FOLLOWING MATERIALITY183resolves in the acknowledgment that animals remain inaccessible to us.
This is the most frustrating aspect of botched taxidermy: its inherent
postmodernist essence. When not indulging in pastiche and parody,
postmodernism showed its darkest heart. It obsessively relished “the
matter of fact.” Its sarcasm would often turn to cynicism. It privileged
the aesthetics of wrongness in anything, and it bore a passive pessimism
at its core—one that eventually tired audiences. Baker’s conception of
botched taxidermy as “something gone wrong with the animal” is a
product of its own time. Like many other postmodernist incarnations
with a tendency to show all that was “rotten,” its desire was to perform
trauma, but it offered nothing, or very little, to recover from it. Botched
taxidermy aligned the work of art with the impenetrability we attribute
to animality—it had a revelatory power. But what can follow such ac-
knowledgment? What can we do with the knowledge that animals are
inaccessible and ever withdrawing, beyond admiring the ruin of classi-
cal representations?^68
An important opportunity to overcome the limitations of the post-
modernist aesthetic of wrongness lies in the proposal to follow materiali-
ties and surfaces in new and dedicated ways. Baker said that Monogram
“goaded” the viewer, “putting the viewer in the position of the animal.”^69
I believe that Monogram does a lot more than simply staging a “compel-
lingly direct confrontation” or posing as an obstacle, and that much of
what this work commands rests on its Dada/surrealist-inscribed geneal-
ogy, its unconventional deployment of materialities, and the ability to
question the ontologies of natural and man-made within the context of
representational realism.^70
Monogram is a work that directly inserts the animal body among
mass-produced everyday objects. It is Rauschenberg’s most recognizable
combine, and it has solidly secured a place in history of art because it
seems to relentlessly withhold so much of itself—art historians simply
don’t seem to agree about what to say in relation to this sad-looking taxi-
dermied angora goat girdled by a car tire, standing on a makeshift raft. This
inability to semantically pin down this combine stems from the highly
unusual and abrasive material presence of the piece itself. The angora
wool looks matted; the somewhat melancholic look on the face of the goat
is counterpointed by splashes of thick, glossy paint; the opacity of the
rubber tire is offset by white paint applied to its tread; the surface of the