They were indifferent as to the materials they appropriated and to the content they drifted into. Using Duchamp’s concept of Chance, Rauschenberg and Johns worked with randomly (non) selected examples of visual culture, both high and low, both loaded with meaning or devoid of significance. Indifference, also defined as Cool Intelligence, was a reaction against the overheated politics of the period-the rhetoric of the Cold War and the Red Scare-and the overvaluation of the artist as creative genius. In their very important book, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, authors Moira Roth and Jonathan Katz wrote of the Aesthetic of Indifference that prevailed in this group of art makers. Both artists were part of the New York “underground” of artists who were swerving away from Modernism and grappling with the ideas of Marcel Duchamp.

Nevertheless, despite knowing little of his antecedents, Johns, along with his artistic partner, Robert Rauschenberg, was part of the two-person movement, Neo-Dada, which carried on Dada of the 1920s. In fact, he later destroyed some of his early work when he realized that it resembled too closely, in his eyes, the work of the Hanover Dada artist, Kurt Schwitters. When Jasper Johns left his native South Carolina for the mean streets of New York, he claimed to have arrived at his Pearl Street Studio knowing nothing about art history.

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