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 order embedded in visual cultural signs.
Steinberg’s understanding of Rauschenberg’s intermedia works as a way of letting “the world in again” in the aforementioned passage, through his choice of the radio waves, aligns itself with the mass communication media that are so crucial to Alloway’s long front of culture. But there is another takeaway here. Steinberg’s proclamation of Rauschenberg as the exemplar of horizontality whose work “lets the world in” also implies that one no longer knows where art ends and where life begins in his work. Indeed, Steinberg’s passage resonates with Rauschenberg’s avant‐gardist desire, in the wake of and under the influence of Duchamp and Cage, to break down the distinction between art and life. One recalls his famous dictum that abdicates the making of art (as well as that of life) and elaborates upon how he understood his combine paintings. “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two.)” (Rauschenberg, quoted in Hunter 1985, 21). To act in the gap between art and life puts (combine) painting on another plane. It is now figured as the horizontal bridging of a chasm whose edges it both connects and divides. If we substitute “flatbed picture plane” for “painting” in Rauschenberg’s statement above, then we also discern the gap out of which the horizontally inclined Steinberg acted when he broke from art historical discourse, at the moment when he let the world of visual culture in.5
Rosalind Krauss’s Trajectory and the Hatred of Visual Culture
The power of Steinberg’s horizontal argument also influenced his Hunter College colleague Rosalind Krauss as she elaborated upon Steinberg’s ideas over the course of her career. Two of these studies also engaged with the work of Rauschenberg as an exemplary artist of horizontality—first in the essay “Robert Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image” (Krauss 1974) and later in her popularizing contribution to the PBS television series Art of the Western World (Wood and WNET New York 1989; see Figure 2.4). Last but not least, Krauss returns to Steinberg’s ideas about the “flatbed picture plane” in an essay titled “Horizontality” and published in the catalogue for the exhibition Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), which she co‐curated with Yve‐Alain Bois at the Pompidou Center in Paris (see n. 2 in this chapter). This ambitious project draws on the ideas of Georges Bataille to craft a “base materialist” perspective on twentieth‐century art and its history. Nevertheless, the efficacy of applying Bataille in this way is debatable; this is a matter that I have addressed and questioned elsewhere (Kaplan 2010). Krauss’s discussion of Steinberg and the figure of horizontality reads in part thus: “The horizontal cast of this kind of imagery […] Steinberg related to what he called the ‘flatbed picture plane,’ and he aligned this conception of the horizontally laden canvas with ‘culture’” (Bois and Krauss 1997, 94).
Figure 2.4 Rosalind Krauss, As a Horizontal Field, Like a Desktop. Video still (detail with caption) from the PBS television series Art of the Western World, Episode 9, “In Our Own Time,” 1989.
One notes in the first instance how Krauss (in contrast to Alloway and, to some extent, in contrast to Steinberg himself) refuses to entertain the larger implications of horizontality and the radical challenge that it poses to the proper borders of art and to the determination of aesthetic value. She begins her analysis with a reaffirmation of Steinberg’s flatbed picture plane: “For Steinberg had been addressing what he saw as a radical change in the aesthetic premises of contemporary art, a change that he called a ‘shift from nature to culture’” (Krauss 2002, 39). What Krauss fails to acknowledge, though, is that the radical change that comes with horizontality offers a stinging critique of the pyramidal premises that ground contemporary art. In other words, horizontality disenables the aesthetic distinctions upon which the concept of contemporary art relies. In this way, the shift from nature to culture also constitutes a shift from art (and its aesthetic judgment) to visual culture (and its operational practices). The inability to recognize such a consequence anticipates Krauss’s later hostility to visual culture and to visual studies (as the anti‐disciplinary practice whose specific object is visual culture). Krauss then concludes with another explication that frames her art historical limits. “And, [Steinberg] asserted, this change in direction had made available to contemporary art an entirely new range of content” (Krauss 2002, 39). While one lauds Krauss’s playful use here of the term “change in direction” to signal the move from vertical