186FOLLOWING MATERIALITYseriously. Classical art has trained us to think allegorically—symbolism
became the quintessential manifestation of the true artistic object. In
achieving its aims, classical art has substantially relied on a methodical
reductionism of materiality. The sculpture of a lion could be made of
bronze or marble but not with the flesh, bones, and skin of the lion itself
(the reason why taxidermy was never accepted by the canon of classical
art). The transubstantiation process of classical art discussed earlier in
this chapter was, however, not simply a manifestation of artistic dexter-
ity. It also constituted a contextual operation of transcendentalism—one
that prompted the viewer to bypass the actual materiality of the object in
order to admire its perfected and rationalized Platonic original: the ob-
ject became an image, an idea.^79
In the case of Monogram, Rauschenberg could have adopted the clas-
sical strategy of transubstantiation. He could have sculpted all the com-
ponents of Monogram in marble, stone, or metal. Yet, he intentionally
built the work with actual objects—the combine is built like a three-
dimensional collage of readymades and found objects. This contingency
should guide the interpretative method. It is implicit that the materiality
these objects flaunt should prevent the viewer from leaving the actual ob-
jects behind in the search for a symbolic register—Monogram’s materiality
is inseparable from its semiotic components, and its semiotic components
are largely determined by the materiality that defines them.
First and foremost, following the materiality of works of art entails a
collapse of the object/subject dichotomy through which the viewer be-
comes a material-semiotic actor. In Donna Haraway’s view, this entails
the ontological collapse between the definitions of human and nonhu-
man, the social and the physical, the material and the nonmaterial.^80 The
materiality of a work of art thus becomes intrinsically bound to the prac-
tices that manipulate its material component and to the discourses that
define this component on aesthetic grounds: the classical relationship be-
tween matter and form is entirely brought into question. Recovering muted
materialities from the textualities of symbolic readings becomes one of
the important methodological steps informed by new materialism and
contemporary art. Following materiality seriously takes us to the very edges
of the boundaries of discourses, and well beyond the conception of
authorship—it challenges what can be said and thought about the objects
we shape and that shape us.