Lawrence Weschler’s “An Impromptu on the Theme of Erasure”, on Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser sculptures and Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing:
For here came an artist of the immediately subsequent generation (b. 1929), and surely part of what was going on was that in observing the de Kooning-Rauschenberg battle — the Old Man seized by the anguished Oedipal implications of the erasing gesture, and the Younger Man by the splendor of its look — he, in effect, the grandson, had taken to proclaiming: Forget the erasure, look at the Eraser! Look how beautiful it is!
