"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"
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Rauschenberg is talking like a guy who tried to let the universe into the studio and discovered the universe has a style problem. Chance, for him, isn’t a hippie embrace of chaos; it’s a technical procedure with an aesthetic aftertaste. What he “could get with chance” was “something quite geometric” - an outcome that feels too neat, too closed, too already-solved. Geometry here isn’t just shape; it’s certainty. It’s the kind of visual order that reads as design, not risk.
The sting is in “and I never was able to use it.” That’s a refusal of results, not process. He’s admitting that randomness can produce images, but not necessarily the kind of life he wants. Rauschenberg’s best work (the Combines, the silkscreens, the scavenged debris) thrives on collision: street noise meeting painterly decision, the found object meeting the artist’s edit. Chance is welcome only up to the point where it starts acting like a system.
The phrase “the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone” gives away the real stakes. He’s after a particular feeling of openness - a provisional, messy aliveness - and pure chance paradoxically sterilizes it. If everything is surrendered to accident, there’s no tension, no pushback, no human stubbornness to make the work vibrate. In the postwar art world, where Cage and Johns made indeterminacy fashionable, Rauschenberg draws a boundary: he wants unpredictability, not neutrality; contingency, not a formula disguised as freedom.
The sting is in “and I never was able to use it.” That’s a refusal of results, not process. He’s admitting that randomness can produce images, but not necessarily the kind of life he wants. Rauschenberg’s best work (the Combines, the silkscreens, the scavenged debris) thrives on collision: street noise meeting painterly decision, the found object meeting the artist’s edit. Chance is welcome only up to the point where it starts acting like a system.
The phrase “the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone” gives away the real stakes. He’s after a particular feeling of openness - a provisional, messy aliveness - and pure chance paradoxically sterilizes it. If everything is surrendered to accident, there’s no tension, no pushback, no human stubbornness to make the work vibrate. In the postwar art world, where Cage and Johns made indeterminacy fashionable, Rauschenberg draws a boundary: he wants unpredictability, not neutrality; contingency, not a formula disguised as freedom.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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