“ I was busy trying to find ways where the imagery, the material, and the meaning of the painting would not be not an illustration of my will, but more like an unbiased documentation of my observations-and by observations, I mean that literally.”
R obert Rauschenberg’s Bookworms Harvest from 1998 encapsulates the confluence of his career-long devotion to the radicalisation of method with new subversions of traditional form. Approaching a turn in the millennium, Rauschenberg began to exploit painterly transfiguration by incorporating images in his paintings. These photographic sources, which Rosalind Krauss in 1997 brilliantly described as Rauschenberg’s “perpetual inventory”, attest to his personal idiosyncrasy. (Rosalind Krauss, “Rauschenberg and The Materialised Image,” Artforum, 1974, print). Rauschenberg’s oeuvre is characterised by an inexhaustible perversion of artistic boundaries in an effort to bridge the gap between art and life. A later work from the Anagram (A Pun) Series, Bookworms Harvest not only perpetuates this transcendence of pre-established aesthetic notions but continues his reflection on the global media experience. Committed to his own compositional logic, Rauschenberg’s visual retort to the trappings of abstraction established him as a forerunner of the Neo-Avant Garde movement.
Bookworms Harvest is an exemplary paradigm of Rauschenberg’s practice. Here, Rauschenberg embraces ambiguity instead of compositional narrative- providing a mirror to the synthesis of consciousness. At first glance, we see the stacks of a common library, a bicycle swathed in stickers, a discordant crowd upon steps: all motes of bygone experiences. Complicating these images are the apparitional facades of a reverberating skyline, and the somatic illustrations of a medical journal. In an anagram, the letters of a word are rearranged to make a new word. Here Rauschenberg achieved a similar feat with transfer images. This fragmented landscape, indelibly succinct, operates on a number of levels: a composition of visual and experiential play, a record of Rauschenberg’s experiences, and a test.mes nt to the intersubjectivity of memory.
Rauschenberg sought to overcome art’s objective shortcomings by incorporating the palpable sensations and materials of existence onto the canvas; “A picture is like the real world”, Rauschenberg says, “when it’s made out of the real world.” (The artist, cited in: Kenneth Coutts-Smith, The dream of Icarus, 1970 p. 53). This radical development in the collapse of abstractive parameters in search of greater conceptual arbitration lent Rauschenberg the faculties necessary to craft Booksworms Harvest; visual complexity and multiplicities delineate the elucidatory juxtaposition through a harmony of imagery, material, and method that has underscored Rauschenberg’s contrarian practice. Incumbent upon contradistinction from gestural expressionism, Rauschenberg transcended the defined praxis of visual linguistics by integrating the phenomenology of symbolism with sent.mes nt that cannot be conventionally conveyed.
