Reading the Rauschenberg

The poster is about three feet tall. The eagle takes up roughly the upper third of it — head in profile, body squared toward the viewer, tail fanned out. Around the bird, in overlapping rectangles and irregular strips, are photographs: a strip mine, a river of foam, a wrecked car, a crane over a landfill, a highway interchange seen from above, a gorilla in what appears to be a cage. The palette is low — browns, faded greens, a tired yellow. What bursts of color there are belong to the photographs themselves — blue water, a smear of red — and they do not overwhelm the earth tones that bind the image together.

The poster is viewable at the Met, MoMA, and the Rauschenberg Foundation. I have not embedded it here; the rights aren't mine to give.

The object is Earth Day April 22 poster, 1970. Offset lithograph, 33¾ × 25¼ inches, published in an edition of 10,300 by Castelli Graphics in New York for the American Environment Foundation in Washington. Robert Rauschenberg designed it. A hand-printed edition of fifty — different in scale, run at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles — exists for collectors; but the thing that mattered is the poster: ten thousand copies, distributed, pinned to walls, folded in boxes, looked at.¹

The first decision visible on the sheet is the choice not to draw the earth. Not the globe, not a map, not a human figure, not a smokestack. An eagle — and not just any eagle, the one on the Great Seal. In 1970 the bald eagle was federally protected as endangered, which is a fact the poster doesn't state but also doesn't need to. The bird was in both places at once that year: on every passport and on a list of things that were about to be gone.

The scale is deliberate. The eagle is four or five times larger than any single clipping that surrounds it, which forces the order of looking: the bird first, then the collage, never the reverse. The collage itself is made from newspapers and magazines — the same channel that had been carrying Earth Day coverage all that spring. Rauschenberg had been working in photo-transfer lithography for most of the decade and had just finished Stoned Moon, the series on the Apollo launches, at Gemini in 1969. "I began lithography reluctantly," he wrote during that period, "thinking that the second half of the twentieth century was no time to start writing on rocks." Earth Day is a print written on stone that is mostly made of other people's photographs.

The logic of the poster is the logic of collage, which is to say it does not invent; it assembles. A pollution photograph from a wire service sits next to a landfill photograph from another wire service sits next to a gorilla from a magazine feature. Each source is real. Each has a context elsewhere on the day it was taken. Put together, they become a single indictment, and something happens in that assembly that is separate from what any one photograph means on its own. This is the formal move that runs through Rauschenberg's late-1960s work — the Combines with their embedded objects, the silkscreen paintings with their layered news, the Stoned Moon lithographs with their NASA transfers. What's specific to Earth Day is that every source is pointing at the same argument; the collage is doing editorial work rather than juxtapositional work.

That is also the risk of the method. Assembled from enough clippings, a subject can lose its distinctness. The polluted river and the landfill and the gorilla start to mean the same bad thing, and the viewer stops attending to what makes any one of them specific. A gathering held under a single viewing condition is what a commonplace book is — Rauschenberg's poster is one, printed in 1970 — and the craft of such a gathering is whether the distinctness of each entry survives its neighbors. On the poster, mostly, it does: the gorilla keeps being a gorilla and not a shorthand.

The bald eagle was listed as endangered in 1967. It was downlisted to threatened in 1995 and delisted in 2007. The poster remained in its edition of ten thousand.