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INEFFICIENT, UNSUSTAINABLE, AND FRAGMENTARY: The Rauschenberg Combines as Disabled Bodies

Cole, Graham J
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5734-4304
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu167637936806872

Abstract Details

2023, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, History of Art.
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.
Lisa Florman (Advisor)
Erica Levin (Committee Member)
J.T. Richardson Eisenhauer (Committee Member)
90 p.
Art Criticism; Art History; Ethics; Fine Arts; Minority and Ethnic Groups
disability; history of art; Robert Rauschenberg; critical disability studies; disability theory; assemblage art; modernism; 20th century painting; Black Mountain College; mid-century America

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Cole, G. J. (2023). INEFFICIENT, UNSUSTAINABLE, AND FRAGMENTARY: The Rauschenberg Combines as Disabled Bodies [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu167637936806872

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Cole, Graham. INEFFICIENT, UNSUSTAINABLE, AND FRAGMENTARY: The Rauschenberg Combines as Disabled Bodies . 2023. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu167637936806872.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Cole, Graham. "INEFFICIENT, UNSUSTAINABLE, AND FRAGMENTARY: The Rauschenberg Combines as Disabled Bodies ." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2023. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu167637936806872

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu167637936806872
184
© 2023, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License INEFFICIENT, UNSUSTAINABLE, AND FRAGMENTARY: The Rauschenberg Combines as Disabled Bodies by Graham J Cole is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.