White Painting
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, 1951
How can an artwork be created untouched by human hands? This was the question Rauschenberg was contemplating when he created the White Paintings. Stark canvases painted completely white with no visible brush strokes, in a series of different panel numbers. For Rauschenberg, these were not one-off artworks, but instead remakeable works. They were a concept, a thought experiment that anyone could, and he hoped would, be able to reproduce. John Cage, for whom these paintings inspired his silent composition 4’33, said the paintings were ‘airports for lights, shadows, and particles’. That the artwork was the world around them, they were merely a vessel for amplification. Rauschenberg succeeded – even if the plane was made by human hands, it became simply the background for the artwork of the world that is happening around us constantly.