Flatbed Picture Plane

Throughout the vast history of visual art, new movements and revolutions have been born as a result of breaking past conventions. This idea of moving past traditional styles was done by many artists in the 1950s and 1960s, including those artists who participated in the many different abstract movements. These artists decided to abandon old-fashioned techniques and ideas such as those of classical Renaissance, Baroque, or even Impressionist art. One of these new conventions, as discussed by art historian Leo Steinberg in his essay, “The Flatbed Picture Plane,” is the concept of a flat and horizontal type of plane in a work that does not have a typical fore, middle, or background like that of the traditional art from classical periods previously mentioned. The flatbed picture plane that Steinberg refers to is similar to that of a table in which items can be placed on top of, yet they are merely objects and do not represent any space. In his article, Steinberg explains that the opposite of this flatbed plane is the

While there are numerous collaged items on the work, they do not create the tabletop flatness that Steinberg describes. Instead, all of the images: the paintings, pictures, and text, are oriented in the same real-life gravitational direction. Unlike Rauschenberg’s White Painting with Numbers, there is a clear direction that the work is to be viewed from, and this direction does not change whether the work is placed on a wall or on the floor; the indented gravitational direction is always clear. There is no mystery in the placement of the work, and no flatbed picture plane quality like that of Rauschenberg’s Third Time Painting (1962) where a normally vertical object, a clock, has been rotated 90