Hollington & Kyprianou

Although Rauschenberg contributed enormously to postwar ideas about agglomeration, order, appropriation, duplication, assemblage, collage and photo-into-painting, his esthetic garrulousness often turns his work into a department store: something scanned, not studied. Unlike Jasper Johns, whose art relies heavily on people talking almost ad nausea about every detail, Rauschenberg is so convinced that all things in the world are equal that the work itself often equals out and gets slushy in the mind. He is a sort of artistic suicide bomber: a true believer who is unafraid to have his work look cruddy.

... As Rauschenberg professed, "I could never make the language of Abstract Expressionism work for me -- words like 'tortured,' 'struggle' and 'pain,' I could never see those qualities in paint.

... after weeks of working with 15 erasers on a particularly dark drawing given to him by the artist, Rauschenberg produced Erased de Kooning Drawing and called it art. Actually, he called it "a monochrome no-image," saying he wanted to "purge" himself while "exercising the possibilities." Later he stated, "I would substitute anything for preconceptions and deliberateness."

...Monogram features a stuffed Angora goat encircled by a tire. The goat, whose snout is covered in multicolored war paint, is standing on a painting, as if grazing at pasture. A sort of gargoyle or ravaging scavenger guarding over and also destroying art, this cloven-hoofed creature is a shamanic manifestation of Rauschenberg. In early Christian art goats symbolized the damned. This is exactly what Rauschenberg was as a gay/bisexual man and an artist, at the time. A dingy tennis ball behind the animal suggests it has defecated on painting. Allegorically, Rauschenberg is a bull in the china shop of art history, a satyr squeezing through the eye of an esthetic/erotic needle.

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz1-11-06.asp