ONE OF THE GREATEST ARTISTS of the 20th century, Robert Rauschenberg, died on May 12, 2008, at the age of 82. Protean and prolific, Rauschenberg was arguably the most significant artist-inventor in the history of American art, celebrated not only for his combines (artworks midway between painting and sculpture), but also for some of the avant-garde’s earliest attempts to meld art and technology, for his invention of conceptual art, his pioneering set and costume designs, his wholesale use of photographic, printed and junk materials, and especially for an attitude of welcoming acceptance of the stuff of the world that would, in time, point towards Pop Art and its successors. No less an icon than Andy Warhol paid tribute to Rauschenberg as far back as 1963 with a series of silkscreen paintings using photographs of his handsome face playfully entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
But as fresh accolades now pour in, few newspapers have noted that he is survived by his partner Darryl Pottorf, and until very recently even that fact would have been met with the same silence that continues to suppress acknowledgment of the other key romantic partnerships in his life, most importantly with artists Cy Twombly (1951 to 1953), Jasper Johns (1954 to 1962), and the dancer/choreographer Steve Paxton (1962 to 1966). Tellingly, R
auschenberg’s relationship and eventual marriage to Susan Weil (1948 to 1951) was the sole romantic liaison referenced in the recent touring exhibition of his seminal combines at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, yet this marriage was dissolved so quickly that citing only this marriage was tantamount to disinformation. Such deliberate distortions of the historical record are common in Rauschenberg scholarship.
Part of the responsibility for this situation rests with the artist himself, who was at best coy about his sexuality. Rauschenberg didn’t want to articulate his sexual orientation openly, and the American art world was only too willing to accede to his wishes: his oft-stated claim to producing a random, unintentional, audience-centered art was in perfect synch with the American art world’s more general refusal to address an artist’s biography when the artist was gay. Following the Christian Right’s sustained attack on Robert Mapplethorpe in 1989, and on queer art generally, this homophobic tendency has continued unabated in the American art world, such that no exhibition of Rauschenberg’s work has ever once acknowledged any of his defining male partnerships in terms stronger than mere friendship.
Nonetheless, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of these partnerships—for the parties involved and for the course of American art generally. Throughout much of the last half century, Rauschenberg was at the center of the most influential confluence of queer artists that the American art world had ever seen. This circle included not only Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly but also the other great friends and collaborators in his life, the composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who were themselves a couple. Ironically, these gay men came to represent America to itself in what was perhaps the most homophobic period in American history, the Cold War era. But they were able to achieve their rapid critical and commercial success precisely because they never articulated their sexuality in terms that the dominant culture would understand as “queer.” Instead, all of them, to one extent or another, made the cultivation of an anti-expressive art the central tenet of their æsthetic.
Never before had the closet proven so resonant an æsthetic strategy, and so rich a ground for the development of art away from the dramatic self-revelations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others associated with Abstract Expressionism. This movement, with its fixation on authentic emotion and expressive interiority, was the obverse of Rauschenberg’s early work. After all, how could a closeted queer artist produce an expressive mode of art at a moment when the direct revelation of his sexuality would have been literally illegal? So Rauschenberg began his career with grand gestures of erasure, absence, and negation, as in his famous Erased de Kooning, a drawing he requested of de Kooning that he laboriously erased; or in his White Paintings—pure, unadulterated white paint on canvas, by definition so unexpressive, so anti-Abstract Expressionist, that Rauschenberg decreed they were to be painted by others, using a roller and house paint.
But in the winter of 1953–54, something remarkable happened to Rauschenberg’s anti-expressive art. In quick succession, all the familiar Abstract Expressionist signs of emotion once so rigorously excluded—high-keyed color, gestural brush work, drips, splats and squiggles of paint—came rushing back into the austere, monochromatic world of Rauschenberg’s canvases. What happened, in a nutshell, was Jasper Johns. Shortly after Johns entered his life, Rauschenberg invented his signature combines—and continued to produce them only through the span of their relationship, stopping in the year they broke up. But Rauschenberg didn’t want a conventionally expressive art—and the attendant danger that someone might understand what he was trying to express. Rather, his work embraced what he called a “random order,” and he analogized his art to looking out of a car window as it sped down a motorway.
Yet Rauschenberg’s fabled random ordering of his pictorial elements turns out to be not so random, after all. There are photos of and love letters from Johns and Twombly in the work, along with precious family photos, newspaper clippings about his sister and parents, notes from friends—a kind of personal scrapbook. But all this autobiographical material shares the canvas with other strange stuff like taxidermy animals and comic strips. On the face of it, the combines appear to be mere agglomerations of material, and that’s the way they’ve been generally understood, even in the most recent scholarly book on Rauschenberg, Brandon Joseph’s Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (2003). Joseph writes that recently, “the artist’s work has come to be seen as expressing coded messages about his sexual orientation…[yet]nearly three decades of such analyses…have yielded only partial and unsatisfactory results.” On the contrary, Rauschenberg very carefully and self-consciously seeded his art with meanings, burying expressive elements in a sea of other random materials. He became a code maker, using his art to send pictorial messages to his partners and friends under the very nose of the dominant culture.
Often these pictorial communiqués were carried via comic strips or other seemingly innocuous collage elements that were carefully chosen to appear insignificant. For example, in Collection (1954), one of his earliest combines after meeting Johns, he included a small, easy-to-miss fragment of a comic in the upper right corner that reads: “How depressing life would be, if our lucky stars hadn’t introduced you to me.” In an even earlier work, Yoicks, most of the comic strips are completely overpainted, but these words clearly loom out of the muck, “five foot ten, hair sandy, eyes blue, 160 lbs. You’re not as guilty as you think”—a fair description, both physical and psychological, of Jasper Johns at the time. In a combine of the same year entitled Minutiae, Rauschenberg signaled how knowingly he employed these comic fragments. Minutiae is indeed composed of minutiae, and among the numerous small fragments one comic strip shows two men hiding under a stage. The first asks nervously, “Hey suppose they spot us under here?” And the other reassures him, saying, “They won’t, they’ll all be looking at the zebra.”
By 1959, as his relationship with Johns cooled, that zebra stepped increasingly onto the stage as Rauschenberg seemed to be testing how much he could get way with. In Photograph (1959), large block letters on the left of the canvas read simply “your ass,” while Kickback of the same year features a pair of men’s khaki pants with a tie protruding from the zipper bracketed by the words “you want” and “king size.” Long after Rauschenberg parted ways with Johns, he continued this careful coding. One late work given to an ex-partner was entitled Schizont Rival. I was sure the title was utter nonsense until one day, leafing through a dictionary, I noticed that the word schizont signified a cell formed asexually.
Rauschenberg’s work contains literally hundreds of examples of such subtle gay coding, yet this argument for intention and meaning in Rauschenberg’s work is still very controversial, for it wars with the dominant image of utter randomness. There is apparently something far more enticing about picturing an ideologically pure Rauschenberg boldly refuting all forms of expressive intention than imagining a closeted gay man carefully scouring the detritus of popular culture for something he can use to express himself. This encoding of Rauschenberg seems too beholden to traditional forms of meaning-making for our current tastes, and were he not gay, to follow this line of thinking to its seemingly logical (and erroneous) conclusion, he would not have been the hugely influential innovator that he was.
Today, most of us no longer feel the need to encode our desires, and artists no longer believe they have no option but to bury messages into the surface of paint. The question is whether our art will be as rich, as multivalent, as innovative, and as suffused with emotion as this closeted generation’s work was. To argue for the utility of the closet wars with every political sensibility I hold dear, yet it seems to me irrefutable that out of these constraints—both self-imposed and external—Rauschenberg and his lovers, friends, and colleagues invented wholly new ways of thinking and making art. Too often, queer art today makes its queerness over into a citation, readily readable off the surface in accordance with dominant ideas of what queerness is or should look like. Rather, I want a queer art, like Rauschenberg’s, that invents new forms for representing our desire, that makes queerness not the represented subject of the work, but its mode of operation, makes it a verb, not a noun. But I want it without the costs Rauschenberg and his circle had to pay.
Only once, relatively late in life, did Rauschenberg articulate in words what he said repeatedly in his art. In a 1990 interview in Warhol’s Interview magazine, gay art historian Paul Taylor presses Rauschenberg to talk about Johns, and for the first time Rauschenberg complies. It seems only fair to give him the last word:
Rauschenberg: I’m not frightened of the affection that Jasper [Johns] and I had, both personally and as working artists. I don’t see any sin or conflict in those days when each of us was the most important person in the other’s life.
Interviewer: Can you tell me why you parted ways?
Rauschenberg: Embarrassment about being well known.
Interviewer: Embarrassment about being famous?
Rauschenberg: Socially. What had been tender and sensitive became gossip. It was sort of new to the art world that the two most well-known, up-and-coming studs were affectionately involved.*
* Paul Taylor, “Robert Rauschenberg: ‘I can’t even afford my works anymore,’” Interview, December 1990.
Jonathan D. Katz is the author of the forthcoming book The Homosexualization of American Art: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Collective Closet (Chicago).
