# HOW I LEARN - Robert Rauschenberg

> When even discarded objects can become art, photography is no longer merely a record of reality on a particular medium. By refusing to repeat ourselves, everything in life can become a new possibility for expression.

- Language: en
- Published: 2022-08-31
- Author: GuoJing
- Category: HOWILEARN
- Canonical: https://afterimage.photography/post/en/how-i-learn-from-robert-rauschenberg

When old quilts, clocks, and discarded objects can enter the canvas—and painting, photography, sculpture, and performance no longer remain separate—photography no longer has to be confined to a particular medium or a single press of the shutter. What Robert Rauschenberg truly taught me was to resist repeating myself and reinvent expression through every material life provides.

I have not photographed for a long time. I keep carrying a camera, yet I have not really made anything. Recently, I have wanted to restart the HOW I LEARN series, but studying only from within photography no longer seems sufficient for finding new ideas. In the Chinese-language material currently available, it is also difficult to find criticism that shows a genuine understanding of photographers or their work, even when that understanding is subjective. Most of it consists of empty phrases, abstract concepts, and kitschy adoration—much of it simply copied. Almost no one expresses a direct thought or a purely sensory response, as if everyone were afraid of being wrong and exposing their ignorance. Yet the more directions from which we discuss a work, the more room both the work and its artistic ideas have to develop.

So I decided to learn about art directly. Perhaps art can help me understand photography more deeply. My primary perspective will still be that of photographic art, of course, rather than the mere act of taking pictures.

Once I tried to choose someone as an entry point, however, I realized how difficult that was. I had no idea where to begin, so I decided to pick someone at random and start on the first page of *Photography Today*. When I opened the book, I found Robert Rauschenberg. It included several of his works with some connection to photography and analyzed their relationship between painting and photography. I found it fascinating.

Reading is the first step toward understanding art. After reading the book’s explanation of Rauschenberg, I still felt that I only half understood it. As a programmer, however, I naturally wanted to investigate what I did not yet understand but might be able to learn. I searched for documentaries, works, books, and criticism about Rauschenberg, and was quickly captivated by his art, his ideas, and the raw impulse behind his work. (At moments like this, I always think how genuinely wonderful art is.)

## 01 - Robert Rauschenberg

![Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/01-rauschenberg-portrait-c2530308b03d.jpg)

Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925–May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early work anticipated the Pop art movement. He is best known for his “Combines” (1954–1964), works that incorporated everyday objects as artistic materials and blurred the boundary between painting and sculpture. He was both a painter and sculptor, and also worked in photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance.

![Rauschenberg’s *Monogram*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/02-monogram-combine-09fa9200044c.jpg)

During a career of nearly sixty years, Rauschenberg received numerous honors. Among the best known were the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964 and the National Medal of Arts in 1993.

He lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida, until his death on May 12, 2008.

## 02 - The Work

Everyone understands a work differently, and my own interpretation inevitably has its biases. As an art enthusiast, my opinions may not be correct by the standards of art history, but I still want to express them. A thousand people will find a thousand Hamlets.

![A Combine made from photographs, furniture, and everyday objects](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/03-untitled-combine-acd4f5ac11a1.jpg)

Three-dimensional objects and flat images form an absurd whole. The photographed figures and the cabinet seem connected and yet not connected. My first reaction was incomprehension; only gradually did new thoughts arise. Most of the time, I can ask questions without answering them, but I enjoy this theater inside my head. Why is the person in the upper right covering his face? Is he the same person as the dashing-looking man at lower left? Are these people a family? What is their relationship? Where did the photographs come from? What kind of lives did the people pictured lead when the work was first shown?

The work as a whole resembles an old cupboard or bookcase covered with little personal pictures once pasted there by someone. They feel like fragments removed from life, both unreal and real. The people attached to the object might still exist, but are more likely gone; nevertheless, the evidence that they once existed remains physically present. The chicken in the lower right and the whole apparatus stand tangibly before us, almost touchable, yet look absurd and uncertain. They create a faint sense of fear, awakening a subconscious anxiety about existence and nonexistence.

Human beings—or perhaps only I—seem naturally afraid of things that defy logic.

![*Reservoir*, a Combine featuring two clocks](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/04-reservoir-combine-7ff4c4baa53e.jpg)

This is also a Combine, but this arrangement of things or objects—to be honest, I do not know how best to describe it—feels more approachable and less difficult than the previous work. Visually, it is simply beautiful. Its colors are warm and healthy, and it possesses a natural order that feels safe. It is not chaotic, oppressive, or confusing. At the same time, it gives off a hallucinatory quality that draws me in.

The two clocks are intensely real, while the background seems imaginary. Real objects appearing on an artificial, illusory surface make us doubt what we see. “Time” is similar: it truly exists, yet carries an unreal quality. Everyone can feel time passing, but no one can touch that movement. We reach out and find nothing. I have to admit that while looking at this work, I genuinely wanted to touch its colors with my hand. It prompts an immediate reflection on the union of reality and illusion, while the old objects and furniture in the middle are closely connected with time. (In my mind, time has color. Or rather, time is connected with memory; memory has color, and so time has color too.)

## 03 - A Life

Robert Rauschenberg was born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, to Ernest R. Rauschenberg and Dora Carolina Matson. His father was of German and Cherokee ancestry, and his mother of Dutch ancestry. His father worked for Gulf States Utilities, an electric company, and both parents were fundamentalist Christians. He had a younger sister, Janet Begneaud.

At eighteen, Rauschenberg entered the University of Texas at Austin to study pharmacology. He struggled academically—without yet knowing that he had dyslexia—and refused to dissect a frog in biology class, so he soon dropped out. Drafted into the United States Navy in 1944, he served in California as a neuropsychiatric technician at a naval hospital until his discharge in 1945 or 1946.

He then studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, where he met fellow student Susan Weil. During this period, he changed his first name from Milton to Robert. In 1948, Rauschenberg and Weil enrolled together at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

At Black Mountain, Rauschenberg sought out Josef Albers, the German artist and teacher associated with the Bauhaus, after reading about him in an August 1948 issue of *Time*. He hoped Albers’s rigorous teaching would restrain his habitual carelessness. Albers’s preliminary design courses relied on strict discipline and permitted no uncontrolled experimentation.

Rauschenberg called himself “Albers’s dunce” and said everything Albers taught was “the best example of something that had nothing to do with me.” Although he regarded Albers as his most important teacher, he found a more compatible sensibility in the celebrated avant-garde composer John Cage. Like Rauschenberg, Cage had left behind the strict system of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg in favor of a more experimental approach. Cage gave Rauschenberg badly needed support and encouragement early in his career, and the two remained friends and artistic collaborators for decades.

From 1949 to 1952, Rauschenberg studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor at the Art Students League of New York, where he met fellow students Knox Martin and Cy Twombly.

In the summer of 1950, Rauschenberg married Susan Weil at her family home on Outer Island, Connecticut. Their only child, Christopher, was born on July 16, 1951. They separated in June 1952 and divorced in 1953. Rauschenberg later had romantic relationships with artists including Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns. His partner in later life was the artist Darryl Pottorf, who had also worked as his assistant.

Rauschenberg moved to Manhattan’s NoHo neighborhood in the 1970s. He had purchased his first property on Captiva Island on July 26, 1968, but it did not become his permanent residence until the fall of 1970. He died there of heart failure on May 12, 2008.

## 04 - What I Learned from the Master

### The Challenge of Never Repeating Yourself

After watching a documentary about Rauschenberg, I strongly identified with the way he challenged himself. Looking back at my own photographic process, I have always challenged myself too, though some people might consider the challenge obsessive: the challenge of **never repeating yourself**. Once an artistic direction has been completed, I do not pursue it again. **The next work must differ from the past.**

That may sound excessive, yet Rauschenberg’s practice broadly followed this principle, which encouraged me. I often feel lost in photography. Once I have made a few supposedly good pictures, I no longer want to photograph the same thing. If an image has become a work, it has also become part of the past. Remaining attached to it means repeatedly recreating a former self. Such repetition brings artists fatigue, anxiety, and tension; it can even become evidence of an artist’s—or any creator’s—insincerity.

> His transitional practice developed into the Combines, including *Charlene* (1954) and *Collection* (1954/1955), in which he collaged shawls, light bulbs, mirrors, and comic strips. Although he had used newspapers and patterned fabrics in his Black and Red Paintings, the Combines gave everyday objects the same importance as traditional painting materials. *Bed* (1955), considered one of the earliest major Combines, was made by applying red paint to an old quilt, sheets, and a pillow, then hanging them vertically like a conventional painting. Because the materials were closely tied to the artist’s own life, *Bed* is often treated as a self-portrait and direct projection of his inner consciousness. Some critics have interpreted it as a symbol of violence or rape, while Rauschenberg called it “one of the friendliest pictures I’ve ever painted.” His best-known Combines also include *Monogram* (1955–1959), with its taxidermied Angora goat, and *Canyon* (1959), which incorporates a stuffed golden eagle. Although the eagle had been rescued from a trash heap, *Canyon* attracted government scrutiny under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940.

![Rauschenberg’s *Bed*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/05-bed-combine-d794a2058539.jpg)

> Rauschenberg’s remarks about the gap between art and life offer a starting point for understanding his contribution. He saw potential beauty in almost anything. He once said, “I feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes, mirrors, or Coca-Cola bottles are ugly, because they are surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.” His Combines gave everyday objects new meaning by placing them in an artistic context alongside traditional painting materials. They erased the boundary between painting and sculpture, allowing both to exist in a single work. Although “Combine” technically refers to works made between 1954 and 1964, Rauschenberg continued throughout his career to use clothing, newspaper, urban debris, cardboard, and other ordinary materials.

> Critics initially approached the Combines through formalism, focusing on color, texture, and composition. In the 1960s, critic Leo Steinberg challenged that view, describing each Combine as “a receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered.” According to Steinberg, the horizontality of Rauschenberg’s “flatbed picture plane” replaced the verticality of conventional painting and made the work’s distinctive material surface possible.

Rauschenberg replaced important elements on the canvas with actual objects, so the canvas was no longer merely two-dimensional. The concepts and logic of color and composition on a flat surface were also broken apart.

Many photographic “projects” today likewise attempt to move beyond the flat image. Some cut and combine photographs to create volume, giving photography a tactile quality and offering viewers different ways of looking and thinking. Yet this method remains extremely rare in China and is still regarded as novel, which is somewhat disheartening.

Because every object in life could become art, and because he refused to repeat himself, Rauschenberg made and participated in many artistic forms. He did not limit himself to Combines or the transformation of two-dimensional pictures into three-dimensional works; he also explored expression through dance.

![The *Silicon City* performance involving Rauschenberg](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/06-silicon-city-performance-f442b163b6d9.webp)

> After moving to New York in the early 1950s, Rauschenberg began exploring his interest in dance. He first encountered avant-garde dance and performance at Black Mountain College, where he participated in John Cage’s *Theater Piece No. 1* (1952), often regarded as one of the first Happenings. He began designing sets, lighting, and costumes for Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor. In the early 1960s, he joined radical dance-theater experiments at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, and in May 1963 choreographed his first work, *Pelican*, for Judson Dance Theater. He worked closely with Cunningham’s company, and his choreography included dancers associated with Cunningham such as Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, and Steve Paxton. His full-time collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company ended after its 1964 world tour. In 1966, he created the performance *Open Score* at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory as part of *9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering*. The series played an important role in the formation of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).

![Rauschenberg’s practice across art and performance](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/07-actions-speak-louder-9e83503db882.jpg)

### All “Trash” Is Artistic Material

This is already a relatively mature idea for me—and from today’s perspective, perhaps even a cliché. Yet the photography world still seems not to understand material. Put simply, I believe anything that reacts through “exposure” can be included within photographic art. CMOS and film are merely different media.

Film is not superior to CMOS, and CMOS is not more special than film. In practical terms, CMOS has become extremely advanced and “perfect” in color reproduction, white-balance processing, and even the abstraction of RAW data. But perfection is not life, and art is not perfection. From the standpoint of creative technique, CMOS, CCD, and film have no hierarchy; the choice depends on what the artist wants to express. If the goal is to convey the passage of time, for example, film and an “incorrect exposure” might be better choices.

![Multiple materials in a Rauschenberg work](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/08-combine-material-study-0bb140005aea.jpg)

![Everyday objects incorporated into a Combine](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/09-combine-object-study-564c48609744.jpg)

Rauschenberg’s Combines prompted many thoughts about photographic media. They reminded me of a project whose creator I can no longer remember. It used asphalt as the photographic ground and sunlight as its light source, drawing on the earth itself. It is difficult to claim that this was not photography. When I first encountered the project, I even felt that the whole world might be a photograph and that we were simply figures living inside it. What an interesting idea.

So we should never restrict photography to a particular medium, whether CMOS or film. We should see the world with more inclusive, vivid, and generous eyes. Nor should pressing the shutter be treated as an indispensable photographic operation. What counts as pressing, how it is pressed, and for how long are all sites of photographic creativity.

If we unravel the photographic process step by step, each step seems open to invention. Photography then becomes more than forming an image on a negative or sensor; it becomes an expression of how we observe the world. Rauschenberg’s work led me to this thought.

## 05 - Taking Pictures Records; Photography Is Art

Finally, I want to say that many people do not adequately understand the word “photography,” or do not respect it enough—perhaps I should not put it that way. Let me say instead that everyone has their own understanding of photography, but our understanding of photographic art remains insufficient.

![Rauschenberg’s *Factum I* and *Factum II*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/10-factum-pair-dde2f979861d.jpg)

The works above, *Factum I* and *Factum II*, pose a fascinating question about painting and photography. Each painting contains photographic images, while the paintings themselves imitate photography—an imitation used deliberately as a method. They are two paintings, yet they foreground the problem of photographic reproduction and compel us to stop.

Look carefully and the two paintings appear so similar that you may doubt your eyes: are these simply two photographs? Many details reveal otherwise. The newspapers seem the same, but are not identical copies; the drips of paint differ too. With only a casual glance, one might never notice that they are two apparently identical works made separately with different materials. Once we observe that and begin to think, we may form our own ideas about photography’s supposed capacity for “copying.”

> Rauschenberg used photography to disrupt painting, while smears and drips of paint broke the disjunction introduced by photography and returned the photograph to the status of appearance. Photography’s most important role, however, was to add life and everyday material to Rauschenberg’s painting; it functioned like the physical objects he used. Photography thereby transformed painting, moving it away from ritual and aura. Yet in the relationship between painting and photography, Rauschenberg never abandoned imagery or painterly elements. Only with Andy Warhol did art fully commit itself to photography’s functions of repetition and reproduction. Warhol pushed photography’s role in painting to its limit: he abandoned the aesthetics of collage for a single, concentrated representation presented as one or more repeated units.

If we think photography is only a record, merely preserving a fragment of time, then photography collapses into the ordinary act of taking a picture. For me, the only link between “taking a picture” and photography is that the physical action looks the same; the original impulse and purpose are entirely different. Photography—as I have stressed repeatedly—is not simply a record of reality. Even if recording was once one of its functions, photography has long since escaped that constraint, just as painting an exact likeness is no longer the central test of an artist. Literal realism should not be demanded of a photographic artist, **even if the mainstream understanding of photography in China today still centers on “reality.”**

Rauschenberg’s work makes me wonder what else can be understood—or pursued—as photography in a broader sense. Cosmic rays? X-rays? The shadow left after a substance decomposes? Seen this way, perhaps all of them can be called photographic art.

## 06 - Summary

1. Do not repeat yourself.
2. All “trash” can become artistic material.

## 07 - Further Resources

![*Factum I*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/11-factum-i-ea522b206b0e.jpg)

![*Factum II*](https://afterimage-images.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/duidui/2026/08/12-factum-ii-7017075c2c72.jpg)

[Video about Robert Rauschenberg 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6RseaEqVQA)

[Video about Robert Rauschenberg 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_nAKiSutiA)

[Video about Robert Rauschenberg 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aGRHOpMRUg)