During the years that my sidelight career was selling Robert Rauschenberg paintings, I tried to catch up on my limited knowledge of abstract expressionist history.
Inevitably, I was drawn to Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing," an experiment about the limits of art.
At the time the two artists combined on the piece, 1953, I was being instructed to erase my own writings and drawings as a first-grader in school. At the time, we were told that we were to erase our "mistakes" as part of the process of learning how to write and draw correctly.
Rauschenberg, of course, had a very different purpose in mind when he asked Willem de Kooning to produce a drawing that he would erase. He sought to discover whether an artwork could be produced entirely through erasure— the removal of what was once there, sort of like creating a ghost.
It would not be a mistake at all, but an act entirely on purpose. And the result would be a work based only on the memory of what used to be.
This is, after all, very similar to what happens in life on many occasions. It happens when we lose all of our possessions to fire, theft, loss or a conscious decision to eliminate them from the premises. It happens when we get dementia.
It also is what happens when somebody we love dies.
It is also what happens when autocrats try to erase history, criminals try to cover up crimes, or genocidal maniacs attempt to remove an entire people from the planet.
In the case of the actual de Kooning drawing, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns carefully matted and framed the work (pictured above), with Johns inscribing the following words below the now-obliterated piece:
"ERASED de KOONING DRAWING"
"ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG"
"1953"
The psychologically loaded history of the creation remains otherwise unknowable.
But as long as we remain aware of what happened, what was once drawn, and what was once seen, it is as real as we need it to be.
Just like our memory.
I first published an earlier version of this essay a year ago.
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