About ten years ago I was given a small print of Robert Rauschenberg's "Words Appearing in a Dream of William Burroughs." I find it endlessly compelling. It's a simple piece: a collage of images (the Taj Mahal; Neil Armstrong on the Moon next to the lunar lander and an American flag; a stormy sea; a diagram of magnetic fields; a botanical sketch of a flower; a truck driving through a puddle; torn polaroid snapshots; an unreadable bar graph; a white horse in the mist) overlayered with cut-out letters (in the manner of a ransom note) reading

"THEY DID NOT FULLY UNDERSTAND THE TECHNIQUE IN A VERY SHORT TIME THEY NEARLY WRECKED THE PLANET"

Which has brought me back, again and again, to the question,

"What is the technique?"

so show us the picture already :-) I can't see what's happening in that little thing.

Love the site!

Posted by: andrew on November 27, 2003 6:48 PM

Unfortunately, my battered copy doesn't scan well to a 200 x 200 image, nor can I find a better version out there on the web. Anyone else have a better image?

Posted by: Alex Steffen on November 29, 2003 12:18 AM

wow, what a great book. is it possible to get a web version to see what it was like? even if it was poor scan it would be better than no scan, don't you think?
One question though. Did each page have a photo and one word from the sentence on the photo? or was the word like a caption below it ?

Posted by: johnni on December 1, 2003 5:19 PM