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Lot Essay
Part of his Anagram series, See Level, 1997, is one of Robert Rauschenberg's more extraordinary visual reenactments of reality and conveys a narrative using recovered images that trace back to his earlier work. Further exploring the transfer process of images to paper, each element in the Anagram series is assigned multiple tasks, ideas, and identities as Rauschenberg continues to work to render all things equal in the eyes of art and focusing in the "gap between art and life."
An exhibition catalogue for the series states, "The Anagrams are the poetic ciphers of his self's self-discovery as it travels among the objects of the material world and inserts itself into the chaotic, arbitrary world of nature" (B. Rose, Anagrams, exh. cat., Pace Wildenstein, New York, 1996, p. 6). The images of See Level, are taken directly out of every day life with mundane imagery of street signs, architecture, and children combined into a more esoteric, exploratory, and jumbled personal vision of the world.
Spatial ambiguities are ever present See Level, as Rauschenberg blends images on top of images, representational and abstract alike with background and foreground in constant flux. The use of photography in the series designates and organizes fragments of the material world with a sense of immediacy, using the camera as an impersonal agent of the artist's creative eye and essentially winning Rauschenberg's authority over his view of reality. Rauschenberg has revealed a world united by art in See Level, using a water-based medium and paper to melt together the images of a fragmented reality into a seamless whole.
An exhibition catalogue for the series states, "The Anagrams are the poetic ciphers of his self's self-discovery as it travels among the objects of the material world and inserts itself into the chaotic, arbitrary world of nature" (B. Rose, Anagrams, exh. cat., Pace Wildenstein, New York, 1996, p. 6). The images of See Level, are taken directly out of every day life with mundane imagery of street signs, architecture, and children combined into a more esoteric, exploratory, and jumbled personal vision of the world.
Spatial ambiguities are ever present See Level, as Rauschenberg blends images on top of images, representational and abstract alike with background and foreground in constant flux. The use of photography in the series designates and organizes fragments of the material world with a sense of immediacy, using the camera as an impersonal agent of the artist's creative eye and essentially winning Rauschenberg's authority over his view of reality. Rauschenberg has revealed a world united by art in See Level, using a water-based medium and paper to melt together the images of a fragmented reality into a seamless whole.