188FOLLOWING MATERIALITYmany artists and scholars, and that will be explored in the next few chap-
ters.^82 However, the ontological alignment of the goat, the tire, the board,
and the images in this combine leads to an ethical totalization of animal
life. Or can we bring ourselves to think beyond the register of visibility of
animal death in order to consider that many of the objects included in
the combine involve rendered animal matter, as Shukin pointed out,
and that therefore animal death cannot be localized exclusively in the
visibility of the animal form? Following materiality in a work of art surely
entails moving beyond the literalism of visibility.
And could the realist taxidermy goat be considered art at all if it were
not girdled by a tire? It is claimed that it was Jasper Johns who suggested
that the tire should hoop the animal’s body.^83 This intervention removed
the goat from the natural history connotation it still bore as taxidermy
and shifted it into the realm of artistic discourses initiated by Duchamp’s
readymades at the beginning of the century—think of Bicycle Wheel, for
instance. Combines such as Monogram defamiliarize the familiar (an-
other surrealist-derived strategy) and thus create a place of uncertainty
in which objecthood and spectatorship involve the negotiation of a com-
plex encounter—one bearing no easy resolution that could be retraced in
a history book, a religious text, or a mythological narrative.
Caught up in a difficult-to-negotiate clash between form and materi-
ality, this animal no longer is the isolated specimen of science but appears
to be a part of a microcosmolog y of objects. What is striking about all the
different interpretations of Monogram is that no art historian has effec-
tively attempted to seriously think about the animal presence in the work
in terms of its materiality. Even the obvious, still symbolic and rather lit-
eral interpretation of the piece as a representation of nature’s and tech-
nology’s antagonism, one that is consumed upon the cultural background
symbolized by the painting/raft object, could bring some attention to the
goat and its role in the work in a sense that is at least closer to some envi-
ronmental or human/animal concern. But this is not an interpretation
that the artworld has found interesting, at least thus far—for a long while,
art involving ecological statements has smacked of propaganda, and in
the eyes of many, its artistic value is diluted, if not corrupted.
While Monogram can be easily read as a clash between nature and
technology, I also argue that Monogram can be productively understood
as an early critique of realism in art. The work brings together, in an on-