride and theBachelors: The Heretical Courtship in ModernArt [New York: The VikingPress, 1965], pp. 204, 232), whichhe enunciatedto John Gruen as "I put my trustin the materials that confrontme, because theyput me in touch with the unknown" (Gruen,"Robert Rauschenberg: An Audience of One," Artnews76, no. 2 [February1977], p. 48).

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This, he has stressed,is differentfrom chance, since chance is programmedahead of time,which is exactlywhat Rauschenberg has insistedupon avoiding.34Instead, if he has continuallyreferred to his process as a collaboration with objects and materials,it is because he never wants it said that he in any way has, as Breton would put it, "had freereign over his heroes." In Breton's case, openness is equally a matterof diaristic,autobiographical writingand "psychicautomatism," or a kindof automaticwriting intended to register unconscious thoughts.But since both forms-the diaryas a demonstrationof the "psychopathologyof everydaylife" (read: objectivechance), and automaticwriting as an unconscious precipitate-are viewed as being in collaboration with the unconscious,in theirattempt to registerthis psychicdimension theyare equally indexical. They both share in the index's "mode of enunciation."Hollier points out:

The specificfeature of Surrealistwriting, whether it be autobiographical or automatic,is, in fact,less the lack of knowledgeof itsfinal destination as such than the identicalposition into whichthis lack places both the reader and the authorin the face of a textwhose unfoldingneither the one nor the othercontrols, and about whichboth of themknow neither the futurenor the ending.35 The Nadja-like quality of "Random Order"-in its unfolding that feels both aleatoryand associative,in its mixtureof intimacyand veracity,and in the dream- like qualityof whatimpresses one as a nocturnalatmosphere no matterif some of the photographsW1ere taken in daylight-puts Breton back in the interpretative picture.Not in any direct,historical way, of course, but as a means of flaggingthe experienceof a certainkind of field:full of associations,metaphors, connotations. This was a fieldRauschenberg had expresslycourted in the Infernodrawings. [Rauschenberg:"Dante was soughtand completedto havethe adventure of what, and if I could applymy abstract sensibility to a classical restrictiveassignment. A one-on-one handlingand no embarrassmenttoeither. Illustration with compulsive respect. "]

8. There are causal questionsthat are extremelyhard to answer.For example, whywould Rauschenberghave chosen the Dante project,not onlyselecting it, but doggedlydeciding as well to continue it, necessitatingintermittent work over two and a halfyears, and, towardthe end, six monthsof isolation in Florida in order to bring it to completion?Rauschenberg has givenseveral different explanations.

34. Rauschenbergsaid, "I was interestedin manyof John Cage's chance operations and I liked the sense of experimentationhe is involvedin, but paintingis just a differentground foractivities. I could neverfigure out an interestingway to use any kind of programmedactivity--and even thoughchance deals withthe unexpected and unplanned, it still has to be organized. Workingwith chance, I would end up withsomething that was quite geometric:I feltas though I were carryingout an idea rather thanwitnessing an unknownidea takingshape." In Seckler,"The ArtistSpeaks," p. 81. 35. Hollier,"Surrealist Precipitates," p. 129.

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As he told Dorothy Gees Seckler in 1966, he wanted the figurativeproject demanded by illustration:"The problem when I startedthe Dante illustrations was to see if I was workingabstractly because I couldn't work any other way or whetherI was doing it by choice. So I insistedon the challenge of being restricted bya particularsubject where it meant thatI'd have to be involvedin symbolism."36 Earlier,however, he had told Tomkinsthat he was simplytrying to find a way of solvingthe problem that his drawingsdid not followone fromthe other the way his paintingsdid: "I reallywanted to make a whole lot of drawings,though, so I began looking around fora vehicle,something to keep them going."37If thiswas his explanationin 1964, however,it had become farmore generalizedby the time Tomkinswrote Offthe Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and theArt World of Our Time(published in 1980), which quotes Rauschenberg's pretext as simplywanting to be taken more seriouslyas an artist.38[Rauschenberg: "It is mentionedwhy I spentsuch a longperiod of timeon thiswork. (1) I was notgoing to leave it undone.(2) I became extremelyirritated by the self-servicing of the text disguised as righteousness.Attempting Dantewas a privateexercise in mygrowth and self-explorationtoface my weaknesses. A test. Bydoing it I had equal opportunitytoalienate or to ally. "] If Rauschenbergwas forcinghimself to engage with "symbolism,"was this because his Combine paintingshad been trulyabstract, as he claimed? Or was it because theyhad alreadybeen invokingconnotational fields,particularly in the matricesset up between objects, words,and photographicreproductions on the surfaces of works like Rebus (1955), Talisman (1958), or TrophyI (for Merce Cunningham)(1959)? [Rauschenberg:"In thecanto ... thespace allowed for each image was a measuremade by the space occupied by the author's words, literally. (Not to exaggerate or edit.)I was thereporter "] And was the figurativenature of the new projectboth a wayof acknowledgingthis and of extendingit? Further, in the three-wayconnection set up in these drawingsbetween the figurative,the symbolic,and the photographic, which element is primary?39Does the avowed desire to break with abstractionpromote figuration,which then leads to the allegorical requirement of a mastertext (in this case the Inferno)and the subsequent need for a (photographic) image bank fromwhich to draw?Or do the photographicforces already

36. Quoted in Seckler,"The ArtistSpeaks," p. 84. 37. Quoted in Tomkins,The Bride and theBachelors, p. 224. 38. Tomkins, Offthe Wall, p. 157. That Rauschenberg continues to be defensiveabout the early characterizationof himselfas an unseriousjokester (in a January1956 review,Steinberg had written "Eulenspiegelis abroad again") is witnessedby the manyinterviews in which,referring to his reception in the 1950s, he made remarkslike "I was considered a clown."See Leo Steinberg,"Month in Review: ContemporaryGroup at Stable Gallery,"Arts 30, no. 4 (January1956), p. 47, and Paul Taylor,"Robert Rauschenberg,"Interview 20, no. 12 (December 1990), p. 147. 39. I am using "symbolic"here in a ratherloose way,to gathertogether the idea of images symboliz- ing other sensorydata or specifictextual ideas, and thus the drive towardthe textualor the linguistic ("symbol"in the semiological sense). In this usage, symboloverlaps with the idea of the allegorical emblem, rather than opposing it, as it does in Walter Benjamin's analysisof the fragmentaryand disunifiednature of allegorycontrasted to the organic characterof the workunderstood as symbol. See Benjamin,The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New LeftBooks, 1977).

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assemblingon the surfacesof the Combine paintings,themselves releasing uncon- tainable networksof association, simultaneouslydemand the figurativeand its textualsupport? Whateverthe first,originary term in this departure, the Infernocertainly plunged Rauschenberginto the domain of the connotational,in which messages overlayone anotherin a pile-upof substitutionsand metaphors.From the kind of visual symbolsused for smells (Canto VI's "putrid slush" is metaphorized as a stinkingfish in Rauschenberg's illustration),for sounds (Canto IV's "roar and trembling of Hell" becomes a racing car), and for tactile sensations (Canto XXXII's icywilderness, where tears freeze the eyesshut, is visualizedby a transparent cube withan eye inside it),40to those forconceptual conditions (Canto XX's idea of fortune-tellersand divinersis renderedby a large head of SigmundFreud and bythe factthat all the bodies have theirheads on backward),the drawingsexplore the allegoricaldimension of the image. But whateverthe specificsymbolic associations released maybe, theirinterconnections could not pass fromone part of the drawingto anotherwithout another dimension.That aspect is the technicalone, in whichrubbing, veiling, and liquiditynot onlyopen vignettesof space withinthe surfaceof the pages but, by reaffirmingthat surface,convert it into the vehicle thatallows one such space to flowinto another. In creatinga unifiedstroke as the medium of all the imagesin the series,the act of rubbing necessaryto Rauschenberg'ssolvent-transfer process (in which a magazine or newsprintpage is soaked withlighter fluid or some othersolvent, laid face down on top of the drawingsheet, and then rubbed witha blunt instrument to force the ink of the printed page onto the underlyingsheet) serves as the matrixof slippage between one image and the next,which the spillsand flowsof watercolorand gouache merelyheighten.41 But the rubbing also produces two more effects.Since a rubbing most often takes the formof a rectangularunit capturinga givenfigure or object along witha patch of its background,the firstis that individualimages are framed,something heightened not only by the many found, internalframes within individual images (such as the astronaut'svisored helmetin Canto XXX) but by the numerousrectangular elements collaged to the pages. The second is thatthe rubbing'svisual blur promotesthe sensationthat the images are "veiled." It is thiscombination of framingand veilingthat paradoxically restores these drawingsto the verydimension that Leo Steinbergwas to call the "diaphane,"in

40. These have been pointed out in Ashton,"Rauschenberg's Thirty-four Illustrations," pp. 57, 61. For another reading of the drawings'relations to the textof Inferno,see Bitite Vinklers,"Why Not Dante? A Study of Rauschenberg's Drawings for the Inferno,"Art International (Lugano) 12, no. 6 (Summer 1968), pp. 99-106. 41. A precedentfor the use of rubbingto promoteassociative readings and slippage is, of course, Max Ernst's frottagetechnique, which I do not think is connected historicallyto Rauschenberg's method. Far more likelyis the connection between the parallel strokesof the rubbing and Jasper Johns'sdrawing technique of using parallel hatchingto open up pocketsof shallowspace.

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Canto XX: CircleEight, Bolgia 4, The FortuneTellers and Diviners.1959-60.

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distinguishingit (and the whole traditionof picturemaking before Rauschenberg) from the very"flatbed picture plane" that he saw Rauschenberg's Combines as inaugurating.The sense of the visual field fallingin a transparentbut decidedly vertical veil before the viewer's upright body connects the "diaphanic" with a dimensionof naturethat Steinberg went on to contrastexplicitly to Rauschenberg's exploitationof the "post-Modern"dimension of culture,understood now,in the Combines, as a horizontal "receptorsurface on which objects are scattered,on whichdata is entered,on whichinformation may be received,printed, impressed."42 To returnto the veil,and therebyto the diaphane-or to the frame,and hence to the windowmodel of the pictureplane-was, then, to arise fromthis flatbed,in whichRauschenberg's originality as an artisthad been invested. But the returnto thisvertical axis in the Dante drawingsseems to have been motivatedless by a need to connect to nature (or landscape) than to what we would have to call an "image logic,"which is to saythat, whether stored within the imaginaryspaces of our dreams,fantasies, or memories,or observedin the external world,images are verticallyoriented, with heads at the top, feetat the bottom.If Rauschenbergwas exploringthe associationalfield of those chainsof connotations that,as Bartheshad noted, make up the rhetoricalform "common forinstance to dream, literatureand image," he had no choice but to seek the image logic's vector,which is vertical.This is the reason whyit is hard to see whichwas foremost in Rauschenberg'sset of choices in 1958: the conditionof the symbol;its existence as figurative;or the supportof the photograph.This is also whythere is no break between the image logic exploited in the Dante drawingsand the oneiric feeling of "RandomOrder." The mentalspaces of dream,of memory,and of the imagination are equallyupright.

9. Heads contained by framesappear throughoutthe Dante drawings,either because Rauschenbergencased faceswithin framing rectangles (as in Cantos X and XXXI) or because he found such framingin the borrowedimages themselves(the diver'shelmet in Canto XX, the astronaut'sin Canto XXX). This resourceis carried over into the silkscreenedpaintings. In Transom(1963), Flush (1964), and Trapeze (1964), for example, mirrorsfrom both the RokebyVenus and Peter Paul Rubens's The Toiletof Venus (ca. 1613-14) isolate the femalefaces and are themselvesfurther isolatedby the painting'sfield, and in RetroactiveII (1964) and Press(1964), John E Kennedy'shead is tightlyframed. Enclosing the head and face,the frameseems to organizean imageof the mental,or of thought,meditation, or reflection. Steinberg had indeed spoken of the flatbed of Rauschenberg's Combine paintings as a turningaway from the optical toward the mental. "It seemed at times,"he wrote,"that Rauschenberg'swork surfacestood for the mind itself- dump, reservoir,switching center, abundant with concrete references freely

42, Steinberg,"Other Criteria,"p. 84.

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associated as in an internalmonologue-the outward symbolof the mind as a running transformerof the external world, constantly ingesting incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an overchargedfield."43 And buildingon that suggestion,plus the sense that the wildlydiverse elements "dumped" onto this surfacewere nonethelessphysically embedded withinit in such a wayas to produce a peculiar homogeneityamong the varied elements,and between them and that surface,I myselftried to develop the particulardimension of the mental space suggestedby the Combines,namely memory.44 If fromthe Combines to the Dante drawingsto the silkscreensvia "Random Order,"the assortmentof materialobjects givesway to the framedimage-a two- dimensionalelement whose substance is now trulyat one withits planar support and whose medium is consistentlyphotographic-this experience of a mnemonic space becomes ever more specific.For not only does the verticalityof the image become pervasive,but now,as assertivelypresented in the manifestolike"Random Order,"the formulafor the entiresilkscreen series is to be a loose gridof enframed photographicspaces that seems to presentone withnothing so much as a visual archive: the storage and retrievalmatrix of the organized miscellanyof images, whichpresents the memoryas a kind of filingcabinet of the mind.

10. The photographic archive was not whollyforeign to Rauschenberg's Identikit.He is fond of sayingthat he almost became a photographer,and the project he imagined embarkingon, inspiredby the presence at Black Mountain College of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind,was, W.P.A.-like,to photograph America,foot by foot, "in actual size."45 Given Rauschenberg'sgeneration, the W.P.A.characterization is surprising. We would sooner expect him to share a sensibilitywith someone like Robert Frank.We would predictthat Rauschenberg's handling of photographywould give us the sense of our connectionto a place thatis onlypossible throughthe intensity of our experience of separation from it, the sense that to see it directlyis so painfulthat the image mustsomehow be mediatedby the presence of a veil. This is true of Frank's famous BarberShop throughScreen Door-McClellanville, South Carolina(1955) and his Fourthof uly-Jay,New York(1954), in which the mesh of screeningthat paradoxically serves as both focusingdevice and barrierin the former and the Americanflag dropping a verticalcurtain through the space of the latter produce the simultaneousconnection and distance that is the heart of Frank's ambivalence.Whether we are looking at Viewfrom Hotel Window-Butte, Montana (1956) or Elevator-MiamiBeach (1955), there is alwaysthe effectof a veil,created

43. Ibid., p. 88. 44. See my "Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image," Artforum13, no. 4 (December 1974), pp. 41-43. 45. Quoted in Rose, Rauschenberg,p. 75. In 1979, Rauschenbergundertook a projectof thisnature, In + Out CityLimits.

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either by the literalmeans of photographedfabric or by the technicalmeans of blur,flare, or pulled focus. Veils do functionin Rauschenberg'streatment of found photographswithin his Combines,famously so in the gauze thatfalls over a group of photos in Rebus and over the reproductionof the stag in Curfew(1958). In these instances,the veilscan be seen as workingto createa balance betweenthe assumedtransparency of the photographicimage's relation to realityand the opaque presence of the other objects piled onto the Combine. The skin of paint that oftenscabs over these objects,marrying them to the flatbedsurface, is thus mimickedby the veil thatis dropped in frontof the occasional photographicimage. However,in Rauschenberg'sown photography,we see somethingfar more in tune withthe example of WalkerEvans's works: the frontality;the relentlessfocus; the qualityof lightfalling on texturedsurfaces (clapboard siding,for example, or brick) actingas a kind of graphic,or drawn,stroke; and the fascinationwith two- dimensional"fronts" (billboards, torn posters, shop windows)standing in forthe deep space of the "real,"which they effectively block. It is thesequalities, combined with the surveymentality expressed by the photographicproject Rauschenberg initiallyimagined, that make the connection to the idea of an archive,a photo- graphiccorpus throughwhich reality is somehowingested, organized, catalogued, and retrieved.Indeed, beginningwith the silkscreens-Rauschenberg'ssystematic turnto photographyas the basis for his paintings-this procedure of the survey has markedhis approach in variousways.

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ONEWH

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One of themis the amassingof the archiveon the basisof certain preconceived categories.A precedentcan be foundin the notorious"shooting scripts" handed out byRoy Stryker in 1936 to hisW.P.A. cameramen, including Evans, who were directed to recordcertain kinds of settings,social types,and accoutrements.In collectinghis own materialfor the silkscreenseries and forsubsequent works, Rauschenberg has also looked forcertain types of subjectsin his media sources.As he and his assistants scour these sources,they arrange thismaterial in prescribedcategories-athletes, space travel,animals, domestic objects, transport, and Americanemblems, among others-in pileson theworktables in his Captivastudio.46 But the mostimportant aspect of the archivalis the idea of the standardized format,which allows for its informationalspace to be mapped. This is where Rauschenberg'stwo choices-his employmentof the loose grid as a structureand the conveyanceof the image in itsframe, so clearlyenunciated in "Random Order" and so faithfullyfollowed in the silkscreens-become important.[Rauschenberg: "Re thearchives: I also arrangemy other colors and materialsin sucha wayto keep them in my reach.Everything I can organizeI do,so I amfree to work in chaos,spontaneity, and thenot yetdone. "]

11. The archiveis a documentaryproject, a public act of collectivememory; or at leastthat is itsideal form,the one projectedby various prewar archival surveys, like the W.P.A.'sin America, or August Sander's Das Antlitzder Zeit (The Face of Time,1929) in Germany.Benjamin Buchloh has writtenabout the peculiarrelation of postwaravant-garde artists to these earlier demonstrationsof a beliefnot only in the transparencyof the photographic medium but in the common-sense assumption of the transparencyof the realityitself onto which the camera was focused. GerhardRichter, as his complex project Atlas (1962-present) reflects,is peculiarlyadamant about the impossibilityof any such transparencyand the need to punctureits mythologicalstatus. If the archivalproject is founded on memory, Richter'sown example seems to say,it mustbe based as well on a notion of subjec- tivityfor which (or for whom) coherent memory is possible. But what Atlas questions, over the meander of its burgeoningbut hapless categoricalspaces, is just thisoption at a historicalpoint at which,to use Buchloh's terms,"anomie" has taken over in such a wayas to eclipse the subject, to produce thatsubject as the basis of mnemonicactivity no longer.47 In Buchloh's reconstructionof Richter'sdevelopment, Richter's experience of seeing Rauschenberg'swork in the 1959 exhibition DocumentaII: Kunstnach

46. This was described to me by Nan Rosenthal,who was struckby it on her firstvisit to Captiva in 1983. 47. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "L'Archiveanomique de Gerhard Richter,"a chapter of his seminal studyof Richter,Gerhard Richter, exhibition catalog, vol. 2, La Peinturea' la fin du sujet(Paris: Mus&e d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1993), pp. 7-17. See also Buchloh's essay in this issue of October, startingon p. 117.

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Rauschenberg.Charleston. 1980.

1945 in Kassel was crucialto his embraceof modernismand redirectionof his own project, which Atlas inaugurated.48 It is therefore fortuitous that by 1962 Rauschenberghimself had embarkedon a series not unrelatedto Atlasin various aspects: the use of "amateur-type"photos (here supplied byRauschenberg, taking themwith his Roloflexcamera) combinedwith images culled frommagazines and newspapers;the exploitationof serializationand repetition;the coordinationof the framedphotographic image with the geometricallypatterned layout of the grid;and the ultimatequarry, which is thenow highly problematic space ofmemory.

12. The last word of the two-pagespread in "Random Order" is "allegory," whichis penciled byitself under the layeredinterior space of Rauschenberg'sloft,

48. Ibid., p. 13. The Rauschenbergworks that Richter saw at the 1959 Documentawere Bed,Kickback (1959), and Thaw(1958).

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stove and sink lined up parallel to the surfaceplane in the image's foreground, countertoprepeating this parallel in the middle ground,and floor-boundworks in progressin the background.This image showsinterior space as organized by the language of perspective,which makes the order of the asserted "allegory"not exactlywhat we would have expected. If "allegory"has been applied as a termof criticalappraisal to Rauschenberg's work,this has been to align it witha varietyof deployments,including fragmenta- tion, appropriation, and indeterminacyof reading, that characterize certain postmodernpractices.49 It has also been to annex it to WalterBenjamin's use of baroque systemsof allegoryto addressthe reifiedstatus of the human subjectwithin a cultureof the commodity.50In myconsideration of "Random Order,"however, I would like to do somethingboth more limitedand more precise.If allegorybegins withthe doublingof one text(or image) byanother, Rauschenberg is clearlyplacing photographyand (Renaissance) paintinginto such a reciprocalrelationship. Not onlyhas he told us whathe thinksRenaissance painting is (the volume thatcan be flattened"to the extentthat a brushloadof paint can hold it to a picturesurface"), but he has made an emblem of this bellows-likeopening and closing everybit as graphic as Albers's reversiblesquares. The opaque, two-dimensionalplane, or square, in Renascenceis suspended withinthe schematic,perspectival rendering of the cube as one of itsdimensions now "holdingvolume to the surface";the cube is a figurethat will reappear persistentlythroughout the silkscreenseries in workssuch as Exile,New Painting, Payload, and Vault(all 1962); Die Hard (1963); Bicycle,Stop Gap, and Transom(all 1963); and Press,Stunt, and Trap(all 1964). But in "Random Order,"what Rauschenberghas also said is that the photo- graphicmark is notjust an imprintfalling onto the emulsion of the light-sensitive surface fromthe space in frontof the camera (as in the example of the White Paintings,which catch cast shadows), but that the mark seems to be welling up fromwithin the camera itself,as in the case of a foggyor dirtypane, where "what is outside appear[s] to be projected onto the window plane." In the artist's description,the photographis neitherconsidered the "transparent"access to reality that is part of the ideology of the document, nor conceived of as the indexically opaque mark of the cast shadow. Rather,it is understood-on the model of the Renaissancepicture, which stands as its allegory--aslayered: a depth and a surface forcedinto some kind of contact. The model of that contact is not the sameas the Renaissance picture;if it were,we would not be speakingof an allegory.Rather, this relationship, or contact, betweensurface and depth is made-hence the "integrityof the pictureplane"- and then broken-the allegorical condition. The figurethat comes to mind in

49. See Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,"October 12 (Spring 1980), pp. 67-86; and October13 (Summer 1980), pp. 59-80. 50. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in ContemporaryArt," Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982), pp. 44, 46-47.

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thisregard is Freud's model of memory,the "MysticWriting-Pad." How, he asked, can we conceive of the storageof informationnecessary to memoryoccurring in the verysame neurological systemthat provides the perpetuallyvirgin fields of impression requisite for new, incoming perceptions?51In thinkingabout the relationship between two systemsof neurons-those of permanent impression (that is, storage) and those of perception-Freud turned to a child's toy,the Wunderblock,which is comprisedof a plasticsheet layeredover a wax tablet.The pressureof drawingon the sheet witha stylusmakes the sheet stickto the tablet, producing a graphic outline. But this configurationcan be made to disappear simplyby liftingthe plasticsheet, therebypulling it awayfrom the tabletto which it had been temporarilyattached. The sheet is then virginonce more, and, like the perceptual system,ready to accept fresh data. The tablet has nonetheless retainedthe marksof the stylus'simpression and, like memory,bears a permanent networkof tracesin the partof the apparatusthat lies below. If"Random Order" is an allegory,it is one thatattempts to triangulatememory, photography,and text,with the allegorical exemplarbeing the oscillatingspace of painting in which inside and outside, virtualand actual, depth and surface are bound and parted only to be bound and parted again. If there was a "belief" in the early1960s thatthese could have somethingto do withone another,it would surelynot have been along the lines of the prewararchive. Rather, although there is no immediate historical connection, the relationships are on the order of Barthes's discussion in "Rhetoricof the Image," in which connotational chains, anarchic and metastatic,open a kind of echo chamber of unstable meanings ricochetingaround the archivalstructure that Barthes later called the "stereophonic space" of the endlesslymultiple associational codes. By 1964,at the heightof hissilkscreen production, it was clear to Rauschenberg that these chains were both what he was confrontingand what he could never control.Accordingly, he said to David Sylvester, We have ideas about bricks.A brickjust isn'ta physicalmass of a certain dimensionthat one builds houses or chimneyswith. The whole worldof associations,all the informationthat we have-the factthat it's made of dirt, that it's been through a kiln, romantic ideas about little brick cottages,or the chimneywhich is so romantic,or labor-you have to deal withas manyof the thingsas you knowabout. Because ifyou don't, I thinkyou startworking more like an eccentric,or primitive,which, you know,who can be anymore,or the insane,which is veryobsessive.52

51. Sigmund Freud, "A Note upon the 'MysticWriting-Pad'" (1924), in Freud, TheStandard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey,vol. 19 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institutefor Psycho-analysis, 1961), pp. 227-32. 52. Quoted in Roni Feinstein,Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962-64 (New York:Whitney Museum of AmericanArt in associationwith Little, Brown, Boston, 1990), p. 25, fromDavid Sylvester, interviewwith Rauschenberg, BBC, August1964, audiotape in Chelsea School ofArt Library, London.

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Rauschenberg.Photograph of a glassof water used as sourcematerial in silkscreenedpaintings. 1962.

Another instance he provided Sylvesterwas the image of a glass of water, whichentered into the silkscreenrepertory by means of his own photograph.Not onlywas it a purelyphysical or functionalobject-"the factthat it's thisbig, this high, that it mighttopple over,that it evaporatesand has to be refilled,that it picksup reflections"--but,he admitted,adhering to it were "all the psychological implicationsof a glass of water."Speaking of the glass that appears in Persimmon (1964), he gave an example of one such implication,an interestingdemonstration forthe person who insistedthat there was no such thingas a sad cup of coffee: In most cases, mymanipulation of the psychologicalis to tryto avoid the ones that I know about. I had trouble in one painting ... I was silkscreeninga glass of waterand I put it over green and that whole paintinghad to change to destroythe look of poison,which is just simply an associationthat one has witha glassof green,I think.53

53. Quoted in ibid.

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The year before this conversation, Rauschenberg had written"Note on Painting,"54in which he returned to his rejection of the connotational as the "cliches"that psychological common sense annexes to certainobjects ("If I see any superficialsubconscious relationship that I'm familiarwith-cliches of association- I change the picture").55In "Note on Painting,"he wrote,"The workthen has a chance to electricservice become its own cliche,"with the interjectionof "electric service"into the sentence functioningsomewhat in the manner of the insertions of photographsinto the flowof "Random Order."Indeed, these strangeinterrup- tions in "Note on Painting"-"open 24 hrs.," "heated pool," "Denver 39"-have the quality of textual fragmentslifted from advertising, journalism, or any of a number of other sources for those words that "broadsideour culture,"which the trucks of "Random Order" are pictured as delivering. It's just that the word "cliche," which in Rauschenberg's usage curiouslyjoins the psychological- "cliches of association"-and the material-the words that "broadside our culture"-sets up a relationshipbetween the externalsource of the image and the internalspace of its reception. Because Rauschenberg has repeatedly said, "I alwayswanted my works- whateverhappened in the studio-to look more like what was going on outside the window,"56we are not surprisedthat with the adventof the silkscreenseries he should have identifiedthat outside withphotographic media: "I was bombarded withTV sets and magazinesby the excess of the world. I thoughtan honestwork should incorporateall of these elements,which were and are a reality."57What is more surprisingis that he should have conceived of "whateverhappened in the studio"as "itsown clich6,"now consideredas a positivequality. This cliche, a precipitateof his characterizationof the media image as "the complex interlockingof disparatevisual factsheated pool that have no respectfor grammar,"58is nonethelessthe stuffof the "subconscious."It is like the kernel of the dream, or the repetitivelysimple wish,encircled by the elaborate disjuncture of its imagery,much of whichis fabricatedfrom the "dailyresidue" of one's recent wakinglife. This relationshipbetween theform of a rhetoricand itswildly prolifer- ating,manifest content is whatBarthes had been gettingat as well when he spoke about the endless lexes into whichimages of realitycan be divided (the ideolects); however,as one descendstoward the "psychicdepths of an individual... the more

54. The handwritten text, dated October 31-November 2, 1963, is reproduced as Robert Rauschenberg, "Note on Painting,"in John Russell and Suzi Gablik, Pop ArtRedefined (New York: FrederickA. Praeger,Publishers, 1969), pp. 101-2. 55. This particularquotation is taken fromthe Seckler interview,which took place two years after "Note on Painting"was written.But at the time he made his black paintings,Rauschenberg's hostility to associationswas expressedin his distressabout the connotationscritics wanted to annex to what he considereda simplematerial. 56. Quoted in Taylor,"Robert Rauschenberg," p. 146. 57. Quoted in MaryLynn Kotz, RobertRauschenberg: Art and Life(New York:Harry N. Abrams,1990), p. 99. 58. Rauschenberg,"Note on Painting,"p. 101. Italicsadded.

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classifiablethe signsbecome. What could be more systematicthan the readingsof Rorschachtests?" The allegoryof inside and outside, of frontand back, of the photographic strikingthe subjectfrom the outsidebut welling up in a differentform (the grammar of the cliche) fromwithin, emblematized by a reversiblecube, is the message of "RandomOrder." As allegoriesgo, itis both simpleand moving,evincing a particular faithin the renewabilityof painting,capable of emerging"like a new season."59

59. I would like to addressin thislast footnote the pressurethat has been exertedon Rauschenberg's workin attemptsto read it as the encoding of a coherentmessage and in some cases to use the conven- tional procedures of iconographyto decode that message. This began with Charles F. Stuckey'sself- proclaimed deciphering of the rebus in Rebus ("Reading Rauschenberg," Art in America65, no. 2 [March-April1977], pp. 74-84) and has continued in the kind of thematicreadings developed by Roni Feinstein,where, among other things,she sees certainof the silkscreenedpaintings as allegories of Marcel Duchamp's The BrideStripped Bare byHer Bachelors,Even (Large Glass) (1915-23; Feinstein, RobertRauschenberg, pp. 75-90). More recentlythe iconographyhas been understood as encrypting themes of gay subculture,whether through allusions to mythsresonant withingay sensibility(the Ganymede mythin Canyonin Kenneth Bendiner,"Robert Rauschenberg's Canyon," Arts Magazine 56, no. 10 [June 1982], pp. 57-59) or, in the case of the entire Dante drawingsproject, through hidden references to bathhouse culture and the media support for homoerotic displays of male bodies (Jonathan Katz, "The Art of Code: JasperJohns and Robert Rauschenberg," in SignificantOthers: Creativityand IntimatePartnership, ed. WhitneyChadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron[London: Thames and Hudson, 1993], pp. 188-207; and Laura Auricchio, "Liftingthe Veil: Robert Rauschenberg's Thirty-fourDrawings for Dante's Inferno and the CommercialHomoerotic Imageryof 1950s America,"in TheGay 90s: Disciplinaryand InterdisciplinaryFormation in QueerStudies, ed. Thomas Foster,Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry,Genders 26 [1997]). This idea of the iconographicas the encoding of a relatively coherenttext that underlies and explainsthe imagesis, of course,miles away from the complex theories of allegoryput in place by WalterBenjamin and then used by other authors,from Paul de Man for literatureto BenjaminBuchloh and Craig Owens forthe visualarts. In those theories,baroque allegory is broughtforward to demonstratewhat in twentieth-centuryexperience is not readable throughthe iconographicmodel of a stable relationbetween two texts.It is preciselythe messageof uncertainty,of slippage,of unreadabilityand fragmentationthat allegory not onlyconveys but also, in a necessaryact of redoubling,itself becomes. The subject of allegoryis thus preciselynot the subject of iconography. This would seem to me to be clear fromRauschenberg's own allegoryof the subject of media. But, then,the convincediconographer is almostimpossible to dissuade.

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