Robert Rauschenberg's Monogram - Essay Example

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG - "MONOGRAM" (1955 - 1959) Freestanding combine: oil, paper, fabric, printed paper, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe heel, and tennis ball on canvas, with oil on Angora goat and rubber tire, on wood platform mounted on four casters; 42 x 63 1/4 x 64 1/2 in. Monogram is one of the most famous Combines, which Rauschenberg reworked several times before achieving the final version. It is an incongruous association, on a sort of abstract painting placed horizontally, of an angora goat with a paint-daubed snout and a car tire around its middle, and various collages ranging from a tennis ball to printed papers.

The combination of objects, images and lines of paint does not seek perceptive unity - despite the odd visual interlacing of the goat and the tire - but division. The goat, despite the tire it wears around its middle, remains implacably a goat and the tire a tire. The meaning of the assemblage is attained in this. (Adams, 1996) If the tire is a reference to the artist's childhood living close to a tire factory according to some contemporary art books, its association with the goat raises questions.

The title Monogram renders this montage even more enigmatic: Monogram, or the interlacing of several letters to form a single character, composed here of the entanglement of the goat and the tire. Thus the letter O passes around the animal to make a knot as a rebellion against meaning and all ideas of beauty. (Nelson, 1996) The Ready-made (tire) and stuffed animal coexist in this work that, in keeping with the artist's wishes, leaves as much place for the viewer as for the artist. That looking turned breathless in 1959 when Rauschenberg completed Monogram, one of the most outlandish and barbarous works of art ever made.

Monogram features a stuffed Angora goat encircled by a tire. The goat, whose snout is covered in multicolored war paint, is standing on a painting, as if grazing at pasture. A sort of gargoyle or ravaging scavenger guarding over and also destroying art, this cloven-hoofed creature is a shamanic manifestation of Rauschenberg. In early Christian art goats symbolized the damned. A dingy tennis ball behind the animal suggests it has defecated on painting. Allegorically, Rauschenberg is a bull in the china shop of art history, a satyr squeezing through the eye of an esthetic/erotic needle.

(Pollock, 1996) Monogram is Rauschenberg's credo, a line drawn in the psychic sands of American sexual and cultural values. It is a love letter, a death threat, and a ransom note. It is Rauschenberg carving his monogram into art history. Bold canonical works will also be on view, such as Monogram, which displays a paint-daubed angora goat, girded by an automobile tire and mounted on a kind of pasture seeded with urban debris. A remarkable example of Rauschenberg's hybridization of art and sculpture, Monogram represents one of the artist's most significant contributions to the history of modern art.

With a swift gesture, Rauschenberg transformed a traditionally horizontal object into a vertical one and, in doing so, he obstructed the Renaissance notion of a painting offering a window onto another, ideal world. Instead, Monogram confounds the viewer's expectations by confronting the audience as an object in our world. (Adams, 1996)REFERENCES:Adams, L. (1996). The methodologies of art: an introduction. New York, NY: IconEditions. de Zegher, C., (ed.) (1996), Inside the Visible. Massachusetts: MIT Press.Nelson, R. S.

, & Shiff, R. (1996). Critical terms for art history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pollock, G., (1996). Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts. Routledge.