Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg is swatting away a whole mid-century script: the idea that serious painting has to arrive draped in anguish. When he says there was a “whole language” he couldn’t make “function,” he’s not claiming he never felt struggle; he’s rejecting a ready-made vocabulary that turns pain into aesthetic proof of authenticity. Abstract Expressionism had trained audiences to read canvases as psychological seismographs, with torment as the most legible signal. Rauschenberg, coming up in the shadow of that mythology, refuses to perform it.

The word “function” is doing the heavy lifting. He’s talking like a pragmatist, almost like an engineer: does this language actually help me make work, or does it just help critics narrate it? “Attitudes” is the tell. Torture and struggle aren’t just emotions here; they’re poses, social badges in an art world that rewarded the artist-as-wounded-prophet. Rauschenberg’s practice - Combines, scavenged materials, silkscreened media noise - pivots away from inward confession toward an art that metabolizes the outside world. If anything is “tortured” in his work, it’s the hierarchy between high and low, painting and object, studio and street.

Subtext: he’s allergic to martyrdom as a brand. He wants permission for art to be curious, hybrid, even funny, without being dismissed as lightweight. In a culture that equated gravity with suffering, Rauschenberg argues for a different seriousness: not the drama of the solitary psyche, but the messier, more democratic pressure of everyday life pressing into the picture plane.