When I again cracked open "Ahead of the Game" now in thinking about Rauschenberg’s death and his importance to my development as an artist, I saw something I had carefully underlined using a straightedge back in 1965: Rauschenberg’s statement that "I consider myself successful only when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense". (p. 188)

I understand now that Ernst and Rauschenberg had presented to my young mind remarkably complementary rhizomatic (*) networks of visual elements. Their compositions were tight but lacked a quintessential sense of order that provided me with a kind of aesthetic shatter; suggesting the nervous sense of shocking unordered delirium I was experiencing with the image/sound circulation system of television. The clearest example of that I remember was my shock at seeing live Jack Ruby (Jacob Rubenstein) fatally shoot the 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday, November 24^th, 1963 while authorities were preparing to transfer Oswald by car from police headquarters to the nearby county jail. Popping out from the crowd of reporters and photographers, Ruby fired a snub-nosed Colt Cobra .38 into Oswald's belly. (**)

Panic and chaos erupted in my peaceful suburban setting that Sunday morning, searing into my 12year brain the perverse principle of jarring juxtaposition. Was it here that I started to elucidate a radical semiurgy full of conspiratorial concerns with the manipulative powers of cultural images and information technologies? Was it then that art came to be for me Rauschenbergian — that is, tied up with the image circulation system itself — as ideas of shock culture became tied into Ernst's dada concept of systematic displacement? Was this the first taste of the excess of the technological information society that would push me towards technological chance operations and a commentarial political art hung up on persistent proliferation and the dissemination of signs? I do believe it probably was.

This is not precisely the same as Kurt Schwitters’s collage approach, a technique that in large part comprised Rauschenberg’s overarching methodology. This is not slapping diverse things together so much as pulling typical things apart. But perhaps this is the explosion that collage implosion implies.

Surely I have a great appreciation of Bob’s work with the Merce Cunningham's dance company; work that perhaps best exemplifies his working in the gap between art and life. But then so did his performance pieces in the 1960s, such as "Pelican" (1963) and "Open Score" (1966) (which employed chance operations) and his founding of Change Inc., a charitable organization for impoverished artists.

In the mid-1970s I moved to New York City into the Tribeca area. I was dating a dancer at the time who’s prior boyfriend worked for Rauschenberg and one day we went to Rauschenberg’s studio on Lafayette for a visit, but he was not in. Still he soon came to represent for me an exemplary artist, one engaged in political concerns tied to technological means. He seemed to me capable of harnessing both the forces of explosion and implosion that manifested a new hyper-rhizomatic era in the making. This was an era in which the new technologies of media distribution, virtual systems, computer networks, and information processing began supplanting industrial production and the gold-based economy as the organizing synthesis/principle of society.

The reductive minimalist aesthetic, so prevalent there at that time, seemed inertly incapable of expressing this coming cybernetic situation, whereas Rauschenberg's art - saturated with media messages — signaled to me a malleable philosophical principle appropriate to the time. This principle was exemplified by his habitual mixing of the mechanical and the loose gesture; a game juxtaposition of the mechanically reproduced photographic image and the poorly handcrafted, which I saw in slightly dangerous terms.

I recall with no pleasure returning home from a huge retrospective of his work at MOMA in 1977; numb and indifferent to the excessive glut I had experienced. That sense of disillusionment forced me to negatively confront Rauschenberg's over-all gesamt aesthetic, his embracing of all materials and all of life within a facile collage encounter which downplayed grandiloquent reason. I had a similar experience at the Guggenheim Museum’s Rauschenberg retrospective in 1997. However individual works continued to capture my attention as I took a greater interest in ideas of excess and ecstatic encounters. Most importantly in the mid-1980s I obtained one of Rauschenberg’s black and white silkscreens from his Current and Surface Series (1970). Living with this work, I discovered the best of Rauschenberg’s work I think - work which contains rhizomatic layered image sequences where the viewer interprets the progression of images as though reading a ruined communication system arranged in multiple, simultaneous combinations. Rauschenberg here dissolves away the paradigmatic model of media as communications and replaces it with one of failed pageant that leads to both a collapse of meaning and the destruction of distinctions between media and myth. In Rauschenberg’s media mythic society, I saw through the numerous saturating media messages, so that information and meaning imploded into pure effect, without content or meaning. In fact here content becomes decorative and ornate.

This rhizomatic Rauschenberg demands a different kind of looking - akin to the aggregated viewpoints of Cubism compared by John Cage to watching "many television sets working simultaneously all tuned in differently". (***) In my piece from his Current and Surface Series there is no obvious hierarchy of images to scan. The trajectory of visual exploration for it is of our own choosing - a dysfunctional situation which no longer communicates purposeful messages but rather proposes pattern. Here we have a rhizomatic visual pleasure, where everything equally connects to everything else, and so replaces visual purpose. This is an art that demands of society an active visualizing participation in private interpretations - and thus is a legitimate metaphor for contemporary art as a form of simulation-shattering engagement. It functions by overloading representation to a point where it becomes non-representational.

Concerning Bob’s instantaneous non-separability and ubiquity, of course I cannot fail to mention a counter example - my great appreciation of Rauschenberg’s graceful Erased de Kooning. Nor may we forget his combining art and new technology (combined with the pursuit of inexactitude) in the famous "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" of 1966 that he helped organize with the engineer Billy Kluver. Rauschenberg understood that through the mediation of machines, the technological built-in can be contorted and bent, thus changing our awareness of what technology is. So I will argue here that Rauschenberg’s art is indispensable to us even today by demonstrating how an art of rhizomatic visual pleasure — when produced by the milieu of image superabundance and information proliferation - is an art that can problematize technology and hence enliven us to the privateness - and unique separateness - of the human condition in lieu of the fabulously constructed social spectacle which engulfs and (supposedly) controls us. This private separateness offers us a personal critical distance (a bacchanalia gap), and thus another perspective on (and from) the given social simulacra.