Landscape Matters Issue 4 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 4
1.
Discover the Goat within
Scott Farlow
I HAVE BEEN THINKING about goats lately.
I grew up in the borderlands of Kent and East Sussex. Hop gardens and orchards were my playgrounds and I had a pet goat
called Humbug. Humbug was old and wise, mischievous and
playful, semi-feral, stubborn, sardonic, inquisitive, charming,
intelligent and creative. He was excellent company and he was
my friend. Like much of the evocative landscapes of my youth,
he is gone, but I am left with memories of profound significance as I now reflect upon my life, my work and what it means
to be an artist, poet, teacher and landscape architect in these
challenging and unsettling times.
He was excellent company and he was my friend.
Some of you might be familiar with an artwork by Robert Rauschenberg called Monogram. It is part of a series of works that
Rauschenberg called Combines and evolved through three
states between 1955 and 1959. The focus of Monogram is the
fusion of a stuffed Angora goat and a car tyre. Homoerotic
interpretations aside, such unexpected and symbolic blending
of the natural and the industrial invites us to question our understanding of the ever-changing world and the often fraught
relationship between nature and human activity.
Above: Monogram by Robert
Rauschenberg.
Rauschenberg said that the goat and the tyre ‘lived happily
ever after’, a statement that surely renders the work as potent
(and ironic) today as it was at its conception. If not more so.
In contemplating the implied messages of the forced connection between a dead goat and a tyre, and thus the duality (and
reality) of this ‘terrible beauty’, I am mindful of the bewildering
complexities of our contemporary world. It goes without saying that the issues we are facing are seriously big. They are
present, they are now and they clearly aren’t going away any
time soon. Unlike the inanimate sculpture, they directly and
