Leo Steinberg - excerpt from Other Criteria, The Flatbed Picture Plane.
(Key Takeaways in bold)
Steinberg borrowed term from flatbed printing press, a pictorial surface whose angulation with respect to the human posture in the precondition of its changed content.
The top of the picture corresponds to where we hold our heads aloft; while its lower edge gravitates to where we place our feet.
Renaissance picture plane affirms verticality as its essential condition.
But something happened in 1950s most conspicuously in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Dubuffet.
We can still hang his paintings but they no longer simulate vertical fields but opaque flatbed horizontals.
Then flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusions to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards - any receptor surface on which objects are scattered on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed - whether coherently or in confusion.
radical new orientation - painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes.
Rauschenberg used newsprint to prime his canvas - to activate the ground, as he put it - so that the first brush-stroke upon it took place in a grey map of words.
‘Drawing by Willem de Kooning erased by Robert Rauschenberg’ - he was changing the angle (for the viewer as much as himself) the angle of imaginative confrontation: tilting de Kooning’s evocation of a worldspace into a thing produced by pressing down on a desk.
Although his work hung on a wall, the pictures kept referring back to the horizontals on which we walk, sit, work and sleep.
Rauchenberg’s picture plane had to become a surface to which anything reachable-thinkable would adhere. It had to be whatever a billboard or dashboards is and a projection screen - palimpsest, cancelled plate, printer’s proof, trial blank, chart, map, aerial view. Any flat documentary surface that tabulates information is a relevant analogue of his picture plane.
Rauchenberg’s most symbolic gesture = painted his bed and put on the canvas in 1955.
He invented a pictorial surface that let the world in again.
Flatbed picture plan accommodates recognisable objects, it presents them as man-made things of universally familiar character.
