Hetero-normalizing Robert Rauschenberg

As I read through the news coverage of Robert Rauschenberg's death last week, I noticed a disturbing sameness: Most writers and critics refused to say that Rauschenberg was gay, and all but two critics were unwilling to say why that is important. This is a problem for two reasons: Rauschenberg's frequently referenced his homosexuality in groundbreaking ways in his own work (much of which was autobiographical and even more of which was intensely about the then-immediate present), and because history tends to hetero-wash whenever possible, to ignore or deny homosexuality when it's convenient.

Critics at America's largest publications, including Michael Kimmelman, Alan Artner, Blake Gopnik, Richard Lacayo, and Peter Plagens, mostly avoid the topic. Kimmelman's queasy reference to Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, and "the intimacy of their relationship" was the closest the Times came to acknowledging that Rauschenberg was gay. The Boston Globe's Mark Feeney, Obit magazine's Phyllis Tuchman and Newsweek's Plagens and others also took the Johns route. (My links-filled Rauschenberg roundup is here.)

The two major papers in Rauschenberg's home state were even more timid. In the Dallas Morning News Kriston Capps obliquely mentioned Rauschenberg's AIDS-related fundraising, and shamefully hoped that wink-and-a-nod insinuation would take care of the rest. Lisa Gray included a reference to Rauschenberg's partner, Darryl Pottorf, in the final paragraph of her Houston Chronicle write-up.

Many other publications weren't even that oblique. The New Republic's Jed Perl was among those on the icked-out extreme. He refused to engage with Rauschenberg's work, his life, or anything else, dismissing it all with a don't-bother-me shrug.

Only two critics prominently mentioned Rauschenberg's homosexuality, and both did so eloquently, in a way that explained why it matters. In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch David Bonetti called Rauschenberg a "patriot," and contextualized his description. LATer Christopher Knight smartly tied Rauschenberg's homosexuality to a discussion of the landmark Monogram (1955-59, above). [An untitled 1955 combine from Johns' collection is above.]

Just as important to the Rauschenberg story (and to the story of gay life in America): At a time when being openly gay was considered a mental disorder and almost unspeakably awful, Rauschenberg was loud and proud through his work. For decades American artists, from Hartley forward, had hidden references to homosexuality. In Rauschenberg's work gay life and love is not hidden in an abstract, oblique reference to be noticed by those in the know; it is central, autobiographical and humanized. It's there in dozens of pieces, from landmark works such as Rebus, which includes a passage that questions the link between being gay and being creative, to a great, rarely seen lusty 1981 combine in Baltimore titled Honorarium (Spread), a piece in which Rauschenberg riffs on every gay cliche imaginable. (It's below. In a related story, how many cliched, barely-cloaked references to homosexuality can you find in Glenn McNatt's Baltimore Sun write-up of Rauschenberg's death?)

I also think it's important to place Rauschenberg within the context of one of the great under-examined migrations in American history: That of gays and lesbians from rural America to cities in the decade after World War II, and the immense changes in American culture that migration helped kick off. Furthermore: While many obits mentioned that John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Johns, and Rauschenberg partnered to re-create whole disciplines, few mentioned that all four were gay, and how that commonality informed and enabled their practices and their friendship.

Sadly, one particularly revolting write-up filled this hetero-normalized void. At the end of a thoughtless semi-obituary, Roger Kimball included a subtle dig:

Along the way, there was no aspect of contemporary artistic culture that is not mocked, trivialized, or turned into some sort of joke [in Rauschenberg's work]. The only exceptions were the ghostly exposed blueprints that Rauschenberg did in 1950 in collaboration with his then wife, the artist Susan Weil. These were the only two works, out of several hundred on view [at a Guggenheim retrospective], that communicated any genuine aesthetic emotion. But these works were said to have been Susan Weil's idea, and they served chiefly to highlight the poverty of everything that surrounded them.

In other words: The only thing worthwhile in Rauschenberg's entire oeuvre is that which (Kimball claims) had its origins in the heterosexual.