Iconoclash.

I HAVE ALWAYS WONDERED at judgments that seek to impose limits on the correct way to read the work of Robert Rauschenberg. Yve-Alain Bois is to be commended for pointing out that if one is going to do iconographic readings, picking and choosing among them so as to avoid implications of homosexuality is disingenuous at best. Sadly, the recent installation of Rauschenberg's Combines at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was desperately engaged in just such "don't ask, don't tell" behavior.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Moreover, I can think of no sustainable challenge to Bois's straightforward observation that the levels of meaning iconographers find in Rauschenberg's imagery would have been unavailable to the casual or even the dedicated viewer of his work. And Bois is certainly entitled to his opinion that such iconographic readings are not his cup of tea. But I am troubled by the implication that because this level of meaning is not patent, it's not worth exploring. The point--and it is a point that seems to have escaped notice in both Bois's and Carroll Dunham's reviews of the Rauschenberg exhibit--is that perhaps Rauschenberg's work can function at multiple levels of meaning for multiple audiences--including the artist himself and those closest to him, such as his former partners Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. Bois cites the inscription in Wager, 1957-59, IMPOSSIBILITY / CONTROL ... TO RECALL / THE / IMAGE / PRECISE, as evidence that Rauschenberg himself finds the readings of his work to be naive. What Bois fails to notice is that the inscription itself is but a reworking of a phrase found in Johns's own sketchbook notes.

I am kindly referred to by Bois as one of the iconographers interested in the "gay subtext" in Rauschenberg, but my point has always been that such "private" meanings in his work--and I have found quite a few--were not supposed to have been glimpsed, much less decoded. It seems to me that a "queer" reading of the Combines should not turn on any particular, hidden content so much as on the repeated thematizing of precisely this distinction between private and public codes of meaning. Rauschenberg's consistent awareness of audience and interpretation, and the exquisite tension between these two very different frames of reference, is for me the queerest thing of all in his work, for it bespeaks a particular kind of knowledge--that which is born of being in the closet, of being aware of being watched--and the desire to give nothing away.

In Kickback, 1959, Dunham finds the smeared paint proof of a loss of sphincter control. Fine. Whatever. But I'm struck by the fact that no one who has published a study of this work has thus far bothered to actually read it. For above those smeared trousers is the very large word KING, and below them are the words YOU WANT, and extending from the trousers' fly is a long, flaccid necktie with black paint scumbled at the point of its emergence. At the bottom of the work we see a submarine attempting to push through packed ice, and toward the top, another image of the submarine having risen triumphantly, like meaning finally coming through. More than any of these individual elements, the fact that this "ensemble" of meaning has gone unobserved is evidence of its success: The private Rauschenberg still successfully coexists with the public on the walls of the Met.

As one comic-strip character says to another who is crouching under a stage in a nearly unreadable newspaper clipping at the bottom right of Rauschenberg's defining Minutiae, 1954, HEY SUPPOSE THEY SPOT US UNDER HERE? To which his companion responds with knowing assurance, THEY WON'T, THEY'LL ALL BE LOOKING AT THE ZEBRA. Indeed.

--Jonathan D. Katz, New Haven, CT

YVE-ALAIN BOIS RESPONDS

WHAT I FIND particularly interesting in Jonathan Katz's letter is the idea that the "'private' meanings in [Rauschenberg's] work ... were not supposed to have been glimpsed, much less decoded." Katz's conclusion (after having precisely performed the task one is "not supposed" to perform) is that Rauschenberg is involved in a tantalizing hide-and-seek tease that is an essential trope of the aesthetics of the closet. My take on this differs. I do not deny in the least that Rauschenberg's Combines are replete with private references, but I see them as an argument against the hierarchical distinction between public and private: Both levels are equally transparent and opaque--which means, among other things, that the very notion of privacy as the guarantee of authorship, authenticity, originality, and the like, is suspended.

I admit that I did not know that Rauschenberg was quoting Jasper Johns in Wager, and I thank Katz for this information, another trinket of meaning which I am perfectly happy to integrate into the myriad other semantic elements woven by the artist in this work. But I do not see how it fundamentally changes the mode of signification exemplified in this work in which, as in all the other early Combines, I find a radical dehierarchization and uprooting of all elements. To point toward it as the master key, or the privileged one, is attempting to tame the shrew. That is, to my mind, what iconology always wants to do.