Creativity Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg talks the way his work looks: collage-like, provisional, stitched together from half-certainties and lived time. “Oracle was I had started it I guess…” isn’t just a sloppy recollection; it’s a small manifesto against the polished myth of artistic certainty. The sentence keeps revising itself in real time - “two and a half,” “maybe even longer,” “closer to three” - as if the truth of the artwork is inseparable from the mess of making it.

In context, Oracle (1962-65) is literally an assemblage: scavenged materials, a hulking, multi-part construction wired for sound. The quote mirrors that construction method. The artwork doesn’t arrive as a single epiphany; it accumulates, changes shape, stalls, gets restarted. Rauschenberg’s hedging (“I guess”) undercuts the romantic idea that the artist is an all-seeing author who can narrate clean origins. He’s positioning himself less as a master planner than as a participant in a process that includes chance, delay, and the stubbornness of materials.

The subtext is also strategic. By refusing a crisp timeline, he refuses the market-friendly storyline of a “period” or a decisive break. The work began when it began - in fragments, in fits, in the same porous present where junk becomes sculpture and noise becomes composition. Even the title Oracle gets teased: the “oracle” can’t prophesy; it can barely remember. That’s the point. The authority is in the openness.