Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)

“Rauschenberg has used chance not as a blind anecdote to order but as a way of handling the streaming autobiographic current that is his subject matter. Chance has meant selection, in fact, not chaos. Nor has he used it to exclusive ends, disguised as a system with its own rules and its own internal determinants. It has been a concrete alternative to the problematic confrontations of the studio, an open horizon. If something just happens it is, from his point of view, more convincing than something longed for or willed that doesn’t happen.”

Andrew Forge, Rauschenberg, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1972, p. 14.