I borrow the term from the flatbed printing press—‘a horizontal bed on which a
horizontal printing surface rests’ (Webster). And I propose to use the word to describe
the characteristic picture plane of the 1960s—a pictorial surface whose angulation
with respect to the human posture is the precondition of its changed content.
It was suggested earlier that the Old Masters had three ways of conceiving the
picture plane. But one axiom was shared by all three interpretations, and it remained
operative in the succeeding centuries, even through Cubism and Abstract
Expressionism: the conception of the picture as representing a world, some sort of
worldspace which reads on the picture plane in correspondence with the erect human
posture. The top of the picture corresponds to where we hold our heads aloft; while its
lower edge gravitates to where we place our feet. Even in Picasso’s Cubist collages,
where the Renaissance worldspace concept almost breaks down, there is still a harking
back to implied acts of vision, to something that was once actually seen.
A picture that harks back to the natural world evokes sense data which are
experienced in the normal erect posture. Therefore the Renaissance picture plane
affirms verticality as its essential condition. And the concept of the picture plane as an
upright surface survives the most drastic changes of style. Pictures by Rothko, Still,
Newman, de Kooning, and Kline are still addressed to us head to foot—as are those of
Matisse and Miró. They are revelations to which we relate visually as from the top of
a columnar body; and this applies no less to Pollock’s drip paintings and the poured
and Unfurls of Morris Louis. Pollock indeed poured and dripped his pigment upon
canvases laid on the ground, but this was an expedient. After the first color skeins had
gone down, he would tack the canvas on to a wall—to get acquainted with it, he used
to say; to see where it wanted to go. He lived with the painting in its uprighted state,
as with a world confronting his human posture. It is in this sense I think, that the
Abstract Expressionists were still nature painters. Pollock’s drip paintings cannot
escape being read as thickets; Louis’ Veils acknowledge the same gravitational force
to which our being in nature is subject.
But something happened in painting around 1950—most conspicuously (at least
within my experience) in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Dubuffet. We can still
hang their pictures—just as we tack up maps and architectural plans, or nail a
horseshoe to the wall for good luck. Yet these pictures no longer simulate vertical
fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals. They no more depend on a head-to-toe
correspondence with human posture than a newspaper does. ‘The flatbed picture plane
makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts,
bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is
entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether
coherently or in confusion. The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a
radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a
visual experience of nature but of operational processes.
To repeat: it is not the actual physical placement of the image that counts. There
is no law against hanging a rug on a wall, or reproducing a narrative picture as a
mosaic floor. What I have in mind is the psychic address of the image, its special
mode of imaginative confrontation, and I tend to regard the tilt of the picture plane
from vertical to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter
of art, the shift from nature to culture.
A shift of such magnitude does not come overnight, nor as the feat of one artist
alone. Portents and antecedents become increasingly recognizable in retrospect—
Monet’s Nymphéas or Mondrian’s transmutation of sea and sky into signs plus and
minus. And the picture planes of a Synthetic Cubist still life or a Schwitters collage
suggest like-minded reorientations. But these last were small objects; the ‘thingness’
of them was appropriate to their size. Whereas the event of the 1950s was the
expansion of the work-surface picture plane to the man-sized environmental scale of
Abstract Expressionism. Perhaps Duchamp was the most vital source. His Large
Glass begun in 1915, or his Tu m’ of 1918, is no longer the analogue of a world
perceived from an upright position, but a matrix of information conveniently placed in
a vertical situation. And one detects a sense of the significance of a ninety-degree shift
in relation to a man’s posture (even in some of those Duchamp ‘works’ that once
seemed no more than provocative gestures: the Coatrack nailed to the floor and the
famous Urinal tilted up like a monument.1
But on the New York art scene the great shift came in Rauschenberg’s work of
the early 1950s. Even as Abstract Expressionism was celebrating its triumphs. he
proposed the flatbed or work-surface picture plane as the foundation of an artistic
language that would deal with a different order of experience. The earliest work which
Rauschenberg admits into his canon—White Painting with Numbers—was painted in
1949 in a life class at the Art Students’ League, the young painter turning his back on
the model. Rauschenberg’s picture, with its cryptic meander of lines and numbers, is a
work surface that cannot be construed into anything else. Up and down are as subtly
confounded as positive-negative space or figure-ground differential. You cannot read
it as masonry, nor as a system of chains or quoins, and the written ciphers read every
way. Scratched into wet paint, the picture ends up as a verification of its own opaque
surface.
In the year following, Rauschenberg began to experiment with objects placed on
blueprint paper and exposed to sunlight. Already then he was involved with the
physical material of plans; and in the early 1950s used newsprint to prime his
canvas—to activate the ground, as he put it—so that his first brush-stroke upon it took
place in a gray map of words.
1
Cf. also Duchamp’s suggestion to ‘use a Rembrandt as an ironing-board’ (Salt Seller: The Writings of
Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, New York, 1973, p. 32). NB: not a dart
board or bulletin board, but a horizontal work surface. (2) Frankenthaler as Pastoral,’ ArtNews,
November 1971, p. 68.
In retrospect the most clownish of Rauschenberg’s youthful pranks take on a
kind of stylistic consistency. Back in the fifties, he was invited to participate in an
exhibitor on the on the nostalgic subject of ‘nature in art’—the organizers hoping
perhaps to promote an alternative to the new abstract painting. Rauschenberg’s entry
was a square patch of growing grass held down with chicken wire, placed in a box
suitable for framing and hung on the wall. The artist visited the show periodically to
water his piece—a transposition from nature to culture through a shift of ninety
degrees. When he erased a de Kooning drawing, exhibiting it as ‘Drawing by Willem
de Kooning erased by Robert Rauschenberg,’ he was making more than a multifaceted
psychological gesture; he was changing—for the viewer no less than for himself—the
angle of imaginative confrontation; tilting de Kooning’s evocation of a worldspace
into a thing produced by pressing down on a desk. The paintings he made towards the
end of that decade included intrusive non-art attachments: a pillow suspended
horizontally from the lower frame (Canyon, 1959); a grounded ladder inserted
between the painted panels which made up the picture (Winter Pool, 1959-60); a chair
standing against a wall but ingrown with the painting behind (Pilgrim, 1960). Though
they hung on the wall, the pictures kept referring back to the horizontals on which we
walk and sit, work and sleep.
When in the early 1960s he worked with photographic transfers, the images—
each in itself illusionistic—kept interfering with one another; intimations of spatial
meaning forever canceling out to subside in a kind of optical noise. The waste and
detritus of communication—like radio transmission with interference; noise and
meaning on the same wavelength, visually on the same flatbed plane.
This picture plane, as in the enormous canvas called Overdraw (1963), could
look like some garbled conflation of controls system and cityscape, suggesting the
ceaseless inflow of urban message, stimulus, and impediment. To hold all this
together, Rauschenberg’s picture plane had to become a surface to which anything
reachable-thinkable would adhere. It had to be whatever a billboard or dashboard is,
and everything a projection screen is, with further affinities for anything that is flat
and worked over—palimpsest, canceled plate, printer’s proof, trial blank, chart, map,
aerial view. Any flat documentary surface that tabulates information is a relevant
analogue of his picture plane—radically different from the transparent projection
plane with its optical correspondence to man’s visual field. And it seemed at times
that Rauschenberg’s work surface stood for the mind itself—dump, reservoir,
switching center, abundant with concrete references freely associated as in an internal
monologue—the outward symbol of the mind as a running transformer of the external
world, constantly ingesting incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an
overcharged field.
To cope with his symbolic program, the available types of pictorial surface
seemed inadequate; they were too exclusive and too homogeneous. Rauschenberg
found that his imagery needed bedrock as hard and tolerant as a workbench. If some
collage element, such as a pasted-down photograph, threatened to evoke a topical
illusion of depth, the surface was casually stained or smeared with paint to recall its
irreducible flatness. The ‘integrity of the picture plane’—once the accomplishment of
good design—was to become that which is given. The Picture’s ‘flatness’ was to be
no more of a problem than the flatness of a disordered desk or an unswept floor.
Against Rauschenberg’s picture plane you can pin or project any image because it will
not work as the glimpse of a world. but as a scrap of printed material. And you can
attach any object, so long as it beds itself down on the work surface. The old clock in
Rauschenberg’s 1961 Third Time Painting lies with the number 12 on the left,
because the clock face properly uprighted would have illusionized the whole system
into a real vertical plane—like the wall of a room, part of the given world. Or, in the
same picture the flattened shirt with its sleeves outstretched—not like wash on a line,
but—with paint stains and drips holding it down—like laundry laid out for pressing.
The consistent horizontality is called upon to maintain a symbolic continuum of litter,
workbench, and data-ingesting mind.
Perhaps Rauschenberg’s profoundest symbolic gesture came in 1955 when he
seized his own bed, smeared paint on its pillow and quilt coverlet, and uprighted it
against the wall. There, in the vertical posture of ‘art,’ it continues to work in the
imagination as the eternal companion of our other resource, our horizontality, the flat
bedding in which we do our begetting, conceiving, and dreaming The horizontality of
the bed relates to ‘making’ as the vertical of the Renaissance picture plane related to
seeing.
I once heard Jasper Johns say that Rauschenberg was the man who in this century
had invented the most since Picasso. What he invented above all was, I think, a
pictorial surface that let the world in again. Not the world of the Renaissance man
who looked for his weather clues out of the window; but the world of men who turn
knobs to hear a taped message, ‘precipitation probability ten percent tonight,’
electronically transmitted from some windowless booth. Rauschenberg’s picture plane
is for the consciousness immersed in the brain of the city.
The flatbed picture plane lends itself to any content that does not evoke a prior
optical event. As a criterion of classification it cuts across the terms ‘abstract’ and
‘representational,’ Pop and Modernist. Color field painters such as Noland, Frank
Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly, whenever their works suggest .l reproducible image, seem
to work with the flatbed picture plane, i.e. one which is man-made and stops short at
the pigmented surface; whereas Pollock’s and Louis’s pictures remain visionary, and
Frankenthaler’s abstractions, for all their immediate modernism, are—as Lawrence
Alloway recently put it—‘a celebration of human pleasure in what is not man-made.’2
Insofar as the flatbed picture plane accommodates recognizable objects, It
presents them as man-made things of universally familiar character. The emblematic
images of the early Johns belong in this class; so, I think, does most of Pop Art. When
Roy Lichtenstein in the early sixties painted an Air Force officer kissing his girl
goodbye, the actual subject matter was the mass-produced, comic-book image; ben-
day dots and stereotyped drawing ensured that the image was understood as a
representation of printed matter. The pathetic humanity that populate Dubuffet’s
pictures are rude man-made graffiti, and their reality derives both from the material
2
Frankenthaler as Pastoral,’ ArtNews, November 1971, p. 68.
density of the surface and from the emotional pressure that guided the hand. Claes
Oldenburg’s drawing, to quote his own words, ‘takes on an ‘ugliness’ which is a
mimicry of the scrawls and patterns of street graffiti. It celebrates irrationality,
disconnection, violence, and stunted expression—the damaged life forces of the city
street.’3
And about Andy Warhol, David Antin once wrote a paragraph which I wish I had
written:
In the Warhol canvases, the image can be said to barely exist. On the one hand
this is part of his overriding interest in the ‘deteriorated image,’ the consequence
of a series of regressions from some initial image of the real world. Here there is
actually a series of images of images, beginning from the translation of the light
reflectivity of a human face into the precipitation of silver from a photo-sensitive
emulsion, this negative image developed, re-photographed into a positive image
with reversal of light and shadow, and consequent blurring, further translated by
telegraphy, engraved on a plate and printed through a crude screen with low-grade
ink on newsprint, and this final blurring and silkscreening in an imposed lilac
color on canvas. What is left? The sense that there is something out there one
recognizes and yet can’t see. Before the Warhol canvases we are trapped in a
ghastly embarrassment. This sense of the arbitrary coloring, the nearly obliterated
image and the persistently intrusive feeling. Somewhere in the image there is a
proposition. It is unclear.4
The picture conceived as the image of an image. It’s a conception which
guarantees that the presentation will not be directly that of a worldspace, and that it
will nevertheless admit any experience as the matter of representation. And it readmits
the artist in the fullness of his human interests, as well as the artist-technician.
The all-purpose picture plane underlying this post-Modernist painting has made
the course of art once again non-linear and unpredictable. What I have called the
flatbed is more than a surface distinction if it is understood as a change within
painting that changed the relationship between artist and image, image and viewer.
Yet this internal change is no more than a symptom of changes which go far beyond
questions of picture planes, or of painting as such. It is part of a shakeup which
contaminates all purified categories. The deepening inroads of art into non-art
continue to alienate the connoisseur as art defects and departs into strange territories
leaving the old stand-by criteria to rule an eroding plain.
From lecture (Museum of Modern Art, New York), 1968;
First published in ‘Reflections on the State of Criticism’, in Artforum in March 1972;
in Other Criteria,1972, pp.61-98.
3
Quoted in Eila Kokkinen, review of Claes Oldenburg.’ Drawings and Prints, in Arts, November 1969, p.
12.
4
‘Warhol: The Silver Tenement,’ Art News, Summer 1966, p. 58
