Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid

Acquired directly from the artist

Cologne, Kicken-Pausenback, March-April, 1988
Berlin, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildenden Kunst, July, 1988

Carter Ratcliff, Komar and Melamid, New York: Abbeville Press, 1988

The work Goat (1987-88) is closely connected to Komar and Melamid's book of visual poetry entitled Poetry of Death, written by the artists in the mid-1980s and published in German, English, and Spanish. Poetry of Death reflects the artists' impressions of their lives in both Moscow and the U.S. In this book Komar and Melamid appropriate ironic aphorisms and other sayings, some of them famous, subverting their conventional meaning by taking them out of their usual context or changing some of the words, thereby making them into puns. For example, one of the borrowed statements is taken from the first line of the Communist Manifesto: "A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism." In Komar and Melamid's version the sentence reads: "A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of eclecticism."

Goat includes the artists' first drafts of the typewritten texts of poetry that would later be included in Poetry of Death alongside other seemingly unrelated elements: an image of a nude woman, a sculpted hand that appears to be engaged in the act of writing, and a stuffed goat, the last of which occupies a substantial portion of the composition. Laden with complex symbolism, the image of the goat has played an important role in the mythology and folklore of all religions and cultures, and had varied associations. Both sexes of the animal signify fertility, vitality, and energy. The male goat (buck)--identified as such by his beard--personifies masculine virility and creative energy as well as lust and lewdness. The symbolism of the goat also relates to the pre-Christian god Pan and the Greek god Dionysius, both of whom represent the forest, unbridled nature, or the fertility aspect of nature. This tradition was carried over into Christianity, where the goat represents the devil, lust, salaciousness, and the damned, while the sheep symbolizes the saved. Other lusty creatures like satyrs and fauns were part man and part goat. The goat was also considered a sacrificial animal, and used as a scapegoat to bear the sins of an entire community.

By juxtaposing the motifs of the he-goat, the nude woman, the sculpted hand seemingly engaged in the act of writing, and their "poetry of death," Komar and Melamid may here be alluding to such dichotomies as virility/death, creative energy/creative inability, and sexual passion/impotence.