Robert Rauschenberg's Queer Modernism: Decoration, Theatricality and Camp in the Combines, 1953--59

Robert Rauschenberg's painted, sculptural assemblages of found objects, photographic reproductions, print and fabric materials have troubled art history in their refusal to yield any coherency of form or meaning. Monogram , 1955--59, is one of the last of Robert Rauschenberg's significant "Combines," and it is no exception: it is an outlandish concoction that features a stuffed angora goat squeezed through a rubber tire and standing on a wood platform of collaged material. It seems to be, in fact, a joke. The paint-smeared snout of the goat is characteristic of the gestural abstraction of the New York school, but rather than flattened out onto an expanse of canvas, the brushwork is the outermost point of a very theatrical and heterogeneous assemblage of found objects. Could it not be argued, however, that this "joke" might in fact be part of a larger challenge to modernism that constituted something far more serious? That challenge is argued in my dissertation to be a queer critique of the culture of modernism in the postwar decade of the 1950s.;The larger goal of this dissertation is to re-read mid-century modernism and its narratives that have coalesced around this period. Navigating through the two predominate strands of Rauschenberg scholarship, this dissertation seeks to problematize the largely postmodern reading of Rauschenberg, in which his work's seeming illegibility has long been seen as a critique of modernist representation. But it also questions the recent new wave of art history that has sought to locate fixed structures of gay identity in Rauschenberg's work through a traditional iconographical approach. Mobilizing both the questions of illegibility and identity, Rauschenberg's artistic practice is defined queerly as a form of resistance to dominant modes of subjectivity inaugurated through the painterly discourse of the New York school. Weaving the tropes of decorativeness, theatricality and a camp aesthetic through various and overlapping groupings of Combines produced during the 1950s, Rauschenberg's modernism is redefined as a queer one.