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Yet one of the Bauhaus-type exercises Albers assigned to his students was the root of Rauschenberg's later practice: they had to find "interesting" discarded objects—anything from old tin cans to bicycle wheels to stones—and bring them into class as examples of accidental aesthetic form. Moreover, the stringent color exercises that Albers set would ultimately have a lot to do with the severe paintings Rauschenberg made between 1951 and '53: all-white and then all-black panels, the latter painted over a wrinkled mulch of newspaper, with no relationships of color. Twenty-five years ago, these pictures looked absurd; today they seem prescient. Art history has caught up with them, and the work of some of the most admired younger American painters—Robert Ryman's all-white paintings, Brice Marden's monochrome slabs of encaustic—can be traced back to them. "Albers," says Rauschenberg, "did give me a sense of discipline that I couldn't have worked without."
But there was a more general sense of ferment at Black Mountain, because the composer John Cage and his friend Merce Cunningham, the dancer-choreographer, were among the innovators living there. If it can be said that advanced art in America through the '50s and early '60s had one single native guru, that man was Cage: at once the most avant-garde and the most transparent of composers, the Marcel Duchamp of music, the man who erected combinations of silence and random sound into an aesthetic strategy in order to give art the inclusive density of life. It was Cage's example that prompted Rauschenberg to formulate his much-quoted remark that "painting relates to both art and life... I try to act in the gap between the two."
A painter could not compete with the saintly and difficult presences of Cage and Cunningham, but one could collaborate, and Rauschenberg did. Through the '50s and early '60s he designed sets and costumes for Cunningham's dance troupe. To a remarkable degree, Rauschenberg eventually made himself the conduit through which some of the big money made in the '60s by new art, including his own, was siphoned to the "profitless" avantgarde, that of dance and music. In doing so, he felt he was only paying his dues, for when Rauschenberg moved to New York in the fall of 1949 he joined the group of dancers and musicians gathered around Cage, Cunningham and Morton Feldman; they, more than the New York painters, gave him his first sense of a real community of artists. "All we had in common was our excitement and poverty. I didn't feel at home with the motivations of the painters who were around—though I liked the work well enough. There was a lot of self-pity in the air, a sense of being mistreated by the world. I never felt that. I had the feeling from my early church background that, well, it's you who decided to live this life, and that's the moral choice. Cage and I used to sell our books to eat. There were times when I felt miserable. But having to