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Even though he has been canonized as a major Renaissance and modern art historian with papers enshrined at the Getty Research Institute, Leo Steinberg (1920–2011) followed in Alloway’s footsteps and played a crucial role in the annals of horizontal thinking and in the emergence of visual culture.¹ I want to review his aptly entitled essay “Other Criteria” (Steinberg 1972a) in detail and to demonstrate how it serves as a key text that contributes to this rupture within art history out of which visual culture emerged. While its final part, which included “The Flatbed Picture Plane” section, was first published in Artforum in March 1972, under the title “Reflections on the State of Criticism” (see Steinberg 1972b), Steinberg notes that “Other Criteria” was incubated as a lecture delivered four years earlier at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in March 1968. (Subsequent citations here will refer to the published essay in Other Criteria and will use the acronym “OC.” followed by page numbers.) While Clement Greenberg and the formalist critics emphasized flatness in color field and other forms of modernist painting, this characteristic had been understood solely in terms of a vertical orientation and viewing experience. Steinberg’s disdain for Greenberg and the flatness argument is captured in marginal handwritten notes in his personal copy of the reprint of Greenberg’s 1960 “Modernist Painting” six years later, in Gregory Battcock’s The New Art: A Critical Anthology—to which Steinberg, too, contributed an essay (a reprint of “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public”). Where Greenberg writes “and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else” (Battcock 1966, 103), Steinberg mockingly retorts, at the bottom of the page: “No. This it shares with pancakes.” That is because Greenberg’s ideas about flatness and medium specificity never addressed what Steinberg referred to as painting’s relationship with the viewer’s perception, or with its “psychic mode of address” (OC 84). Steinberg believed that a radical change had occurred that the formalists could not register, a change regarding “how the artist’s pictorial surface tilts into the space of the viewer’s imagination” (OC 82). The tilting to which Steinberg alludes here is the pictorial surface’s becoming horizontal independently of whether it was hung on a wall or not. Steinberg elaborates further:

To repeat: it is not the actual physical placement of the image that counts. There is no law against hanging a rug on a wall, or reproducing a narrative picture as a mosaic floor. What I have in mind is the psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative confrontation, and I tend to regard the tilt of the picture plane from vertical to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture. (OC 84)

In order to understand this transformation, Steinberg introduced the concept of the flatbed picture plane as a major innovation in mid‐twentieth century avant‐garde art.

Steinberg acknowledges that the flatbed offers a textual figure or, in Rosalind Krauss’s words, “a field of written signs” because its source is the printing press (Bois and Krauss 1997, 94).² He begins with a definitional turn to the dictionary: “I borrow the term from the flatbed printing press—‘a horizontal bed on which a horizontal printing surface rests’ (Webster). And I propose to use the word to describe the characteristic picture plane of the 1960s—a pictorial surface whose angulation with respect to the human posture is the precondition of its changed content” (82). What does one make of Steinberg’s posturing here, of this shift “with respect to the human posture”? Steinberg argues that the history of western art, from the Renaissance masters to the avant‐garde modernists (including cubism and abstract expressionism), presupposes the “erect human posture” that views the painting as it offers a transparent window onto the world of nature (what Steinberg calls a “worldspace”). This leads him to assert the following art historical truism: “Therefore the Renaissance picture plane affirms verticality as its essential condition. And the concept of the picture plane as an upright surface survives the most drastic changes of style” (83). In light of Steinberg’s argument and of its underlying ethical connotations, let us consider further what is at stake here. If the emergence of visual culture affirms horizontality as its “essential condition,” and therefore offers a critique of the “upright surface,” then visual culture studies will have been framed by the enemies of the field as a subversion of what is upright in both literal and figurative terms. While Steinberg entertains a few avant‐garde artistic precedents, here and there, of horizontal thinking and viewing (whether Schwitter’s trash collages, Mondrian’s plus and minus signs, or Duchamp’s readymades), he finds a distinct rupture and an exemplary model in the combine paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and in Jean Dubuffet’s art brut paintings, wherein the pictorial surface as a transparent (and vertical) worldspace yields to the pictorial surface as an opaque (and horizontal) workspace. His origins narrative of a “becoming horizontal” in painting by way of the flatbed picture plane—one that would open up the space for visual cultural practice—turns to this young innovator from Port Arthur, Texas. Steinberg reviews this “radically new orientation” along the following lines:

But something happened in painting around 1950—most conspicuously (at least within my experience) in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Dubuffet. We can still hang their pictures—just as we tack up maps and architectural plans, or nail a horseshoe to the wall for good luck. Yet these pictures no longer simulate vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals. They no more depend on a head‐to‐toe correspondence with human posture than a newspaper does. The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes. (OC 84)

This is a bold and prophetic passage, which refuses to read Rauschenberg’s work in the traditional terms of pictorial aesthetics. Instead, Steinberg argues that one must address the flatbed picture plane and its horizontal demand as a dense field of data or visual information, a field that is transmitted to the viewer by way of its “receptor surface” and that requires the viewer’s active perceptual and conceptual engagement. Through the deployment of language that resonates with our own contemporary digital era of computational media and “operational processes,” Steinberg captures how the logic of the information age reframes our understanding of Rauschenberg’s combine paintings. Indeed, Steinberg suggests that analogical thinking is no longer relevant to the flatbed picture plane because “the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature” (OC, 82). This informational approach to Rauschenberg and his combines is also reminiscent of John Berger’s considerations in his contemporaneous Ways of Seeing—in a project strongly indebted to Walter Benjamin—when he talks about the transformation of painting and the emergence of visual culture in the era of its reproduction and transmission. “In the age of pictorial reproduction, the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort, and like all information, it is either put to use or ignored; information carries no special authority within itself” (Berger 1972, 24). Some of Steinberg’s language and figures are quite similar to those we find in Berger’s foundational text and television program for the emergence of visual culture. For example, the figure of the bulletin board as the site for posting a diverse range of visual materials is also embedded in Berger’s democratic argument that bulletin boards are the new museums of visual culture. Berger writes:

Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living‐rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board, all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums. (1972, 30)³

With this paradigm shift, art objects are now reframed as a type of visual information among others, to be incorporated and interpreted alongside other visual cultural signs, from advertisements to magazine 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 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