FOLLOWING MATERIALITY185modern culture.”^73 In general, these readings have been informed by
Rauschenberg’s own tendency to incorporate autobiographical elements
in his work. According to Jerry Saltz, the goat is an early Christian sym-
bol of the damned: a direct reference to Rauschenberg’s status as gay/
bisexual man and artist living in New York in the 1960s—therefore, alle-
gorically, the artist was representing himself as “a satyr squeezing through
the eye of an aesthetic/erotic needle.”^74
Other psychoanalytical interpretations could link the goat and the tire
through the literal and metaphorical conceptions of drive—the goat is a
symbol of sex drive, while tires are essential car parts. Cars and sexual drive
have been long associated in psychoanalytical terms, while in this case, be-
cause of the position in which the tire is situated around the waist of the
goat, Monogram could be inherently gesturing toward the friction between
desire and castration—the frustration of drive itself. Also recurrent in the
art historical accounts of Monogram is the story that, as a child growing up
in a Texan oil-drilling town, the artist was traumatized upon discovering
that his father had killed his pet goat for food.^75 As seen from this perspec-
tive, Monogram appears as the spectral return of the unresolved trauma
caused by the father figure—textbook matter for Freudian analysis.
Arthur Danto has proposed another symbolic reading, in which the goat
figures as a sacrificial animal. But in relation to the materiality of the piece,
Danto notes that “goat and tire have 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.”^76 Of relevance to the interpreta-
tive short-circuiting caused by Monogram is the title of the piece itself—one
that fails to anchor its meaning within a specific semantic register, thereby
elusively freeing the combine in what Rosalind Krauss would have called an
“uncontainable network of associations.”^77 Cunningly, in 1981, Roger Cran-
shaw and Adrian Lewis advanced that in front of Monogram we are “faced
with an abundance of competing semantic possibilities.” The work thus so-
licits “decodification but frustrates its operation.”^78
But many of the hermeneutical challenges involved in Monogram, are
not simply posed by its semantic openness or suggestive allusiveness.
They are posed by what Elkins identifies as a persistent art historical
problem: a difficulty of saying something related to an inability of follow-
ing the materiality of the work of art itself—in brief: taking materiality