Robert Rauschenberg's Queer Modernism: The Early Combines and Decoration

Abstract

The Combines that Robert Rauschenberg produced between 1953 and 1956 represent a “queering” of Abstract Expressionism and, by extension, the culture of postwar modernism itself, through the artist's pronounced use of decoration. The decorative materiality of his work is overlooked by current scholarship, which frames the Combines as either a postmodern allegory of representation or an iconographically read revelation of his gay identity. An alternative view is to refuse biography and draw on queer theory's opposition to legible—and legislated—identity to read the decorative as a queerly deconstructive strategy deployed to undermine postwar American art's grand narratives of subjectivity.

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Notes on contributors

Tom Folland

Tom Folland is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Art History and Visual Arts Department at Occidental College [Department of Art History and Visual Arts, Occidental College, Los Angeles, Calif. 90041, [email protected]].