A Private Public Sphere: Robert Duncan and Jess’s Cold War Household

Robert Duncan, a poet, and Jess, a visual artist, were collage artists and life partners; their shared home came to comprise an integral part of their artistic philosophy. This essay uses the resources of public sphere theory to analyze how Duncan’s “The Homosexual in Society” and “The Architecture Passages 9,” and Jess’s Paste-Up, “The Mouse’s Tail” taken together provide a theory of living directly opposed to the then-hegemonic vision of a pleasure-based family or home life cordoned off from the “real world” of work and politics. Collage becomes a way of bringing—as the historical avant garde attempted to do—art and life together, and of forming a political home and family life integrally related to the life of the “outside world.”