Concerning Consequences STUDIES IN ART, DESTRUCTION, AND TRAUMA Kristine Stiles The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London KRISTINE STILES is the France Family Professor of Art, Art Flistory, and Visual Studies at Duke University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by Kristine Stiles All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 12345 ISBN­13: 978­0­226­77451­0 (cloth) ISBN­13: 978­0­226­77453­4 (paper) ISBN­13: 978­0­226­30440­3 (e­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226304403.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloguing­in­Publication Data Stiles, Kristine, author. Concerning consequences : studies in art, destruction, and trauma / Kristine Stiles, pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978­0­226­77451­0 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978­0­226­77453­4 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978­0­226­30440­3 (e­book) 1. Art, Modern — 20th century. 2. Psychic trauma in art. 3. Violence in art. I. Title. N6490.S767 2016 709.04'075 —dc23 2015025618 © This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48­1992 (Permanence of Paper). In conversation with Susan Swenson, Kim Jones explained that the drawing on the cover of this book depicts directional forces in "an X­man, dot­man war game." The rectangles represent tanks and fortresses, and the lines are for tank movement, combat, and containment: "They're symbols. They're erased to show movement. 111 draw a tank, or I'll draw an X, and erase it, then re­draw it in a different posmon.... But when they're killed they're erased and fl A gh0St image­ 80 the erasing is 3 vefy 'mPortant elemen of the war drawings.... The important thing is that it's always 2005^ (SUSan Swenson' conversation with Kim Jones: April 25 0 1 4 W"°rkC'ty; WarP™<*™^ NY: Pierogi 2005], 4). Two years earl.er, Jones described his "war drawings" as mages 0 , hat ^ ends„ ^ q ^ ^ ^ A Studio Vuit wuh Km Jones, a fifteen­minute video codirected bv ' David Schmidlapp and Steve Staso (2003). Rauschenberg's "Gap" (2014)' During an interview with Robert Rauschenberg and his dealer, Leo Castelli, in 1977, the writer and impresario Barbaralee Diamonstein slowly read aloud Rauschenberg's famous 1959 statement from the Museum of Modern Art's ex­ hibition catalogue for Sixteen Americans: "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)"2 Diamonstein's dramatic reading perhaps reflected her respect for the definitive role that the twenty­one­word statement had on art and its histories. By 1977, Rauschen­ berg's "act in the gap" had become a maxim for experimental art—from assem­ blage, happenings, Fluxus, body art, and process art to art and technology in the 1960s, and from performance and installation to pluralism in the 1970s. Rauschenberg's appropriated imagery, combined with photography and paint­ ing, would soon also be recognized as the antecedent for visual aspects of post­ modernism, especially neo­expressionist painting, in the 1980s;1 and his world­ wide travel and insistence on collaboration and interactivity would inform "relational aesthetics" in the 1990s and collectivity in the 2000s2 But after recit­ ing Rauschenberg's words, Diamonstein just looked at him. Rauschenberg picked up the conversation in his careful manner, speaking with determined forethought: 1 don't think that any honest artist [pause] sets out to make art. You love art. You live art. You are art. You do art. But you're just doing something, [pause] You're doing what no one can stop you from doing. And so, it doesn t have to be art. And that is your life, [pause] But you also can t make life. And so there s something in between there that, because you, you flirt with the idea of that, that it is art.5 Diamonstein interrupted him to ask, "Are you saying that art, painting, rests more in ideas than the painting itself?" Rauschenberg answered: No. I think the definition of art would have to be more simple minded tha that, and it's about how much use you can make of it. Because if you trv to sepa rate the two, art can be very self­conscious and a blinding fact. But life doesn't really need it. So it's also another blinding fact.6 After his introspective analysis, which was full of many thoughtful pauses, Rauschenberg stopped talking. Diamonstein avoided, or did not grasp, the sweeping implications of his arresting commentary and, failing to explore its philosophical depth, ironically followed up with a question about his approach to "surface." Diamonstein was not the only critic, just the first, to miss the broader im­ plications of Rauschenberg's thought. Curiously, it appears that no scholar has remarked on his 1977 comments. Despite its omission in the abundant litera­ ture on the artist, Rauschenberg's 1977 amplification of his 1959 statement pro­ vides his most expansive explanation of his process in the interstice where he "just" did "something" that "no one could stop [him] from doing." Rauschen­ berg's 1977 commentary is also his most incisive remark on artistic integrity in the act of making,7 the clearest identification of his emotional states in the gap, and the most commanding example of his conviction that the significance of art resides in its "use" value. This essay explores these lines in Rauschenberg's thought, attending closely to the meaning implied by his process in the gap, the site of his sense of immediacy between the incommensurability of one blinding fact (art) and another (life). In 1949, a full decade before Rauschenberg articulated the gap as the space within which he did "something," the artist Susan Weil introduced him to the process of creating monoprints on blueprint paper.8 Exposing the paper to the ultraviolet light of a sunlamp turned it a rich ultramarine blue, leaving the covered areas of underexposed paper in the varied tones of pale blue to white. Using this paper, Rauschenberg made striking blueprint images of his friend Patricia Pearman, who posed nude in various positions, one picture ofwhichD/e magazine published in its April 9, 1951, issue, along with images of Rauschen­ berg and Weil making other types of blueprint images.9 The famous photographs that Hans Namuth took in 1950 of Jackson Pollock standing over and on his canvas while painting on the floor appeared for the first time a month later in Portfolio magazine, as well as in the May 1951 issue of Art News. Harold Rosenberg's theory of action painting followed in the December 1952 issue of Art News.10 That same year, Georges Mathieu began having him self photographed while painting, and he would soon begin to perform action paintings publicly. In October 1955, the Gutai artist Kazua Shiraga would per­ form Challenging Mud in Osaka, Japan, wrestling on the ground in viscous pig ment mixed with mud; and on June 5, 1958, Yves Klein would begin experi­ ments using a female nude model who, after immersing herself in his patented International Klein Blue paint, made prints of her body on canvas placed on the floor of his friend Robert Godet's Paris apartment.11 As Life was distributed worldwide, it is certain that Mathieu knew the images of Rauschenberg working with the nude model, and it is highly possible —even probable —that Klein and 288 I RAUSCHENBERG'S "GAP" Shiraga had also seen the images at some point. In this regard, an historical re­ lationship exists between Rauschenberg's concept of using a live nude to create images, and artworks that followed throughout the world. While describing his artistic process in 1959 as an effort to "act" in the gap, Rauschenberg did not align his approach with the history and theory of action painting,12 or with the events just cited. He rejected the notion of art and life col­ lapsed into an undifferentiated unity, and instead marked out a place that dis­ tinguished the two even as it imperceptibly interconnected them. In the 1949 blueprint works, Rauschenberg remained the maker, not the work itself, even as he posed in several of the monoprints.13 His conceptually nuanced position vis­a­vis the fusion of art and life would earn him the sharp criticism of John Cage. I think there s a slight difference between Rauschenberg and me," Cage explained in 1968. "And we've become less friendly, although we're still friendly. We don't see each other as much as we did."14 Cage explained the breach this way: "I have the desire to just erase the difference between art and life, whereas Rauschenberg made that famous statement about working in the gap between the two. Which is a little Roman Catholic, from my point of view."15 When the interviewer, Martin Duberman, an authority on Black Mountain College, asked (.age what he meant, Cage responded, "Well, he makes a mystery out of being an artist."16 ( ages comments reflect his own unease about how Rauschenberg had, in only a few words, unsettled the idea of either the unity or the dualism of art and life, fundamentally exposing the claim for unity as Utopian, and for dualism as falsely oppositional and potentially hierarchical.17 Instead, Rauschenberg would try, as he wrote, to establish his own position, one of presence between the blinding facticity of art and life.18 "I am in the present," Rauschenberg stated in a 1961 interview, "with all my limitations but by using all my resources."19 In Autobiography (1968), his more than sixteen­foot­tall, three­panel lithograph, Rauschenberg ends the spiral text in the middle panel, which also resembles a thumbprint, by stating that he is "creating a responsible man working in the present."20 Read in this context, the blueprint works anticipated Rauschen­ berg s identification of the gap, which both constituted the site of presence and provided the resource of an open space where he was neither completely in art nor in life.