From: The Art of Code -Jonathan Katz
Almost from the very beginning of their relationship, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were linked together, usually by people who had little or no idea of what they really meant to each other. Early critics tagged them both with the same facile labels--neo-Dada, assemblage, junk art--and viewed and reviewed them as a pair. They showed together, were discussed together, even discovered together by their dealer. Still later, they would be declared Pop, or more subtly, proto-Pop, and credited with the development of the first American style that led away from Abstract Expressionism. Artistic movements generally involve more than two artists: theirs was confined to them alone.
All the more remarkable then that the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg is so completely distinct; one could simply never mistake one artist's hand for the other's. It seems that the fact that Johns and Rauschenberg were involved together determined to some extent how they were understood. And yet, paradoxically, while their partnership was widely acknowledged, few comprehended what it really meant, and fewer still knew that it transcended simple friendship. John and Rauschenberg are in the curious position of being understood as a pair, but not a couple. Yet they were a couple; and the rather obvious silences, ellipses, and omissions that permeate the usual accounts of their history make no sense unless arrayed against an insistent and damaging homophobia that has led both artists to actually deny the substance of what they had together. LINK: The Art of Code Essay
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