"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"
About this Quote
Rauschenberg draws a line between the measurable and the lived. A canvas can be six by eight feet with perfect certainty, yet the moment awareness enters, numbers loosen. Spend two minutes with it and the proportions seem to contract to five; glance for thirty seconds and it ceases to be a rectangle at all, becoming a bed for activities, a surface where events happen. The work is not just an object to be measured but an arena in which attention, movement, and materials perform.
That shift from fact to experience is central to his practice. Rather than treat the canvas as a window onto illusion or a field for pure formal balance, he treated it as a site, a place where paint, fabric, photographs, dirt, and everyday detritus collide. The famous piece titled "Bed" literalizes the idea: a quilt and pillow hung on the wall, smeared with paint, turning a private piece of furniture into a public stage. The canvas becomes both image and thing, a register of actions taken in time. When perception changes its tempo, the meaning of the surface changes with it.
Time, for Rauschenberg, is not just a schedule for making but a medium that shapes what is seen. Working alongside John Cage and Merce Cunningham, he embraced indeterminacy and duration; a work could be measured, but it could not be fixed in experience. The viewer’s attention completes it, and different spans of attention produce different works, just as different performances of a dance or different chance operations yield different outcomes. The apparent paradox resolves: accuracy belongs to rulers and labels, but truth belongs to engagement.
So the canvas is both six by eight and something else entirely. It is a constant that becomes variable in the presence of a gaze. Space bends under time, and the artwork reveals itself not as a static thing but as a lived event that changes as you do.
That shift from fact to experience is central to his practice. Rather than treat the canvas as a window onto illusion or a field for pure formal balance, he treated it as a site, a place where paint, fabric, photographs, dirt, and everyday detritus collide. The famous piece titled "Bed" literalizes the idea: a quilt and pillow hung on the wall, smeared with paint, turning a private piece of furniture into a public stage. The canvas becomes both image and thing, a register of actions taken in time. When perception changes its tempo, the meaning of the surface changes with it.
Time, for Rauschenberg, is not just a schedule for making but a medium that shapes what is seen. Working alongside John Cage and Merce Cunningham, he embraced indeterminacy and duration; a work could be measured, but it could not be fixed in experience. The viewer’s attention completes it, and different spans of attention produce different works, just as different performances of a dance or different chance operations yield different outcomes. The apparent paradox resolves: accuracy belongs to rulers and labels, but truth belongs to engagement.
So the canvas is both six by eight and something else entirely. It is a constant that becomes variable in the presence of a gaze. Space bends under time, and the artwork reveals itself not as a static thing but as a lived event that changes as you do.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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