{{Short description|Work by Robert Rauschenberg}} {{Infobox artwork | image_file = | image_upright = | title = Monogram | artist = Robert Rauschenberg | year = 1955–1959 | type = Oil, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe-heel, and tennis ball on two conjoined canvases with oil on taxidermied Angora goat with brass plaque and rubber tire on wood platform mounted on four casters. | height_metric = | width_metric = | height_imperial = | width_imperial = | metric_unit = cm | imperial_unit = in | museum = Moderna Museet | city = Stockholm }}
[[File:William Holman Hunt - The Scapegoat.jpg|thumb| ''The Scapegoat'', William Holman Hunt, 1854–1856, oil on canvas]] '''''Monogram''''' is a combine by American artist Robert Rauschenberg, made between 1955 and 1959.<ref name="NY Times - 14May2008 - Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82 ">{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/arts/design/14rauschenberg.html|title=Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82 |last=Michael Kimmelman |author-link=Michael Kimmelman |date=May 14, 2008|work=The New York Times|accessdate=14 February 2013}}</ref> It consists of a stuffed Angora goat with its midsection passing through an automobile tire.<ref name="The Australian - 15May2008 - Robert Rauschenberg: A delight in the ordinary ">{{cite news|url=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/a-delight-in-the-ordinary/story-e6frg8n6-1111116340575|title=Robert Rauschenberg: A delight in the ordinary |date=May 15, 2008|work=The Australian|publisher=News Limited|accessdate=14 February 2013}}</ref> Critic Jorg von Uthmann described it in the Huffington Post<ref name="Bloomberg - 08Nov2006 - Rauschenberg's Mystery Goat Stars in Paris Show of 'Combines' ">{{cite news|url=https://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aJO1aQbv_DMs&refer=muse|title=Rauschenberg's Mystery Goat Stars in Paris Show of 'Combines' |last=von Uthmann|first=Jorg|date=November 8, 2006|publisher=Bloomberg L.P.|accessdate=14 February 2013}}</ref> as Rauschenberg's most famous work. In 1965, Pontus Hultén purchased the artwork for the collection of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
==History== Rauschenberg created a series of artworks between 1954 and 1964 that merge aspects of both traditional painting and sculpture. He coined the term “Combine” to describe this new artistic category. ''Monogram'' typifies the idea of the Combine as a free-standing sculptural artwork that also incorporates a painted canvas.
The artist first saw the stuffed Angora goat in the window of a secondhand furniture store at Seventh Avenue in New York. He bought it for $15 which was all of the money that he had on him at the time. Over the next four years (1955–1959), ''Monogram'' evolved through three different stages, which are documented in several studies and photographs. The title came from the union of the goat and tire, which reminded the artist of the interweaving letters in a monogram.<ref>[https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/art/art-in-context/monogram ''Monogram'' at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Official Website]</ref>
== Monogram’s multiple forms == From 1955 to 1959, ''Monogram'' took on three different incarnations. In the first iteration (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.<ref name=":1">Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1980), p. 124.</ref> thumb| Robert Rauschenberg by the first form of Monogram|left
In 1956, Rauschenberg reconstructed ''Monogram''. In this second state, 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. In this second state of ''Monogram'', one side of the vertical panel is painted and collaged. Rauschenberg was unsatisfied with this version, as he felt that the goat appeared to be pulling the painting.<ref name=":1" /> thumb| Robert Rauschenberg by the second form of Monogram
In the third and final incarnation of ''Monogram'' (1959), 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.<ref>Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), pp. 124-125.</ref>
==Analysis== Rauschenberg insisted throughout his career that he carefully avoided creating closed systems of meaning when making his artwork. "If I see any superficial subconscious relationships that I'm familiar with—cliches of associations—I change the picture." Rather, he insisted that meaning resides within each viewer and their individual direct experience of the elements combined in the work: "A stuffed goat is special in the way that a stuffed goat is special."<ref name="sb">{{Cite book |last=Baker |first=Steve |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xPie8rpcxm8C&dq=why+did+robert+hughes+say+monogram+was+about+anal+sex&pg=PA80 |title=Postmodern Animal |date=March 2000 |publisher=Reaktion Books |isbn=978-1-86189-060-3 |pages=62–80 |language=en}}</ref>
Art historian Graham Smith, summarizing his review of Rauschenberg's statements on ''Monogram'', concludes: "Rauschenberg himself never suggested that the goat in ''Monogram'' was anything other than a goat or that the tyre was anything more than a tyre."<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal |last=Smith |first=Graham |date=October 2016 |title=Rereading Rauschenberg's Monogram |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00233609.2016.1201140 |journal=Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History |language=en |volume=85 |issue=4 |pages=271–298 |doi=10.1080/00233609.2016.1201140 |s2cid=193387235 |issn=0023-3609|url-access=subscription }}</ref>
Any search for a fixed unitary meaning in a work like ''Monogram'' operates in contradiction to Rauschenberg's stated intentions. Yet dozens of readings have been proposed by authors mining the elements of the artist's biography, the iconographic history of the objects contained in the work, as well as aesthetic and philosophical implications of the manner in which they have been combined.
Kenneth Bendiner has interpreted the work as "a specific re-working" of the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt’s ''The Scapegoat''.<ref name=":0"/> This work depicts a goat awaiting sacrifice in order to erase the blame of the Israelites in the Old Testament. As such, Bendiner reads the goat as a Christ figure, with the tire around his waist symbolizing Christ's burden of man's sins.
This reading has also been linked with a biographical anecdote involving a pet goat that Rauschenberg had as a child. He recounted coming home from school one day to find that his father had slaughtered the goat.<ref name=":2">{{Cite book |last=Steinberg |first=Leo |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8sNGtzzd3asC&dq=was+rauschenberg%27s+monogram+about+anal+sex&pg=PA56 |title=Encounters with Rauschenberg: (A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture) |date=2000-05-15 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-77183-0 |language=en}}</ref>
Art critic Catherine Craft said of the work: "Not surprisingly, ''Monogram'' shocked contemporary viewers. Still, there is also a strangely poignant beauty to its acquiescent, eternally patient goat. Some observers have associated it with an animal awaiting sacrifice. Nevertheless, with its horns and long, shimmering coat it also recalls the ''Feticci Personali'' Rauschenberg made in Italy." (''Feticci Personali'' is a series of hanging 'fetish' assemblages of animal fur, rope, wood and various small objects, referencing handmade totemic sculptures worshipped for magical powers or believed to be inhabited by a spirit.)<ref>[http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2016/december/06/the-meanings-in-robert-rauschenberg-s-monogram/ The meanings in Robert Rauschenberg's Monogram, Phaidon]</ref>
Critic Robert Hughes ignited controversy by insisting that the work referenced homoerotic themes and subtext, saying, "One looks at it remembering that the goat is an archetypal symbol of lust, so ''Monogram'' is the most powerful image of anal intercourse ever to emerge from the rank psychological depths of modern art. Yet it is innocent, too, and sweet, and (with its cascading ringlets) weirdly dandified: a hippy goat, a few years before the 1960s. Fifty years after its creation, it remains one of the great, complex emblems of modernity, as unforgettable (in its way) as the flank of Cézanne's mountain, the cubist kitchen table or the wailing woman in ''Guernica''."<ref>{{Cite web|last=Hughes|first=Robert|date=2006-01-26|title=Robert Hughes: Spirit of the age|url=http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/jan/26/art1|access-date=2021-04-05|website=the Guardian|language=en}}</ref>
Although this oft-quoted reading generated a great deal of attention, it is by no means definitive. Responding to the controversy, critic Leo Steinberg said: <blockquote>This is strong and seductive prose...Yet I find the proposed reading too reductive to persuade. In place of an ever-astonishing incongruity, we are given the notion of a close fit. For what Rosalind Krauss calls, 'An uncontainable network of associations,' we are offered one overwhelmingly single meaning, making the work and its motivations—as Rauschenberg put it on an earlier occasion—'too simple,' too single-minded. The thrill generated in Rauschenberg's work of the fifties by the unpredictable, the perilously uncontrolled, the indeterminate connotation, has been replaced by one naughtiness—excitement of a different order.<ref name=":2" /></blockquote>It is worth noting that Hughes's reading is the only interpretation of ''Monogram'' that Robert Rauschenberg took pains to specifically disavow.<ref name=sb/><ref>{{Cite web |date=2008-05-14 |title=Robert Rauschenberg: Restlessly experimental artist whose career was a |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/robert-rauschenberg-restlessly-experimental-artist-whose-career-was-a-celebration-of-change-828260.html |access-date=2023-11-22 |website=The Independent |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |date=2011-07-29 |title=Robert Rauschenberg: a decade ahead of Warhol |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/edinburgh-festival/8668651/Robert-Rauschenberg-a-decade-ahead-of-Warhol.html |access-date=2023-11-22 |website=The Telegraph |language=en}}</ref>
Meanwhile, critic Arthur Danto wrote: <blockquote>Utterly familiar as tires and goats are - so familiar that they could be images in an alphabet book for children (T is for tire, G is for goat) - no one had ever seen a goat wreathed with a tire before, as in Rauschenberg's signature work ''Monogram''. Who could say what it meant? The goat is, to be sure, a sacrificial animal, so it is entirely thinkable that it would be wreathed with laurel when led to the altar. Monogram is an exceedingly evocative and at the same time a very funny work. Who knows what Rauschenberg was thinking? All one knows is that nothing like it had been seen in the entire history of art, and that goat and tire had identities so strong as to counteract any tendency to think of them as other than what they were....the power and absurdity of the combination suggests that his gifts of adjunction surpassed entirely his—our—capacity to interpret."<ref name=":2" /></blockquote>
==References== {{Reflist}}
{{Robert Rauschenberg}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Monogram}} Category:1950s sculptures Category:Sculptures in Sweden Category:Goats in art Category:Works by Robert Rauschenberg Category:Taxidermy art Category:Collection of Moderna Museet