184FOLLOWING MATERIALITYraft is covered in paint, fragments of wood, paper, cardboard, newspaper
articles, prints, and traces that have been painted over with a general dis-
regard for contours; and some of these fragments bare the visible imprint
of commercial lettering—broken-up words; the failure of language. Para-
doxically, the solemn simplicity Monogram embodies is the result of a
complex interconnection and layering of many materials, textures, and
surfaces: a “sculpture-painting” that challenges any canon of classical art.
Beyond the unorthodox materiality that characterizes it, Monogram
has puzzled critics because of the enigmatic animal presence it comprises. In
1959, when it was first exhibited at Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York, the
use of animal skin in artistic contexts was unusual. As we know, surrealism
had repeatedly flirted with the awkward and alluring materiality of fur, but
presenting a whole angora goat, rather than a manipulated, fragmented, or
reinvented animal body, constituted a rupture with previous discourses
and practices. Initially, this work was condemned by some critics as little
more than a satirical and derivative object appropriating Willem de
Kooning’s brushstroke, Duchamp’s readymade, and the collage technique
of Picasso, Braque, and Kurt Schwitters.^71 These critiques can be used to
better understand Monogram’s allure—its gesturing charge, the elusive
quality characterizing the art object itself as ingrained in materialities that
enable it to surpass the role of symbol. In this combine, not only do the
juxtapositions of materiality transcend the prescription of the classical
artistic canon, but it is clear that Rauschenberg deliberately presented a
clash among notions of classical materiality in the use of paint, its con-
temporary rushed and time-based application, and the liminality between
what was institutionally acknowledged as artistic language and what
was not.
But despite Monogram’s irreducible material charge, most art histori-
ans have insisted on symbolic readings. Some have interpreted the goat as
the oldest metaphor of priapic energy. The symbolic charge of the goat led
to a recurrent reading of Monogram. Roger Cranshaw, Robert Lewis, and
Robert Hugs all agree that in its semantic loading of the tire as a signifier,
Monogram proposes a metaphoric representation of the homosexual
penetrative act.^72 Guided by a surrealist analytical structure, this reading,
invites a Freudian game of free associations. This interpretation emerges
from the consideration of Rauschenberg’s own homosexuality. Hughes
called Monogram “one of the few great icons of male homosexual love in