react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

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” was telling; the problem the Combines presented was that they were not private when good sense said they should be. This spilling over of the 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 article, however, suggest a supplementary reading of Rauschenberg’s Combines through the lens of disability theory. If Rauschenberg’s Combines are debased, and if one’s experience of them is bodily, then their association with the 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 disabled bodies that refuse to comply and in so doing inscribe new ways of being (corporeally) in the world.