Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg is arguing for the weird usefulness of uncertainty, but he’s doing it by quietly shifting the battlefield from painting to performance. “Chance” isn’t just a hip avant-garde gimmick here; it’s a structural fit. Music happens in time, then disappears. Because you “can’t refer back,” the listener can’t freeze-frame the work to audit it for coherence or intention. That one-way flow makes randomness feel less like a lapse in control and more like a native principle: events arrive, collide, and vanish before you can fully domesticate them.

The halting syntax is part of the message. Rauschenberg’s sentence stumbles, doubles back, corrects itself midstream. It performs the very condition he’s describing: a medium where you can’t maintain a single, continuous grip on meaning. That’s the subtextual flex. He’s positioning chance as a collaborator that thrives when the audience is forced to move forward.

Context matters: Rauschenberg is speaking from the postwar art ecosystem that overlaps with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and the broader push to dethrone the heroic, fully intentional artist. His own combines and silkscreens already treated images and objects as temporal fragments you read in sequence, not as a single, stable picture. So when he praises music’s irreversibility, he’s also defending an ethic of attention: stop demanding the artwork prove itself in retrospect. Let it happen to you, and let the accidents count.