The Flatbed Picture Plane; nothing groundbreaking, however grounds to dispose of old criteria for art

In his Excerpt from Other Criteria, Leo Steinberg writes on the work of Robert Rauschenberg. His purpose for writing is to inform the reader, be he art connoisseur or casual art enthusiast, that the work of Rauschenberg is “part of a shakeup which contaminates all purified categories,” of art. Essentially, he aims to explain the significance of Rauschenberg’s art and make a point that the old criteria is unfit to judge works emerging in contemporary art.

Specifically and quite simply, Rauschenberg’s works emphasize the operational processes that occur on the horizontal plane rather than represent visual experiences of nature in accordance with man’s upright posture. One sleeps in the horizontal position, doesn’t he? He reads and writes, lives and works in the horizontal position. Processes taken place on desks or tables hadn’t been given their respects in the art world of painting, according to Steinberg. Painting up until Rausch relied on a top to bottom, or head to toe, orientation with respect to human upright posture.

 

   

Compare Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon with Rausch’s Third Time Painting.  Picasso’s work, though far distanced from the work of renaissance artists in almost all aspects, is still representative of the human experience through the vertical, visual plane. In Rausch’s work, there exists a collared shirt painted over and ironed down to the canvas in a manner that had to have been worked on while I lay on a bench or table of some sort. At the very least, the work had to have been lying flat. The clock is purposefully situated so that the 12 is pointed to the left, rather than upright. These factors contribute to the overall theme and implementation of The Flatbed Picture Plane, which Steinberg attributes to the revolutionary works of Rausch.