The Medium of the Present. Rauschenberg’s Displaced Method
The Medium of the Present. Rauschenberg’s Displaced Method

Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s ‘Inferno’ from 1958-1960. Instead of focusing on the allegorical or symbolic aspects of this project, the author tries to analyze the historicity that stems from the artist’s specific method – or as the article tries to prove: quasi-technique – of “solvent transfer” invented not long before the work on illustrations and developed during its realization. The article discusses this method in juxtaposition with two important contributions to the discussions about the importance of the artist’s technique for the understanding of his or her broader significance. The first is George Didi-Huberman’s book on the imprint as a prototype for anachronistic reflection on art, the second – Jacques Derrida’s essay on Artonin Artaud’s drawings and his practice of “unsensing the subjectile. While drawing upon those two texts the author of the article analyzes various aspects of temporality implicated in the method of solvent transfer and thus also in the project of Dante’s reading.

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