As Real As We Need

During the years that my sidelight career was selling Robert Rauschenberg paintings, I tried to improve my 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 taught 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 subsequently erase. He sought to discover whether an artwork could be produced entirely through erasure— the removal of what was once there, sort of like transforming it into a ghost.

It would be not a mistake but an eradication entirely on purpose. And the result would be only the memory of what used to be. 

This is, of course, very similar to what happens in life on certain occasions and ultimately. It happens when we lose things, including to fire, theft, or a conscious decision to eliminate them from the premises. It happens when we get dementia.

It also is what happens when we die.

It is also happens when autocrats try to erase history, criminals try to cover up crimes, or genocidal armies attempt to remove an entire people from the planet.

But I digress. 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. To be considered perhaps.

At the end, as long as we remain aware of what happened, what was once drawn, what was once seen, what was once touchable, it is as real as we need it to be.

Just like our memory.

I first published a version of this essay two years ago. It has been rewritten twice since then.

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