Painting in New Media.

Abstract

This project is a reappraisal of the accepted view that radical new forms of art dominating the New York art scene from the late fifties, such as assemblage and installation, represent a rupture with painting. On the contrary, as contemporary criticism and artists’ writings show, these new forms should be understood as extensions of painting. Robert Rauschenberg, as the link between abstract expressionism and the new art, is a key figure in this reconceptualization of painting. This dissertation examines the first decade of Rauschenberg’s art, when he experimented with using new media such as junk found on city streets to make paintings. A recurrent misperception of these early paintings is that they signaled the end of painting as a viable practice, and prefigured the postmedium condition of later postmodern art. He always stressed that his works were paintings no matter how far they strayed from the conventional easel picture—a fact that has been suppressed in the accepted view of Rauschenberg’s work, a view heavily biased towards postmodernist discourse, and which figures the main thrust of his project as negation. I challenge this fundamental misunderstanding of his art, showing that his acceptance of nonart objects as painter’s materials was a consequence of his unique way of thinking about painting—and indeed life—in non-hierarchical terms, rather than oppositional in intent. As such, his artistic project did not reject painting, but rather worked towards an expanded notion of painting. Rauschenberg’s “hidden” practice of photography played a key role in his artistic experiments. He used photography, I argue, as a way of reconceiving his work in the mind’s eye and of picturing its interactions with its immediate environment. His work behind the camera shaped a far looser, intermedial conception of “picture” that referred to anything from paintings, photographs, and imagery in an everyday context; to actual objects serving as images (of) themselves. This pictorial awareness, which I term pictoriality, is the basis of painting’s eventual extension into new media and multiple dimensions, which enabled it to weather the crisis posed by Modernist medium-specificity and the easel picture.