"Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting"
About this Quote
Wrapped is doing a lot of work here: it shifts painting from an object you look at to an environment that acts on you. Coming from Robert Rauschenberg, that word is also a quiet manifesto. He’s pointing to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings not as macho displays of gesture, but as early prototypes of immersion - pictures that behave like rooms, weather, or noise. The ellipsis matters, too. “Pollock also...” suggests a correction to the usual art-history script. Yes, Pollock wanted to break composition, to register movement, to make paint a record of action. Rauschenberg adds: and he wanted to take the viewer hostage.
In the postwar moment, that ambition carried cultural charge. America was turning scale into a virtue - highways, supermarkets, television - and Pollock’s mural-sized fields match that appetite. You don’t “read” a Pollock the way you read a Renaissance scene; you submit to it. The eye can’t find a safe focal point, so the body becomes the anchor. That’s the wrap: a visual surround that refuses distance and turns spectatorship into something closer to participation.
Rauschenberg’s subtext is autobiographical. His own work would push past the canvas into the literal world - combines, silkscreens, objects - making the “wrap” physical, not just optical. He’s crediting Pollock with a key escape route from easel painting: the move from framed image to lived encounter, where art stops being a window and starts being a condition you’re briefly inside.
In the postwar moment, that ambition carried cultural charge. America was turning scale into a virtue - highways, supermarkets, television - and Pollock’s mural-sized fields match that appetite. You don’t “read” a Pollock the way you read a Renaissance scene; you submit to it. The eye can’t find a safe focal point, so the body becomes the anchor. That’s the wrap: a visual surround that refuses distance and turns spectatorship into something closer to participation.
Rauschenberg’s subtext is autobiographical. His own work would push past the canvas into the literal world - combines, silkscreens, objects - making the “wrap” physical, not just optical. He’s crediting Pollock with a key escape route from easel painting: the move from framed image to lived encounter, where art stops being a window and starts being a condition you’re briefly inside.
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| Topic | Art |
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