FOLLOWING MATERIALITY187All the symbolic readings of Monogram that have been presented in
this chapter implicitly subjugate the objects in the combine, determining
a fixed anthropocentric reading and anchoring a semantic register that
disavows materiality. Sensation and affect are essential to the aesthetic
experience through which Monogram relentlessly gestures toward mul-
tiple inferences. From this perspective, its unorthodox materiality can be
understood as that which derails and ruptures the rhetorical determinism
of symbolism: a normative set of strictures that implicitly organizes ma-
teriality within a semantic grid capable of structuring gender roles, so-
cietal behaviors, and racial/cultural stereotypes. Most importantly, this
reprioritization of materiality provides a platform upon which the viewer
might bypass the overemphasis on linguistic signification and social con-
structivist theories in the hope of opening up a space of critique situated
between the traditional descriptive and interpretative roles of art history.
The irreducible materiality of the goat’s wool, the rubber of the tire, and
the wood of the signs upon which fragmented texts appear all bear irre-
ducible connections to the outside world. As Rauschenberg said: “All ma-
terial has history. All material has its own history built into it. There’s no
such thing as a ‘better’ material.”^81
Another hermeneutical challenge presented by Monogram lies in
Rauschenberg’s flat ontologization of the objects included—in his com-
bines, all objects are of equal importance, and Monogram is no exception.
In this sense, the animal surface, as in surrealist assemblages, is inserted
among the inanimate and the commodity. The angora goat appears to be
as important as the raft upon which it stands or the tire that encircles it.
This conception of objects as “equal to each other” within a compositional
scheme had already been explored in cubist paintings by Picasso and
Braque, and most notably in the constellation works by Miró from the
early forties, in which the artist deliberately conflated the networked flat-
ness of macroscopic outer space with the flatness of microscopic biomorphic
organisms. Miró believed in a universal equivalence of objects and that
objects provided a magical encounter with chance. This simple proposition
constitutes one of the most powerful nonanthropocentric maneuvers in
modern art, for it disrespects the hierarchy of material values and artistic
skills that have for centuries defined the very notion of power and knowl-
edge. These perspectives anticipated by far, among others, Levi Bryant’s
theories of object-oriented ontology that today attract the attention of