Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82

From the obituary of the great Robert Rauschenberg in today's NY Times:

'Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, off southwest Florida, these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on one that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he felt, and risk sometimes meant failure.

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”'

Comments

[steve farr]

He did it ALL and did it with humor, intelligence, and grace. He once said, "An empty canvas is also full." Which might sound like bullshit, but I think it sums up his POV. Lift a glass to a great one. Cheers, Bob. (clink)