Monogram
One of Rauschenberg's most famous works, Monogram, pushed the art world's buttons by further merging painting and sculpture as the combine moved from the wall to the pedestal. While he began with traditional materials - an abstract painting executed in oil on stretched canvas - he abandoned tradition by adding an assemblage of found objects on top of the painting to create a canonical, three-dimensional combine painting. Rauschenberg often acquired materials for his artwork on his meanderings about New York City, allowing chance encounters with found objects to dictate his artistic output, and Monogram was no exception. In one of his wanderings in the early 1950s, Rauschenberg found and purchased a stuffed angora goat from an office supply store and later encircled it with a tire he encountered in street trash. He applied paint to the goat's snout in gestural brushstrokes that quoted Abstract Expressionism. On top of the canvas, Rauschenberg surrounded the goat with a pasture of more detritus strewn about its hooves - including a tennis ball, a wooden plank, and several found and reproduced images.
Similar to his earlier combine, Bed (1955), Monogram is a work that engages the viewer on multiple levels, as they look at, down, and around the interwoven elements of the work all vying for the viewer's attention at once. However, despite many varied interpretations, Rauschenberg refused to hint at any predetermined meaning of the different symbols within the work, instead allowing viewers to create their own associations between the objects and images. Despite Rauschenberg's insistence against specific meanings of the work, often critics interpret the tire-ringed goat as a symbol of the artist's sexuality, as well as his role within the art world, trampling over tradition with his own artistic monogram.
theartstory.org
