joseph

Fall 2000
Volume 27, Number 1

Excerpt from
White on White
by Branden W. Joseph

Rauschenberg had been absent from Black Mountain College in the summer of 1950 when Clement Greenberg taught courses there on Kantian aesthetics and the history of modernism.5 Nevertheless, Greenberg's specter hovers over Rauschenberg's observations, as it was in the critic's writings that the underlying tenets of modernist painting were most clearly developed. For Greenberg, of course, the specificity of the medium of painting was defined as its flatness.6 One way to take painting to a place where art had not yet been, therefore, would be to pursue it further towards its "essential" two-dimensionality. In 1951, Rauschenberg seems not only to have discovered such an underlying logic behind modernist painting but immediately to have advanced to its conclusion. For the White Paintings were purged of all remnants of image, mark, or color that could represent or imply illusionistic depth. In this way, Rauschenberg's pure white, monochrome canvases occupy a terminal point in this modernist development, reprising the historical role played by the monochrome as the degree zero of painting.7 Indeed, the language Rauschenberg used to describe his achievement--terms like "silence", "restriction", "absence", "nothing", and "the point a circle begins and ends"--clearly conveys such an aura of finality (RR, p. 230).

[...]

By the time of his Stable Gallery exhibition, Rauschenberg had already come to share Cage's understanding of the White Paintings as vehicles for perception beyond the confines of intellect. Crehan cites Rauschenberg's statement that "my black paintings and my white paintings are either too full or too empty to be thought--thereby they remain visual experiences. These pictures are not Art" ("RD," p. 25). Here, Rauschenberg's assertion that his "pictures are not Art" is not of the same order as his earlier claim to Betty Parsons that his "paintings...are not Art." Gone is the imbrication with formalist modernism and the attention to specificity of the medium found in his letter to Parsons of 1951. The progressive elimination of pictorial elements is no longer conceived as a reduction toward the essence of painting; it is no longer an aesthetic of negation or, as Crehan termed it, "the purge." Instead, following the implications of the critique of negation, Rauschenberg's elimination of artistic elements from his painting was now understood as allowing incorporation of the temporally changing, nonart realm. Indeed, by incorporating duration, the White Paintings no longer represent a return to the monochrome as degree zero of painting, but rather assert--as his hermetic statements from the "Art of Assemblage" symposium would have it--that "there is no zero which returning implies" ("AS," pp. 127-128).

5. On Greenberg's teaching at Black Mountain College, see Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 214.

6. This trope runs throughout Greenberg's criticism. For a particularly clear (although later) presentation, see Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (1960), Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, vol. 4 of The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago, 1993), pp. 85-93.

7. On the historical avant-garde manifestation of the monochrome, see Yve-Alain Bois, "Malévich, le carré, le degré zéro," Macula 1 (1976): 28-49. Despite the extreme position represented by the White Paintings, at the moment of their inception Rauschenberg seems to have judged them to exist within the framework established by Greenberg. All of Rauschenberg's recollections over the years point to the conclusion that, while he saw the White Paintings as advancing painting further along its developmental path, they nonetheless maintained a viable presence and quality as paintings. As he said in recounting his initial enthusiasm to Barbara Rose, "I was so innocently and indulgently excited about the pieces because they worked. I did them as an experiment to see how much you could pull away from an image and still have an image" (Barbara Rose, An Interview with Robert Rauschenberg [New York, 1987], pp. 45-46). See similar recollections by Rauschenberg in Richard Kostelanetz, "A Conversation with Robert Rauschenberg," Partisan Review 35 (Winter 1968): 94, and Julia Brown Turrell, "Talking to Robert Rauschenberg," in Rauschenberg Sculpture (Fort Worth, Tex., 1995), p. 76.

Branden W. Joseph is currently Cotsen Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows in the liberal arts. He is an editor of Grey Room, a journal of contemporary architecture, art, media, and politics. His essay on John Cage's early aesthetic, "A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers," is forthcoming in John Cage: Music, Philosophy and Intention, 1933Ð50.

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