clippings.
The leveling thrust of Alloway’s long front of culture is reinscribed in Steinberg as the horizontal thinking of the flatbed picture plane, in his analysis of works such as Rauschenberg’s Small Rebus (1956) (see Figure 2.2), where a Renaissance painting is reproduced alongside other elements of visual cultural information and given equal weight: whether these be three‐cent stamps, a map fragment, or a photograph of a track athlete, they are all collaged together on this “opaque flatbed horizontal” that resembles a tabletop. (Interestingly, Rosalind Krauss also reads works like Rauschenberg’s Small Rebus “as a horizontal field” and in a democratizing manner, as related in her interview for Art of the Western World; see Wood and WNET New York 1989). In this instance as in others, Steinberg’s flatbed picture plane becomes the appropriate pictorial surface for acknowledging the information overload endemic to an age of mass media.
Figure 2.2 Robert Rauschenberg, Small Rebus. Oil, graphite, paint swatches, paper, newspaper, magazine clippings, black‐and‐white photography, United States map fragment, fabric, and three‐cent stamps on canvas, 1956.
Credit: © 2019 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
The overdetermined case study for Steinberg’s flatbed picture plane argument and the ultimate triumph of horizontality lies in Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) (see Figure 2.3). While he refers to this work as the artist’s “profoundest symbolic gesture,” one suspects that it also serves as Steinberg’s favorite because of the readymade embedding of its title in the overarching construct of the flatbed. Steinberg writes:
Perhaps Rauschenberg’s profoundest symbolic gesture came in 1955 when he seized his own bed, smeared paint on its pillow and quilt coverlet, and uprighted it against the wall. There, in the vertical posture of “art,” it continues to work in the imagination as the eternal companion of our other resource, our horizontality, the flat bedding in which we do our begetting, conceiving, and dreaming. The horizontality of the bed relates to “making” as the vertical of the Renaissance picture plane related to seeing. (OC 89–90)
Figure 2.3 Robert Rauschenberg, Bed. Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 1955.
Credit: © 2019 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
One is struck immediately by the fact that Steinberg puts the name of “art” in quotation marks here, as if to acknowledge that Rauschenberg’s Bed has performed a radical and rupturing gesture that cannot be contained by art historical thinking and by its presupposition that art is somehow horizontally challenged. Steinberg’s reading also reminds one of the Duchampian tradition from which the neo‐Dadaist Rauschenberg hails and which he furthers in his combine paintings in another way. One recalls that Duchamp’s goal was to go beyond purely retinal painting and visual pleasure and that the express aim of the readymades was “to put painting back in the service of the mind” (Sanouillet 1975, 125; Sweeney 1946). This mindful conception is also at play in Steinberg’s allusions to imagining, dreaming, and conceiving; however, any dialectical opposition between mind and body is immediately problematized when the sexual connotations of conceiving and begetting are introduced. In Steinberg’s reading, the tilt to horizontality encourages the multisensory “making,” which is endemic to visual cultural practice, rather than privileging any type of unidimensional seeing—or of “ocularcentrism,” to invoke Martin Jay’s term in Downcast Eyes (Jay 1993). For Steinberg, the becoming vertical of the bed (its “uprighting” against the wall) paradoxically exposes horizontality (its “eternal companion”) all the more. As he states a little earlier in the essay, “[t]hough they hung on the wall, the pictures kept referring back to the horizontals on which we walk and sit, work and sleep” (OC 87).
There is another aspect of Steinberg’s argument that needs to be reiterated and that has ramifications for the emergence of visual culture. Let us recall, in Steinberg’s words, that the move from verticality to horizontality is also “expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture” (OC 84). Simply put, Steinberg aligns verticality with nature and horizontality with culture. For the purposes of this genealogy, we only need to add the modifier “visual” to grasp the significance of the flatbed picture plane and its horizontal thinking for visual culture, whether or not Steinberg had the new term in mind (here we also should remember that he was probably the first to apply the term “postmodern” to the visual arts) and whether or not “visual culture” found a place in his parlance—the so‐called Leologisms.4
While Steinberg states that this is the “most radical shift in the subject matter of art,” it is possible to argue, in hindsight and from the perspective of visual culture, that the inclusion of this new subject matter takes us beyond the reach of art. For, even though he puts the term “art” in quotation marks in his analysis of Rauschenberg’s Bed, this stretch appeared to be beyond Steinberg’s reach, given his own art historical investments. In other words, the move from nature to culture signals the very rupture in and of the discourse of art and its history, the rupture that leads us from the fine art museum or gallery as the legitimized site of art historical meaning to the laboratory, the courtroom, or the shopping mall as equally valid and appropriate institutional sites yielding visual cultural significance.
The move from nature to culture also relates to what Steinberg finds most distinctive about Rauschenberg’s work and its break with a practice of looking based on direct sensory perception and rooted in the Renaissance. If we want to know what the weather will be like today, we netizens of the twenty‐first century reach first for our electronic devices, in order to check the forecast, or we ask our intelligent assistants Siri or Alexa to perform this operation for us. As postmodern subjects, we no longer look out of the window to see; we prefer cultural mediation instead. This is exactly what Steinberg emphasized in “Other Criteria” by privileging the reading of signs, visual or other, over the direct referent. “What he [sc. Rauschenberg] invented above all was, I think, a pictorial surface that let the world in again. Not the world of the Renaissance man who looked for his weather clues out of the window; but the world of men who turn knobs to hear a taped message, ‘precipitation probability ten percent tonight,’ electronically transmitted from some windowless booth” (OC 90). Steinberg’s last point regarding the “windowless booth” fits perfectly with his idea that painting as the transparent window on the natural world has been surpassed by the mediated world and “visible records” exhibited via the flatbed picture plane and its horizontal thinking. This point of view is reiterated in one note found in the “Flatbed” folder of his Getty Library papers, where he describes the shift from nature to culture with the following pronouncement. “Sensuous Reality perception becomes Reading charts.” It is to be paired with another note that offers a similar insight. “The flatbed P.P. Corresponds to trend in language. Information exchange takes on more and more a reporting not of the appearance of the events, but of the appearance of their visible record on a graph or chart” (Leo Steinberg Research Papers, c. 1941–2011, Box T 30, Steinberg Papers). In other words, to view a Rauschenberg combine painting is not to perceive the sensuous reality of nature but to interpret the visual cultural signs as one would inspect a graph or a chart. It is a mediated vision and a dangerous supplement that unfolds before our eyes (and minds) and that usurps the sensory perception of nature via a new informational
