Robert Rauschenberg Quotations

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

If you don't have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.

I think maybe chance works better in a situation like music because music exists over a period of time, and you don't maintain constantly the you can't refer back from one area to another area.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway

I wouldn't use the same color in a picture in more than one place

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended

I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.

Every time I've moved, my work has changed radically.

I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings

A newspaper that you're not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn't think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting, and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.

Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I've been here for four years and this is 1965.

I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.

And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary

Oracle was I had started it I guess two and a half years ago, maybe even longer than that, closer to three.

Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission

Everybody thought I was being elitist, ... I wanted the best, to get variety.

One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it's five, or thirty seconds and it's just a different bed for activities there.

I don't think that we have the strength over a period of years to see things always as though we hadn't ever looked at them before to see them new.

And if I see in the superficial subconscious relationships that I'm familiar with, cliches of association, I change the picture.

By the time you establish your priorities, there really isn't any fun or need to interest yourself in what you're doing. And this I find disastrous.

The working process is ideally freeing my mind.

I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable

I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.

An empty canvas is full only if you want it to be full.

You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.

With me, it's much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration.

While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn't work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.

My art is about paying attention – about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art,

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone.

Curiosity is the main energy.

Basically painting is total idiocy.

A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.

I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness.

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

There's a moment for everyone when you fall into your own shadow and the fact is that it's your shadow and you're forced to live in it. And this is nothing to celebrate or not celebrate. It simply is.

It's so easy to be undisciplined. And to be disciplined is so against my character, my general nature anyway, that I have to strain a little bit to keep on the right track.

Success is a worn down pencil.

I don't like masterpieces having one-night stands in collectors' homes between auctions.

I don't think he (Joseph Albers, fh) ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. ..I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing - I didn't want color to serve me, in other words.

I still have a struggle reading (dyslexia, fh) and so I don't read much.. ..Probably the only reason I'm painter is because I couldn't read yet I love to write, but when I write I know what I'm writing, but when I'm reading I can't see it, because it goes from all sides of the page at once. But that's very good for printmaking.

I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee'.. ..I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.

This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy" painted by Thomas Gainborough).. ..somebody actually MADE those paintings.. ..(it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.

For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated.. ..I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that (his trip to India around 1975, fh) I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like 'tortured', 'struggle'. 'pain''.. ..I could never see these qualities in paint - I could see them in life and art that illustrates life. But I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter.

Work is my joy... Work is my therapy, I don't know anybody who loves work as much as I do.

There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction.

This telegram is a work of art if I say it is.

Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.

Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.

I refuse to be in this world by myself. I want an open commitment from the rest of the people.

A canvas is never empty.

Having to be different is the same trap as having to be the same.

I don't think there's anything really wrong with influence because I think that one can use another man's art as material either literally or just implying that they're doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view.

I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.

I was much happier when I had less responsibility... when my only responsibility was to my work and to myself.

Photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts.

I like photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall... The point is to be uninteresting.

I'm quite taken aback when I get something that appears to be technically a good photograph, because it's not necessarily my intention.

You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.

If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.

I prefer images that are less specific, so there is room for everyone's imagination.

I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.

Most artists try to break your heart, or they accidentally break their own hearts.But I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying.

I don't mess around with my subconscious

I always have searched for a point of view that a participant could change.

For me there is no difference between art and life.

People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' In the first place I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea it's too limiting, and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity.

(Art is) a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.

My fascination with images open 24 hrs. is based on the complex interlocking if disparate facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliché. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object freightways by this I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built in...

I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.

You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That's what makes the adventure of painting.

My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for.

I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.

Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think 'Is this going to be it? Is it the end?' You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he's through.

I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is.

It is impossible to have progress without conscience

I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop, At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.

It's when you've found out how to do certain things, that it's time to stop doing them, because what's missing is that you're not including the risk.

Screwing things up is a virtue. 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.

I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.

An empty canvas is full.

I've not been cursed with talent, which could be a great inhibitor.

I don't really trust ideas, especially good ones. Rather I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.

It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.

There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting,