Erased de Kooning

Rauschenberg was always looking for a different way to make art or take something plain and make it art. But what about taking a work of art and removing the very thing that made it art in the first place? Would it still be art? Well after Robert erased a drawing by the famous Willem de Kooning, he saw it as art. At first the thought of this may sound a little crazy and disrespectful.  This erased drawing was to be an addition to the white paintings he previously created. Instead of the blank canvas lacking an image due to a reduced form of addition to the canvas, a way was created to achieve the same outcome by subtraction. Previous drawing were too easy to erase and had no meaning during the act of erasing it.He needed something extremely difficult to erase like the drawing of de Kooning due to the fact that they were created with ink and crayon on paper. Robert was actually a fan of de Kooning's work and thought that when asking him if he could erase one of his images, that he would say no. He actually was hoping for a rejection just to turn that into an art form. None the less, de Kooning agreed and gave Robert an extremely difficult drawing to erase with many layers. The process itself took nearly a month to get rid of any marks. While doing it, Robert felt a sense of being empowered. While the image is gone the process of getting there tells the story and is the reason why the blank image is still meaningful. It questions if a material object is still important when the thing that made it special in the first place is gone. Take the Mona Lisa for instance. Its one of the most well known paintings in the world. Imagine the paint just faded or disappeared. The actual canvas is still present but there's no image. I believe the object itself is still just as important as what we see. As long as we retain the memory of the way we feel when seeing the painting, the actual material object should still be kept and displayed. Its not the way it looks in the present but its the journey that it took getting to that point. An artwork shouldn't be admired for its present state but rather every state its ever taken shape. Rauschenberg knew what he was doing when "defacing"  de Kooning's work. Its a psychological process that makes people question what true art means.

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