I first met Bob at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where I’d come to give dance classes for the summer session. I remember his feet. They were not very flexible, but they were interesting—the size and the shape. At Black Mountain, [composer John] Cage devised this evening, the first Happening. It was Cage, [musician] David Tudor, Rauschenberg, [poet] M.C. Richards, myself. We could do whatever we wanted. I remember Bob at the top of a ladder, with an old-fashioned Victrola that you wound up, playing records. The record player was probably something he had in his room. He had this gift of being able to use anything he saw. Later on, in New York, we became friends. I asked him to make something for me, and two or three weeks later I went to his loft to see it. There was this star-shaped object made of materials from the street—sticks of wood, sheets of plastic, bits of newspaper, comic strips. All different colors. It was this marvelous object. You didn’t know what it was, but there it was.
Bob was all humor. He was marvelously open to the world that way. When he traveled with us in the Volkswagen bus, he’d sing popular songs. He didn’t really have a singing voice—it was like he talked them through. I see him in India, in Delhi, trying to hang something from the top of the stage. It turned out to be a bicycle, and that turned out to be the whole set for the dance. His theory of art was to do what nobody else does. He made so much work; his facility was extraordinary. He had such energy about art.
Bob rarely talked about his childhood. I didn’t even know he’d changed his name until someone told me his real name had been Milton. I do know he didn’t have any connection with art until he was in the Navy. He was in San Diego and he went to a museum, and he saw paintings and he thought, “I could do that.” I’m sure it was that kind of directness. I think with Bob, dying was not an end, it’s a transition. He’s probably out there someplace trying to hook up the stars with the planets, trying to find some way to use the material at hand.
