Robert Rauschenberg: Monogram

       Yup, that’s a taxidermy goat with a tire around its middle, standing on a canvas covered with stuff. It’s called Monogram, and a guy named Rauschenberg made it in 1959.

    When regular old people talk about a specific work of art, they eventually start talking about the ideas behind it. In my (admittedly limited) experience, a lot of the time the people talking about those ideas are sort of just making stuff up. They probably never met the artist, most likely never talked with them about this piece, and can’t realistically know what the guy’s motivation was when he stapled a goat to a canvas. They’re basically talking out their ass, based on the context and how many girls are around that they want to sleep with. Personally, when I’m  talking or writing about art, I try to stick to the facts I can find on the piece and how it fits into the art world.

        Even so, my first time viewing this I had to stop and ask “What was he thinking about while he was shoving that tire around that dead goat?”

       Monogram is what Rauschenberg called a “Combine”. He would walk around New York, where he lived, and pick up trash he found interesting, then go home and glue it all together. Ta-da. Shopping cart hobo by day, super-important neo-whatever artist by night. He made a bunch of Combines, starting with a lot of 3-D stuff and eventually working in 2-D because he really liked to paint.

Maybe a Rauschenberg scholar.

                  Allright, now you know the basics. Here’s where we get all analyze-y.

   Monogram came about as the direct result of this urinal:

              It’s called Fountain and it was basically an anonymous prank pulled by an artist named Duchamp in 1917. He bought a urinal, signed it “R. Mutt” (a pseudonym), submitted it to a gallery show that was accepting all works of art, and sat back to watch the chaos ensue. He is sometimes credited as the first person to ask “What is art, really?” which he almost certainly was not, but art historians really like hyperbole.

Fountain was groundbreaking in that it was not actually art, but it was. It’s like some spooky quantum mechanics thing. It was rejected by the gallery people, who just weren't with it, man.  Undaunted, Duchamp went on to make a career out of so-called “ready-mades” like Fountain.  He called it art, and so it was.

Fun Fact: Is Fountain in your local museum? It’s in mine too. And a bunch more. But, in fact, it’s in none of them. The original was lost and then a bunch of “commissioned replicas” were made later, in the 60’s after everyone decided that Duchamp was a genius

      Just after Fountain was rejected from its show, a Dadaist (rule-breaking art movement, we’ll get to them) journal published an anonymous editorial (probably written by one of Duchamp’s friends) that defended the “Art-ness” of the signed urinal. The editorial said:

    “Whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”

           That second sentence pretty much sums up the eventual rationalization behind works like Monogram. By taking the urinal out of context, away from its originally-intended use, Duchamp changed the meaning of the urinal. This is sort of the big idea here. Objects have a very relative meaning. Rauschenberg did this with Monogram, if a little differently.

          Maybe Monogram isn’t a pure ready-made. We can let the historians argue that one out, but it is heavily influenced by the idea of ready-mades. Rauschenberg took a bunch of everyday-ish objects and put them together in a way that had meaning to him. I’ve read plenty of articles explaining what that meaning actually was, from a statement about his homosexuality to an attack on the Abstract Expressionist movement popular at the time.

         It’s true that Rauschenberg was probably bisexual or gay, and the goat has negative Christian associations in much the same way as his lifestyle did. It’s also true that he couldn’t relate to the “Oh, my tortured artistic soul” aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism, who boasted artists like Jackson Pollock.

"The black drips represent my sadness. That'll be 150 million dollars."

                   Personally, I like to think that he had the same sense of humor as Duchamp, and just wanted to see what would happen if he put a tire on a goat and dropped it off at the gallery.