Description

Robert Rauschenberg questioned the relationship of art and the news in a moment of great social and political change. He collaged headlines and images from mainstream and counterculture newspapers published in early 1970. This jumble of scraps evokes the artist’s studio tabletop or a newspaper designer’s light table. To make the final printing plate, Rauschenberg manually cut and pasted different elements together (in the form of photographic negatives), visually presenting the tension between art and the news where the photographs overlap. The gridded arrangement of the halftone dots conflict and create an optical effect known as moiré pattern.