On Erasure

Disappearance as art & the art of loss

Papermate Union Eraser (Courtesy Carin Goldberg Collection)

In 1953 (irrelevant fact: the year I was born) Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing he could erase. De Kooning obliged with a dense mixed media drawing (reportedly, as no photos of the artwork in its state prior to being erased) just to make it as difficult as possible to remove. De Kooning said that though he didn’t like the idea, he understood it and wanted…