Abstract
In a 1960 article entitled “Younger American Painters,” William Rubin accused Rauschenberg’s Combines of rendering the “inherently biographical style of Abstract Expressionism… even more personal, more particular, and sometimes almost embarrassingly private.” Rubin’s choice of the word “embarrassingly” is telling; the Combines are not just private, but embarrassingly so; that is, the problem the Combines present is that they are not private when good sense/taste tells us they should be. This spilling over of the supposed-to-be-private into the embarrassingly deviant public has been read as an insistence on the work of art as both in its environment and in communication with it, as a valorization of the femininity associated with the interior/personal and relatedly, as a refusal of heteronormative subjectivity as dictated in the Cold War era. This paper suggests another reading—not as an alternative, but as a supplement to these: a reading of Rauschenberg’s Combines through the lens of disability theory. If Rauschenberg’s Combines are debased (and there seems to be some agreement that they are), and if one’s experience of them is bodily (and this experience seems if not universal, then nearly so), then their association with the debased/abject body demands inquiry. Made up of disparate parts that insist upon their discrete, adjunctive identities and former lives, the Combines might be best understood as Frankensteins—disabled bodies that refuse to comply and in so doing inscribe new ways of being (corporeally) in the world.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Disability, Corporeality, Sculpture, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Junk Art, Assemblage, Installation Art
