ART OF THE REAL

Robert Rauschenberg's transformative energy.

- HILTON ALS

On certain days, I'd cut school and head over to the Museum of Modern Art to dream awhile. This was in the mid-nineteen-seventies, and my high school—then called the High School for Performing Arts—was on West Forty-sixth Street. I lived in Brooklyn, and the world within the walls of that school, and beyond them, was a wonderland to me. In addition to all that I was learning in my classes, there was Manhattan itself, and, a block or so away, the Gotham Book Mart, Frances Steloff's fabulous bookstore stuffed with treasures, and, a little farther, the MOMA. I didn’t know much about modern art, European or American (though I'd seen some African art at the Brooklyn Museum), but I was porous, and entering that storied building one afternoon and encountering a stuffed goat on a multi-panelled wooden platform remains one of the more destabilizing experiences of my life. The goat had a goatee, horns, and a long-haired silver torso. Its head and neck were streaked with several colors of paint, as though it had put on makeup while drunk. Not only that—there was a black-and-white rubber tire around its middle. Standing before the goat, I felt as if I were having the worst or best possible dream, and, to steady myself, I read the wall label. Titled “Monogram,” the piece had been made in 1955-59 by an artist whose retrospective I'd walked into: Robert Rauschenberg. (I learned later that, in his twenties, he'd changed his name from Milton to Robert, because he liked the approachable sound of “Bob.”) Who was this man? And what did the word “monogram” mean in this context, or in any context? I remember perspiring, not because the museum was too hot but because something was happening to me: an aesthetic experience I did not understand was changing my body temperature, changing my mind.