It is sometimes claimed that some models are more than a little sheepish, but in this case we were dealing with a righteous goat

Claes Britton | Dec 22, 2008 | 0 comments

When, some twenty moon revolutions back or so, we were entrusted by Moderna Museet with the honorable and committing task of designing and producing the massive, recently published The History Book, in celebration of the world famous museum's half century anniversary, it wasn't long before the vision for the cover of this book appeared crisp and clear in the mind of Yours Truly. It should of course be the two glass eyes of Robert Rauschenberg’s monumentally famous goat "Monogram", the most iconic of all the modern masterpieces in the museum's magnificent collection, a work that has indeed become something of a logotype for the museum and which will be, to be sure, even more so hereafter; one eye on each side of the cover of the slip case, one bright, one darker: the two sides of art and life, and by no means nothing lesser.

The reason that this idea came so naturally to me is certainly that I grew up in this museum, where my beloved, long diseased aunt worked in the children’s cinema and where I, my brother and my cousin — and with considerable success — spent a good deal of our childhoods’ fall and winter weekends in the late sixties and early seventies in the children's workshop and play room while my mother and, in particular, my father were drinking cheap wine in the company of politically sympathetic friends and contemporaries in the restaurant: a geniously simple concept far more sensual and intellectually and creatively rewarding, I dare claim, than today's gastly "ball rooms" and other atrocities in McDonald's, Bauhaus, IKEA and other godless doldrums. Those omniscent, so profoundly kind and loving and yet so heartbreakingly sad and resigned eyes had captivated me from as far back as I can recall. They told a tale of the inevitable suffering, humiliation and enslavement of spirits in this world. In those days, the goat was standing free in the center of the museum's main hall, without its present glass cage, even if we were no longer allowed to pet it, much less ride upon it, which the somewhat older kids had done when the goat had first arrived in the museum, in swinging 1962, for the pivotal exhibition "4 Americans" (Rauschenberg, Johns, Stankiewicz, Leslie).

It's a tribute to our comissioners, if I may allow myself a moment of self-glorification, that they instantly approved of my idea, and with considerable enthusiasm, which my friend Frederik Lieberath, the master still-life photographer, also did, later.

Creating the necessary conditions for this photographic shoot, however, proved a much more complicated and time-consuming matter. It took a good deal of arguing from my side before I had convinced our clients that it was absolutely necessary to move the goat down to the museum's photo studio and remove its glass cage, and that we needed two full days for the shoot — one to build the rig and do some tests, one for the actual photography. Moving "Monogram" out of its place on the Monday, when the museum is closed, was one thing, but Tuesday quite another, as visitors would then be disappointed, since the goat is the musem's number one mouthpiece and crowd pleaser. "Monogram" is an extremely fragile work of art, which is only lended very rarely and exclusively for unique exhibitions at other world leading museums, in exchange for other masterpieces of equal magnitude, and which for this purpose has its own customized freight box, the size of a lumberjack’s cabin. It took even longer before our clients in their turn had seceeded in persuading the staff of technicians and conservators to perform this operation. Finally, there we were all the same with the ol’ goat in the studio on two grim, gray late winter days in early March. At nightfall on the first day, when we had framed the goat with screens and cloth, rigged the entire truckload of equipment and started doing some tests, the chief conservator strolled into the studio to inspect these strange proceedings which he had done his best to prevent. Checking out our rig with a stance reminiscent of a big boy looking at younger kids playing, he said, en passant: "I take it you know how much this piece is worth, don't you, boys?" No we don't, we answered truthfully. "Well then I will tell you", he said, which he then did, nonchalantly wiping off one of the glass eyes with his sleeve (not succeding, however, in removing the misty spot that I guess has always been there, along with some small paint stains).

I will now give you an opportunity to guess the value of Rashenberg’s "Monogram" — its value at that time that is, which was just a few days before Rauschenberg passed away and long before the eruption of this present capitalistic crisis. A clue could be that both Frederik and I had nightmares that same night about the goat being damaged and severed in various ways due to clumsiness on our side — screens and tripods falling and breaking horns and such...

Not that I reckon there will be many guesses on this value, as nobody ever comments in the English version of this column, as opposed to the Swedish version, where by old basketball teamates and home boyz are flooding the damned thing with utterly outrageous and downright bizarre and demented babbling.

Yes, this life moves us on along some strange paths. One thing that I've learned is that time is longer than we tend to think but memories much shorter. When I, back in 1998, wrote a massive, highly freaked out and gloriously scandalous literary short story fomat article in the weekend section of Sweden's leading daily Dagens Nyheter about the museum and Stockholm's bourgoise cultural scene in general, published shortly after the inaugration(s) of the new musem and letting loose all hell all over me, well the last thing I would have guessed was that I, that very same person, less than a decade later would be trusted with the task of producing the very same museum's grand 50-year anniversary book. Today, few seem to remember that I ever wrote this, I must confess, rather nasty and, should we say, somewhat imature piece, which is also included in my book "Sekelskifte i Stockholm" ("Turn of the century in Stockholm"). That's the way life goes. Matters that you yourslelf see as crucially important are quickly obscured and then forgotten.

Those of you who may be able to read Swedish can judge for yourselves, as I've added the piece piece to my text archive (the Swedish version), where my frequently quoted extensive interview with the museum's legendary founding director Pontus Hultén, based on over ten hours of exclusive interviewing and published in Stockholm New N0.5, 1998, can also be found.

It is sometimes claimed that some models are more than a little sheepish, but in this case we were dealing with a righteous goat

Comments

Recent blog entries