Christy Rupp: Rat Patrol in New York City, 1979

In 1979, American artist Christy Rupp (born 1949) created a street poster of a prowling, life-sized rat. With a keen interest in animal behaviour and habitat, Rupp’s popster coincided with a three-week strike by NYC sanitation workers. As the rubbish bags piled up on the city’s streets, Rupp added her poster wherever rats were claiming new territory.

The strike was big news. And it got bigger when not far from Rupp’s home in the financial district, witnesses reported that a woman had been attacked there by a pack of rats. The media picked up on Rupp’s posters placed before the incident. When they discovered the artist and that she shared her home with domestic mice and rats as part of her study of animal behaviour, Rupp and her art became news.

 

The rat featured on Christy Rupp’s poster was appropriated from a public service subway poster (above). Usually Rupp wheat-pasted her posters low to the ground. There were originally 2000 offset posters: 1,000 with the rat facing right; 1,000 with the rat facing left.

 

As well posters, she made plaster sculptures of rats, which she placed in the street amidst piles of garbage. Rupp placed her posters not only in locations connected with the habitat of rats, but also in places of commercial and political power like the walls of banks and the steps of City Hall.

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The city has its own ecosystem with a delicate balance. Soon after moving to the city, I became a fascinated observer of rat behavior, watching for patterns in feeding, social interaction, and population movement. The garbage strike of 1979 went on for 3 weeks, creating habitat opportunity with every accumulating pile of garbage. I started pasting these up as a way to mark areas that were infested, so people could avoid walking through dangerous areas in which rats were defending their territories. I “borrowed” a sanitation ad from a subway car of this lifesize rat and had it offset printed. Never intending to defend rats, I wanted to point out how we had created a habitat for them, and they would naturally occupy it.

It has been said that rats possess a culture—if you define culture as the ability to pass information through generations without direct experience—such as a fear of predators and pesticides. Humans and elephants are the only other species that can do that.

– Christy Rupp (via)

 

 

As Marc Miller writes at Gallery 98, which has a fantastic collection of items for sale:

Much of Rupp’s art was connected with Collaborative Projects Inc. (COLAB), a loosely organized group that experimented with new ways of linking art with real-life issues and everyday people. Her street posters and rat sculptures corresponded with the group’s philosophy, as did her work as an artist-in-residence in the Animal Behavior Department at the American Museum of Natural History. Art as a means of education lay at the heart of Animals Living in Cities, a group exhibition she organized for two art spaces connected to COLAB—Fashion Moda in the South Bronx (1979), and ABC No Rio in the Lower East Side (1980). In summer of 1980, Rupp was a conspicuous presence in the Times Square Show, a highly publicized exhibition organized by COLAB in a former Times Square massage parlor. Her rat posters lined the stairway, and the gift shop featured her multiples of plaster rats and silkscreened T-shirts with rats.

 

Via: Gallery 98.