The sins of the world: Kenneth Bendiner argues that Robert Rauschenberg's 'combine' work Monogram is not a random assembly but a coherent whole that by alluding to Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat takes as its subject the sacrifice of Christ

Apollo, Oct, 2006 by Kenneth Bendiner

Robert Rauschenberg's 'combines' continue to be viewed as random assortments of the world's debris. (1) Yet this is the artist who in 1957 mocked abstract expressionist spontaneity with Factum I (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and Factum II (Museum of Modern Art, New York), where the paint drips, smears, torn collage items and helter-skelter composition of the first canvas reappear identically in the second. Such scrupulously planned, pointed pictorial arrangements contradict any notion of Rauschenberg as an unthinking collagist of disorder.

A few observers discern partial themes and certain consistencies of imagery in the messy, seemingly half-accidental combines. (2) More focused interpretations, however, are possible. Some of the combines gather together cultural objects that coherently re-create famous works of art, and convey clear, specific meanings. (3) Monogram, of 1955-59, in which a stuffed Angora goat stands upon a collaged canvas, is one example (Figs. 1 and 2). The goat and its accessories reached their final configuration gradually over the course of four years. Rauschenberg did not create the work in some momentary outburst of chance and mayhem) Monogram carefully and imaginatively re-works one of Victorian England's most powerful Protestant works of art, The Scapegoat, painted in 1854-55 by William Holman Hunt (Fig. 3). (5)

[FIGURES 1-3 OMITTED]

I am not the first to see a connection between Monogram and The Scapegoat. In an essay largely devoted to literature and politics, Kevin Nolan brings the two images together. He views Rauschenberg's goat as expressing the same outcast meanings as Hunt's animal, but apparently does not see Monogram as a specific re-working of the Victorian painter's famous image. (6) There have been other interpretations of Monogram, quite different from the religious one presented here, notably that of Robert Hughes, who sees homosexual passion as the theme, with the proverbially lusty goat penetrating the sphincter-tyre. (7) Hughes, however, does not show how the other collage elements in Monogram support that interpretation.

An interest in Hunt's painting is not out of place in Rauschenberg's career. He included reproductions of Victorian pictures in other of his combines--Edwin Landseer's Stag at Bay (1846, private collection) appears repeatedly--and religious imagery is also not unknown. Fragments of reproductions of Landseer's painting appear, for example, in Odalisk (1955-58; Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Curfew (1958; David Geffen collection, Los Angeles). Religious images--a picture from a religious magazine of the Magi en route to Bethlehem, a small print of Leonardo's Last Supper, and a church's Easter notecard with a picture of a pilgrim kneeling before Christ--appear in Odalisk. Many of Rauschenberg's later constructions contain religious imagery, most notably the works of the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange/Chile series of 1984-85, the largest of which is Altar Peace/ROCI Chile (Robert Rauschenberg Collection), a six-foot-tall crucifix.

Hunt's hallucinatory vision of the Old Testament's scapegoat, dying on the shores of the Dead Sea, was once a familiar and revered image in the English-speaking Protestant world. It was just the sort of icon that would have been familiar to the congregation of the Church of Christ in Port Arthur, Texas, where Rauschenberg worshipped in the 1930s. As a youth, he reportedly had wanted to become a preacher, and he continued to attend church during his first years in New York. (8) Furthermore, in 1956 in New York, when he was at work on Monogram, the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition, 'Masters of British Painting 1800-1950', which included Hunt's Awakening Conscience (Tate, London). The Scapegoat was discussed briefly by Andrew Ritchie in the catalogue of that show as 'a symbol of "the Church on Earth, subject to all the hatred of the unconverted world".' (9)

The Scapegoat illustrates an ancient Judaic ritual (see Leviticus 16). Each year during Yom Kippur the sins of the Israelites were placed on the head of a pure white goat, and when the goat died in the wilderness the sins of the Israelites died with him. Holman Hunt, who was an exceedingly earnest Christian, understood the scapegoat ceremony as a foretelling of Christ's sacrifice. Just as the goat bore the sins of the congregation, and absolved those sins through his death, so too did Jesus die in order that mankind's sins could be cleansed and heaven attained. The Old Testament's scapegoat in Hunt's painting represents Christ. (10)

In Monogram, Rauschenberg 'translated' Hunt's goat painting, elaborating its Christian meaning, and re-did parts of Hunt's image with modern allusions (for the details discussed below, see Fig. 4 and the diagrams overleaf). The stuffed goat, of course, replicates Hunt's animal, the paint on its head somewhat akin to the red wreath on Hunt's beast. (The red fillet of Hunt's goat, which looks like Christ's crown of thorns, was supposed to turn white at the goat's death if the sins of Israelites were absolved.) I imagine that upon finding the stuffed goat in a used furniture store, Rauschenberg saw its resemblance to Hunt's image, and then proceeded to add collage elements in accord with the Victorian painting's theme and vision. (11) Rauschenberg placed a tyre on the body of his goat to depict the beast's burden. The wheel that once supported a weighty chassis now rests upon the body of a weak and dying goat. The tyres that often appear in Rauschenberg's combines of the 1950s and early 60s can have many meanings. But here, I would suggest, the tyre represents Christ's burden as the 'wheel of life', the 'wheel of dharma'--mankind's sensual and suffering life in the mortal world. It is a Buddhist concept applied to a Christian subject. Buddhism attracted many in New York's artistic circles in the 1950s, and Rauschenberg's friend John Cage had been a Buddhist adherent since the 1930s (Cage drove the automobile that in 1953 produced Rauschenberg's first wheel-image, a 23-foot-long tyre-print; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). (12) In his non-linear, scattershot manner of allusion, Rauschenberg further emphasised his Christ-goat's painful burden by leaving visible the stencilled quality-label of his canvas: EXTRA HEAVY.