Monogram (artwork)

In this second state, the goat was encircled by a tire with its tread repainted white and was standing on a narrow wooden platform with a vertical extension at its posterior.

[5] In the third and final incarnation of Monogram (1959), following the suggestion of Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg placed a square panel on casters on the floor and centered the goat, as if in a pasture.

"[8] Any search for a fixed unitary meaning in a work like Monogram operates in contradiction to Rauschenberg's stated intentions.

Yet dozens of readings have been proposed by authors mining the elements of the artist's biography, the iconographic history of the objects contained in the work, as well as aesthetic and philosophical implications of the manner in which they have been combined.

Kenneth Bendiner has interpreted the work as "a specific re-working" of the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat.

[series of hanging ‘fetish’ assemblages of animal fur, rope, wood and various small objects, referencing handmade totemic scultpures worshipped for magical powers or believed to be inhabited by a spirit] [10] Critic Robert Hughes ignited controversy by insisting that the work referenced homoerotic themes and subtext, saying, "One looks at it remembering that the goat is an archetypal symbol of lust, so Monogram is the most powerful image of anal intercourse ever to emerge from the rank psychological depths of modern art.

Fifty years after its creation, it remains one of the great, complex emblems of modernity, as unforgettable (in its way) as the flank of Cézanne's mountain, the cubist kitchen table or the wailing woman in Guernica.

Responding to the controversy, critic Leo Steinberg said: This is strong and seductive prose...Yet I find the proposed reading too reductive to persuade.

For what Rosalind Krauss calls, 'An uncontainable network of associations,' we are offered one overwhelmingly single meaning, making the work and its motivations--as Rauschenberg put it on an earlier occasion--'too simple,' too single-minded.

The thrill generated in Rauschenberg's work of the fifties by the unpredictable, the perilously uncontrolled, the indeterminate connotation, has been replaced by one naughtiness--excitement of a different order.