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Rauschenberg At Random:
Conversations With The Artist

ON JANIS JOPLIN
I was at Max's Kansas City one night when word was that she was in the backroom. That's where most of the rock stars hung out, and Andy's people. All the arguments were in the frontroom right next to the liquor, with the painters, and that's where I was. I don't know who it was who who finally came up to me and said, 'Janis learned you were here and she just wanted to meet the other person who got of Port Arthur, Texas. Would you like to come back and have a drink?' Which I did, of course. I was—I still am, really— very shy, do I don't make many aggressive moves, even if it's only to the next room, but of course I went back and there she was and of course we had nothing to say to each other. 'Great to meet you,' that sort of stuff. I mean, she was show business. And she was a terror, but rightly so, because what she was after was quality, and that doesn't just drop in your lap. We stayed in touch and we hung around together for a little bit, mostly running into each other at The Bar, in whatever location it happened to be. We got drunk together, and for a while we were both convinced that we were saving each other's lives. I tried to convince her not to go back [to Port Arthur] for her reunion, but she went, and she was almost arrested, and killed, doing it. They hated her there. She had the wrong attitude. She was going back to get even, and Revenge is always a lousy idea.

ON OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS
The whole rock business is a lot trickier than the painting world. People tend to just blow up, explode. There are a lot of casualties in the painting world too, but not stemming so much from over-excitement as under. What tends to kill painters is melancholia and self-pity. Maybe it's boredom. Boredom is a kind of paradise. Decay, or something. I am constantly in search of not being bored, and I succeed. Just ask people who work for me. They all tried to quit last week, because I keep changing my mind. We switched all our techniques overnight, learned to expand. To avoid boredom you have to avoid safety of the obvious.

ON ARTISTIC SELF-DISCOVERY
I was almost twenty years old when I saw my first oil painting, and it was a revelation. Suddenly I realized that somebody had painted all those playing cards and napkins and church fans and all that, out of an idea. it had never occurred to me that art had to be an idea first. I could draw, but I had no sense of that making me an artist. I more or less thought that just as everybody can fish, everybody can draw. In the navy, I used to do portraits for people to send back home - drawings I did in the latrine, because that's the only place that kept the lights on at night-my 'toilet paintings.' I almost remember the name of the person the first one was a portrait of. It was something like Schibler, and I think that his father raised chickens in Wisconsin. I've never heard from any [of the early subjects]. None of the stuff was signed. I didn't take any of it seriously. Before I could take art seriously I had to learn, and I had to learn the whole thing at once, you see. I had to learn that there was such a thing as an artist as a breed, and that alone can be a pretty shocking thing, and then you find out, my God, I think I'm one. It's never a decision. I don't think it is for any artist. I think it's something that can't be avoided, like pigmentation.

ON HIS OWN TALENT
I'm not a bad painter. I've got a good sense of values and sensations, color and all of that is my undoing because if you reach any form of perfection you're at a dead-end. I really think of myself as a communicator, and each has to adapt to what is being communicated, which keeps it interesting, keeps testing you. It keeps the talent alive. 

ON COMPOSITION
I fight the attitude of composition very much, anything that stays in the same place for more than about thirty seconds is a composition, and I work in a fixed medium. Whether a canvas is four feet long or a hundred feet long, at the first stroke you are already making predictions and restrictions on how it will end. It can be a pencil line, and you've already fenced yourself in.

ON THE ARTITS'S RESPONSIBILITY
I'm almost naive enough to think that art can stop war. I know that the sensations a person feels while looking at the painting are the exact opposite of the feelings that produce war, violence of any kind. The artist's job is to reach as many people as possible, to stir up in them just those sensations.

ON SUMMER IN FLORIDA
I love it. The days go on and on, the mosquitoes do not bother me, and I love to sweat. It's like when I'm dancing, I like to dance until I'm in a pool of sweat. I know where I am when I'm leaking. When I'm cold, I feel that all the things that are making me work are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, tighter.

ON TEXAS CHILI
No beans, of course. And the meat shouldn't be hamburger, or anything else that comes all wrapped in a nice package. Chili is poor people's food. You've go to take the gizzards and the neck, all the leftover stuff, the junk-and if it's meat, the older the better. The spiciness is to cover the taste of bad meat. And you have to have all different kinds of ingredients, pieces of this and chops of that, chunks. Chili is texture. Like my paintings. 

ON HIS BEST ARTISTIC PERIOD
Right now. Tonight. 

26    MARQUEE  MAY 1984