BY LINDA DeNICOLA
Staff Writer
“Signs” Renowned artist Robert Rauschen-berg has been called an “artist-citizen” for good reason. He believes that artists must be engaged in determining the fate of the earth.”
And that is not just talk. Since the 1960s, the Texas-born artist and activist has used printmaking as a vehicle to address contemporary social and political concerns, such as racial equality, the war in Vietnam, and environmental protection.
Area art lovers and Rauschenberg groupies will be able to see some of his posters at the Monmouth Museum, Lincroft, now through July 23 in an exhibit titled “Robert Rauschenberg, Artist-Citizen: Posters for a Better World.”
Organized for travel by the Smith-sonian Institution, the exhibit includes 17 posters produced between 1969 and 1996 that address such issues as apartheid, artists’ rights, Earth Day and nuclear disarmament.
Avis H. Anderson, executive director of the Monmouth Museum, said of the exhibit, “With the current social issues of war, the environment and cultural prejudice on everyone’s mind, we are thrilled to present this collection of Rauschen-berg’s ‘Protest Posters.’ His visual statements on behalf of human rights are a testimony to how art reflects our collective consciousness.”
“Stoned Moon” According to a press release from the Monmouth Museum, in the 1960s, Rauschenberg, who was born in 1925, began applying his innovative collage style to silk-screen prints that combined familiar images from popular culture and current events in radical ways.
Praised for his artistic and social energy, Rauschenberg earned the title “artist-citizen” in 1976 during his critically acclaimed retrospective at the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum).
Introducing the exhibition are two extraordinary images: a poster from his 1969 “Stoned Moon” series, which indicates his optimism about the space program, and his famous 1970 screen print “Signs,” which powerfully alludes to contemporary events, such as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., social upheaval and the death of rock icon Janis Joplin.
“Earth Summit (Last Turn, Your Turn)” Also represented in the exhibition are posters he designed for the Rauschenberg Oversees Culture Interchange (ROCI, pronounced Rocky), in which he interacted with people of other countries in an attempt to enhance international understanding and worldwide peace through collaborative art-making.
“I thought it would be terrible to live in this world and not know what another part of the world was like,” said Rausch-enberg, an octogenarian who continues to produce work.
According to his biography, by 1958 his work had moved from abstract painting to three-dimensional combines and two-dimensional collages.
One of Rauschenberg’s first and most famous combines was titled “Monogram” (1959) and consisted of an unlikely set of materials: a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball and paint.
He is reputed to be one of the primary artists who explored making art out of just about anything. As Pop Art emerged in the 1960s, Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen prints.
Rauschenberg transferred prints of familiar images, such as JFK or baseball games, to canvases and overlapped them with painted brush strokes. They looked like abstractions from a distance, but up close the images related to each other, as if in conversation. These collages were a way of bringing together the inventiveness of his combines with his love for painting. Using this new method, he found he could make a commentary on contemporary society using the very images that helped to create that society.
From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, he continued the experimentation in prints by printing onto aluminum, moving Plexiglas disks, clothes and other surfaces.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Rauschenberg continued his experimentation, concentrating primarily on collage and new ways to transfer photographs.
In 1998, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City put on its largest exhibition ever with 400 works by Rauschen-berg, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work, and its influence over the second half of the 20th century.
The Rauschenberg exhibit will be at the Monmouth Museum through July 23.
The Monmouth Museum is on the Brookdale Community College campus, 765 Newman Springs Road (Route 520), at parking lot No. 1.
The main gallery, in which “Robert Rauschenberg, Artist-Citizen: Posters for a Better World” will be on exhibit, is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Sunday from 1-5 p.m.
Admission is $6 per person. For more information, call the museum at (732) 747-2266.