Shawn Tucker, assistant professor of fine arts in the Department of Art and Art History, recently published a paper titled “The Aesthetics of Dissociation: Radiohead’s ‘How to Disappear Completely’ and Jasper Johns’s Device Paintings.”
The paper appears in Volume 96, Issue 1 of Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
This essay uses the psychological concept of dissociation to describe one way that Radiohead’s song “How to Disappear Completely” and Jasper Johns’s Device paintings seem to function. In their formal elements, content, and context, these works show the detachment, depersonalization, and automatization that are hallmarks of what psychologists describe as dissociation. The song and paintings do not show these qualities in exactly the same way, but the triangulation of song, paintings, and psychological concept shed light on all three.