Robert Rauschenberg — Monogram (1955–59) #notesontheartwork
Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) is one of those inevitable names that always comes up when we think about the massive artistic transformations that happened in the second half of the twentieth century. Laura Cumming described him as “America’s Leonardo” in an opinion piece in The Guardian and rightly so as he was an inventive genius who worked in a wide range of subjects, styles, materials, and techniques including painting, sculpture, prints, photography, and performance for over six decades.
Reading about Rauschenberg may seem repetitive but his work has this sort of magnetism that pushes me to it every time I see it. It’s a weird combination of fascination and intrigue that comes from his capability to expertly combine images and objects that at first glance feel so distant and detached from one another. So, as I feel any excuse is good to come back to his work, let’s dig into Monogram (1955–59), probably one of his most famous “Combines”. The term was coined by Rauschenberg itself to describe the series of works he made between 1953 and 1964 that put together painting, sculpture and assemblage into a combined third new thing. Described as radical or innovative, these three-dimensional pieces were composed of more traditional objects usually associated with high art as the canvas that could then be covered with paint or assemblages and all sorts of discarded materials and mundane objects he would find throughout the city of New York such as sheet metal, newspaper, tires or umbrellas. The result was a beautiful mess that came together inexplicably.
Monogram is a difficult piece to describe precisely because of the combination of objects that apparently don’t make any sense together even more so in an artwork. In the center is a furry embalmed Angora goat with long horns and whose face is semi-covered with drippings of paint in different colors. The animal is inserted in a rubber tire and sits on top of two canvases covered in a miscellanea of apparent abstract drawings and collage elements, that include a tennis ball, the heel of a shoe, a series of four footprints and a stenciled notice at the corner reading “extra heavy”, allude to the work’s unusual orientation. The piece was named after the way the horned goat and the car tire intertwine, like the letters of a monogram.
Rauschenberg often used tires and stuffed animals in his combines, giving them a second life as was the case with this Angora goat which he saw in the window of a secondhand furniture store at Seventh Avenue in New York, buying it for $15 which was all of the money that he had on him at the time. First, he painted the goat’s face by dripping several colors in what seems to be a reference to Abstract Expressionists and the possibilities of free brushwork. Then, from 1955 to 1959, he studied the possibilities of combining the goat with the other elements, making sketches and photographing the possible solutions whose records shed valuable light on his conceptual process.
In the first attempt (1955–1956), the goat was poised on a shelf that was connected to a wall-mounted painting that later became Rhyme (1956). According to Calvin Tomkins, this version was eventually altered because Rauschenberg was dissatisfied that the goat could only be viewed from one side. In the second attempt (1956), the goat was encircled by a tire with its tread repainted white and was standing on a narrow wooden platform with a vertical extension at its posterior. Rauschenberg was unsatisfied with this version, as he felt that the goat appeared to be pulling the painting. In the third and final attempt (1959), and following the suggestion of Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg placed a square panel on casters on the floor and centered the goat, as if in a pasture. With this position, he explored the relationship between the horizontal surface and the viewer’s bird’s eye perspective.
By positioning the canvas on the floor, he completely subverted the system of rules that had been in place for centuries. On the one hand, the placement of the goat on top of the canvas can turn the animal into a sculpture and the canvas into a pedestal following historic art traditions. On the other hand, the canvas’s surface is painted and was worked on as a proper artwork and not merely an attachment to the goat. So, why is it on the floor? Well, because Rauschenberg wanted to. He was trying to completely frustrate the preconceived ideas of what painting and sculpture were.
Rauschenberg trained at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina and his combines were his rebellious answer to the strict rules he faced in academia and a way of undermining the authority of the system he was working in by virtually eliminating all distinctions between artistic categories. When I look at his works there is an anarchic feeling as there seem to be no rules regarding the materials allowed and how they can be put together. These hybrid pieces were absolute innovations at the time, breaking boundaries and leading to important changes in the years to come, giving future artists an enormous sense of permission.
The introduction of random daily objects into his pieces allowed Rauschenberg to expand on Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade and imbued new significance to ordinary objects questioning the distinction between art objects and everyday objects. Also, ‘the readymade’s influence on Rauschenberg’s assemblages testifies to the cyclical nature of art history; in this specific case, Duchamp and Rauschenberg assigned a quotidian object an artistic status in order to scrutinize the aesthetic standards of their respective contemporary cultures. For using familiar objects such as the tire within a different cultural context, critics referred to the later generation of artists, of which Rauschenberg was a member, as “Neo-Dadaists”’ as Frances Vigna wrote.
The observations made by Rauschenberg throughout the years about Monogram never suggested that the goat in Monogram was anything other than a goat or that the tire was anything more than a tire. However, art historians and curators live to find hidden meanings and create narratives, and as happens with most of Rauschenberg’s Combines, Monogram offers a variety of possible interpretations. Some observers have proposed that considering the goat is an archetypal symbol of lust and the way the animal and the tire are conjoining, it is the most powerful image of anal intercourse ever to emerge from the rank psychological depths of modern art, making the work a representation of homoerotic themes. Others pointed to the poignant beauty of its acquiescent, eternally patient goat, and have associated it with an animal awaiting sacrifice.
Monogram was first shown to the public at a gallery in New York in 1959. The work came to Stockholm and was shown at Moderna Museet in 1962 as part of the exhibitions of four American artists: Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Stankiewicz. It was acquired for the museum’s collection three years later with a contribution from the Friends of Moderna Museet. Not surprisingly, it shocked contemporary viewers and fifty years after its creation, it remains one of the great, complex emblems of modernity.
In 2016, Monogram left the Moderna Museet in Stockholm to go on a world tour and visit some of the most famous museums as Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York and SFMOMA in San Francisco. Before the trip, the museum’s team understood the piece should undergo a thorough examination by the conservators to understand if it was fit for traveling, which included elemental analysis (X-ray fluorescence, XRF) and color-fastness tests (micro fading tests).
The microfading tests allow the determination of the light sensitivity of the various materials and hence the appropriate light intensities and exposure times. With the aid of the XRF spectrometer, they were able to map out the pigments that Rauschenberg used in this painting, which provides valuable information about his technique and serves as a basis for the handling and preservation of Monogram in the future. The XRF examination additionally showed that the Goat contains arsenic, which used to be a normal ingredient in the preparation of objects to protect them against insects. Knowing this allows the staff to safeguard themselves against exposure to toxic substances when handling the work.
From the X-ray images, they could see that there were no visible fractures in the construction but most importantly, that there were bits of the skeleton in all four legs and that the cranium is still there in the skull, which is quite unusual with prepared animals of this size. The Goat has been constructed on a profiled wooden board to which an iron stand has been fixed with nails. Wood wool, clay and steel wire have been used as building materials and to give the shape.
In the past decades, Rauschenberg’s work has been widely celebrated and has been the subject of solo shows at the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and Moderna Museet, among other institutions. His work belongs in collections worldwide and has sold for tens of millions at auction.
References
Cumming, L. (2016) Robert Rauschenberg review — the combine master, uncut, The Guardain. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/dec/04/robert-rauschenberg-review-the-combine-master-uncut-thrilling-retrospective
Vigna, F. (2012) Duchamp, Rauschenberg, and Assemblage: A Preview of Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 >> 2013, Inside / Out — A MoMA/ MoMA PS1 Blog. Available at: https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/11/28/duchamp-rauschenberg-and-assemblage-a-preview-of-fast-forward-modern-moments-1913-2013/
The Moderna Museet — https://sis.modernamuseet.se/objects/1325/monogram
The Museum of Modern Art — https://www.moma.org/artists/4823
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation — https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/art/art-context/monogram
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Robert_Rauschenberg/
