Art Forum

AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES ROSENQUIST

An Interview with James Rosenquist - Artforum International

ONE OF THE STATEMENTS repeatedly made about Pop art was that Pop artists have always accepted anything that was part of our society rather than registering some sort of protest. This was considered a basic difference between Dada and Pop. Alloway phrased it “to live with the culture one has grown up with.”

That idea of accepting the banal for the beautiful doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. That’s like trying to figure from the glint on the grass what kind of sun in the morning is going to activate how you are going to act for the rest of the day. Of course, I hate smog and, of course, I react to this and that, but it doesn’t have much to do with anything.

Your first paintings in 1960, 1961, and 1962, however, because of their banal imagery did put you into the “pop” bag. Take Necktie, for instance.

At that time I was trying to find an empty area to work in that wasn’t popular, wasn’t contemporary looking. It’s so funny that the people have gotten into Pop art. . . . In my case it wasn’t meant to be present, passionate imagery—it was meant to be no image, nothing image, nowhere. Objective It’s like a beat generation person riding around in a five-year old car. It’s not an antique and it’s not new. Necktie is supposed to be hung in the very corner of a room so that it’s like a person can’t stand it in the room and he’s trying to get out to the corner. It’s like being stuck at a cocktail party. It’s that idea.

In the so-called billboard paintings, like Silver Skies, the images are sharper.

Silver Skies has to do with bringing scale and feelings of scale, altitude, color, and imagery into a room. It had something to do with an exhilaration that I’ve had while working on a billboard. Being reduced to the size of a fly on a piece of paper does things. I’ve often wished in the past that I could bring people to the back of the Astor Theater and have them look out the window of the sign into Times Square to let them see the color and the feeling. Ephemeral. Beauty of artificial lights So the simplest and the cheapest thing I could do would be to make an oil painting of the illusion on canvas and try to give the feeling of this numbness that I felt when being immersed in painting large imagery. The imagery was expendable to me but it was the color and texture that I was interested in, for instance, if I thought I felt like painting red I might have painted a great big tomato. Objects and their meanings are secondary? Treating objects like foreign props with no meaning. I had these possibilities working for Artkraft Strauss—there’d be a desk in the front office with imagery there that I could pick out and do something with. It was a place to learn and I had an opportunity to paint a lot of gallons of paint and drop a lot of it.

Nevertheless, certain images are recurrent, for example, body fragments, particularly hands, automobiles, and food. Why did you choose them?

Hands for me have always been sort of an offering, a suggestion saying 2 cents off, buy this, try a new steam iron. They had to do with advertising, and advertising, as I said before, was like the power on the street that a lot of money was poured into, to make something bright and flashy, to make something go. And that was a powerful gesture that people would recognize, so if I put them in a painting, they would see them and they couldn’t mistake them for a crucifix because it would be a hand offering something. I used that imagery so it wouldn’t be mistaken for something else.

As for automobiles and car parts, I was brought up with automobiles in the Midwest and I used to know the names of all of them and I came here and spent some time in New York and I didn’t know anything that was stylish, and I didn’t have any affiliation with anything that was stylish, and I found myself standing on the corner, and things going by, and I couldn’t recognize anything and that wasn’t only automobiles. There were a lot of other things and I began to feel that what was precious to my thing was what I could remember.

Perhaps car parts appealed to you because of their simple, geometric shapes.

It’s like you’re born with your own living room furniture and in Russia they’re born with another set of living room furniture. This has to do with whether you like the shape of an automobile or the shape of horses and a wagon. Objects around us are historical accumulation of style culture. As they say in Eastern philosophy, energy turns to ethics and to me a human being is tied to some kind of humanism and that has to do with ethics and I could think of ethics of a stone or feelings towards a stone. And I like to ask the question—are people really part of the living room furniture How attached are we to surrounding objects? of their own community or aren’t they? It’s the idea for a film I’m making now.

The light bulb seemed to be a particular favorite. A real light bulb appeared in one of your first pieces, Floor Plan, and it was reborn in the form of a GE label in later paintings and prints.

Floor Plan came from knowing an ex-convict who, when I visited him in his home, used to wander around the house looking out the curtains and knocking over the furniture and going from room to room turning on and off the lights—he was very nervous and watching out for people. So I tried to invent a randomness machine like a tilting pinball table that would light up in sequence and then go off again, but I always came up with a sequence that would return very quickly, so it ended up as a painted floor plan with light bulbs hanging from it like a chandelier..

In the later paintings and prints I was interested in why a person’s eye is like a camera and do things happen in a camera the same way they do in the eye. When you look into the sun with a camera, you see a phenomenon called “circles of confusion” which are little balls of color that start moving around or the aperture is- reflected inside the camera into a circle, the same way in your eye Interesting —there’s a reflection in your eye that causes strange things to happen. And it was like trying to find something while looking at a light bulb. Also it was trying to see something while a person was looking into a vacant area like straight up into the sky, at a plain white wall, meditating What happens if you look and look and look—you see spots in front of your eyes.

You had a special way of fragmenting images, cutting them into large, sharply angled, irregular shapes and then fitting them together in a way that simulated collage. Why did you do that?

That has to do with identifying a shape of something that you’re looking at. For instance, if you’re looking at something at a long distance, say, over the plains in the West, you might think that’s all trees there but it might be blue smoke. Or you might think you’re seeing two people walking, but you’re only seeing one person with an umbrella in the wind. So, if you take an image and you fragment it—let’s say you take a beautiful straight-on photograph of somebody’s face and you cut out a section of this face, you could change the character of the feeling of part of that person by the edge of the shape so that if you take two ideas and you connect them and you identify a part of the two ideas, you might unleash what the other part of it is instead of disguising something.

Or say it’s raining and two people are standing on the street and they’re embracing each other—let’s say it’s two people in a raincoat, and there’s a fragment of them that’s identifiable. You might find out that it’s something more than what you think that it is. And it may not be two people embracing each other. It has to do with the edges of what you’re seeing. The shape of what you see can suggest one thing and you’re still—right in your face—shown something else and it becomes a very peculiar mind bender. Perhaps kind of hyper reality. Looking t a detail gives us something you would never see alone from a full image

I began to get interested in that when I painted figures for movies like South Pacific and there would be an actor kneeling on the ground with France Nuyen or Suzy Wong embracing one of them, and I was to paint the photograph of these two people. Someone would take a scissors and just cut out the shape and sometimes their shape would look like a whale or a sea otter or something else and I thought, here I am painting two kneeling figures embracing for South Pacific but they really look like whales. Now on the other hand, two faces looking like two whales would really look like people. It gets very, very peculiar. I’m not into mystical things or mystery. I’m only interested in how you see things. So it gets to be how and what things look like. Like the shape of things to come. It has to do with what shape are your ideas going to take and that’s very peculiar and I hope that my ideas don’t take any shape like anything before. Being a painter I would like them to be completely something else.

In The Lines Were Etched Deeply on Her Face, the images float more freely.

I set things in planes in space to be identified at a certain rate of speed so you can probably identify the pants first, the typewriter second, the hot dog third, and then you recognize her face as the last thing because her chin and face are very large. Using layering to control how the viewer goes through the image. What I was involved in was the rate of identification of imagery.

Also, the closer things are to you the harder it is to recognize them. Like if you are getting mugged by a mugger, you don’t know who the mugger is if he’s got his hand on your head, and if something is being thrust at you, say, here have a drink—like that—you can’t even recognize it. So in a very old-fashioned optical manner I was thinking of that numbness that exists beyond the brutality of an enlarged image. So one of my first paintings was called Hey, Let’s Go for a Ride. It was someone with a beer bottle and just the middle part of a face thrust at you. Painting almost attacking I could have done hundreds of paintings like that—I still could. Because that’s what seems so strange to me, is that I still feel young in things that I know aren’t developed yet.

You have stressed your experience as a billboard painter as a great influence on your ideas about scale. On the other hand, when you read any of the art historical literature from around this time, reference is always made to artists like Barnett Newman and the Abstract Expressionists, all of whom were using large scale. Were you aware of what they had done?

I heard rumors in the Midwest of a painter called Jack the Dripper in ’48 and ’49 but I saw his paintings much later. I guess, consciously, a lot of things add up to what I think about the space, but I still think about a space that’s put on me by radio commercials, television commercials, because I’m a child of that age. Things, billboard signs, everything thrust at me, and when I came to New York I used to live on Columbus Circle on 59th Street in rooming houses and there was spit in the hallway and tobacco juice and dirty and brown looking things. I couldn’t stand it. And I thought the only way I could stand it was by saying “Oh, doesn’t that hallway have a beautiful green patina.” And so with all kinds of advertisements, in the numbness that occurred, I thought that something could be done in that numbness, that power. I had heard that John Marin and Stieglitz and someone else had a show on Madison Avenue in the 1930s when there were horses on the streets and they were trying to do the most fantastic show in that gallery and one of them looked out the window and said “Look, it’s more exciting out there than it is in here,” society we live in is so exciting compared to subtlety of classical art meaning the muscles of the horses galloping up the street. There was more throb, more action, and I begin to think there was more power and more massive things in advertising than there was in the intellect of a person making a painting in a studio. Also, I saw soap boxes being designed in advertising agencies and they used to pin the soap boxes on the walls to see who would look at them the most and I thought there’s more visual things worked out there than there is in an artist’s studio working singularly, Visual experimentation, would be interesting as an artist to look at what people look at the longest so I thought of imagery spilling from my billboard experience—imagery spilling off the picture plane—and then after you see that imagery, what’s behind it. It’s like a thought or a feeling.

You painted some of this same imagery on clear mylar which you cut in thin strips. How did the change in material alter the meaning of the images?

The material was oil paint stippled on clear polyester plastic and it was .005 millimeters thick and it was imagery that could be recognized. The largest image in the show was an armored car larger than life-size being sawed in two by a large hacksaw and two hands. The armored car image was on one plane and the hacksaw was on another plane so that they intersected. The mylar was cut in thin strips so that you could walk through it like a hanging curtain. What I hoped for was that when people came into the gallery that they would see these configurations and they would think that they had to take a Certain path through the room, but actually they could walk directly through the images.

I started doing that in the winter of 1966, but in April, 1968, I showed a whole room of these hanging mylar paintings at Ileana Sonnabend in Paris. In the recent Whitney exhibition only a few fragments were shown because the owner wouldn’t lend the bulk of the pieces.

In the mid-’60s you made a group of paintings, like Growth Plan, that do not seem to have a direct bearing on your billboard experience, or your other paintings, and which strike a rather sinister note.

I can tell you about that. I saw someone murdered down in Lower Manhattan and I had to identify four murderers. Afterwards I went through a lot of strange events and I made this painting and that’s why it was called Growth Plan. I wished I hadn’t sold it—I’d like to have kept it.

Why?

Because I don’t think I want to show it. I don’t want to be known as a contributor to the revival of realistic painting. I’ve been written about as a precursor of New Realism, like Karp has downtown. I hate that.

Your sculptures look quite different from all of the work we have discussed. What caused the shift in style?

I can tell you the things that made me do them. Soap Box Tree, which is now destroyed, is a nostalgic thing about seeing a soap box put into a tree in a housing project somewhere during World War II. I took a small sapling tree and cut it down the middle and wedged in between an enlarged AD soap box label. Catwalk had to do with the metal structure above the Latin Quarter in Times Square and the Canadian Club sign. One time I was working up there and there was a girl in the back yard of a building sunbathing in the nude and I was leaning off the edge of this thing looking at her and two workmen dumped about 200 light bulbs down on my head from about five stories and I thought it was bullets—they popped off and went down my neck and everything else. Catwalk is merely an idea of walking across a place with lights shining through underneath and it’s supposed to be at a high altitude but of course, it’s only like a little puddle or a little thing. Tumbleweed is about seeing a huge tumbleweed (in Texas it’s a small bush that breaks up and the wind moves it along and it scatters its seeds as it gets blown about and the tumbleweeds stick together) which was as big as a house coming towards me as I was driving in a car and the way it looked later on I thought of chrome-plated barbwire as a barricade and a piece of neon light going through like a rabbit going through a barricade. And another thing I saw were animals and grasses hung up on barbwire fences in North Dakota after floods in the spring. And then I thought of East Germany and the Berlin Wall and chrome-plated and barbwire and it being in the middle of a bustling economy and there was something very ridiculous about being next to something that was tough but trying to live with it like an urban thing.

Does the barbwire function in the same way in Toaster?

That’s just to make it spiky—it’s like waking up in the morning. This is a small cube, the size of a toaster and its two saw blades—I had those left over in my studio—and it’s like two pieces of toast are like waking up tough and trying to put your teeth on two sawblades.

But whatever I say made me do these sculptures—they could look fantastic or they could look terrible—and my visual thing which appears later, I hope, carries through an idea and I hope it’s successful because of that. I say this because it’s not style that’s carrying me on, it’s idea. It’s idea that translates into form instead of something less. Most people involved in art history think of visual influences but it doesn’t really work that way, in other words, a hard-edge school doesn’t have to influence hard-edge art. A substance or feeling will probably influence me in a way that is not so recognizable.

Although the sculptures differ, as a group they have a look of process. For instance, in Tumbleweed, the way in which the barbwire twists and encircles the wood and the crudeness of the wood with its drips and splatters of paint makes the viewer more conscious of the material creating the work.

I’m not concerned with process at all because, being concerned with process is being self-conscious of how to make it. I’m interested in shortcuts. In the past years, I seem to be interested in things up to a point and then I don’t go on with it. In a lot of my work all through the years I try something and only go so far and a lot of times I find myself in a frustrated position and after that feeling happens I leave it and try something else.

Probably the strangest sculpture/painting you have made to date is 5Ups.

I did this painting that looked like a big pants-pressing machine and I thought that it would be a strong piece with the edges of the stapled canvas sticking right at your eye at eye level. That would be a very tough painting. The idea of it is this: both canvases, sitting there horizontally, are painted different colors and when they reflect the color on one another you really don’t know what color each one is because of the color reflection between the two flat canvases being thrust out into the room horizontally. The present title is misleading—the original title was Towards Earth’s Center, that means if you’re making something in color and you had a rheostat on the light or if the sun goes down, the colors change and earth creeps in.

Would you say that you have become increasingly interested in color since you started to paint in 1961? After all, your first paintings were monochromatic.

Yes, I started painting really in grays. Occasionally adding a color but usually in gray because I didn’t want my paintings to be gorgeous. It had to do, like my choice of imagery, with not wanting to look contemporary.

One of the first in color was Rainbow in which there was a real window and on the window was a fork painted stabbing into the house and color was flowing out the window over the sides of the clapboard and the side of the house.

It would appear that you arrived at the greatest clarity of imagery with the mural, F-111, in 1965, and then the gradual transition toward the elimination of all imagery took place through the subsequent environmental paintings, Horse Blinders, Area Code, Flamingo Capsule, Slush Thrust, and Horizon Home Sweet Home.

There wasn’t any imagery, there was just color and paint in Slush Thrust. But in Horse Blinders and in F-111 I started out without any imagery at all. I started Horse Blinders in the beginning of 1968 and I had a new studio and I felt good and I started working and as that year passed we had a number of assassinations and the Democratic Convention and my feelings got heavier and heavier and I began to have this feeling then that I was putting a chain around my ankle and being a worker again. It wasn’t fun, I was seriously embroiled in work, and people would say “Well, how can you let that happen to yourself”—well, life and politics are a very real part of one’s existence and it’s very, very difficult to expend the energy to put it down and not be embroiled in it and if it comes into my work, it comes into my work. It doesn’t make my work less or any more. I’m not trying to do my art with a capital A, in other words, I was very angry too at that time and with F-111 and with Horse Blinders anger came into my mind.

The progression is probably correct, but I have new ideas about it. I’m doing a film now about this room and the walls falling over that I can do with imagery or without imagery. The imagery really doesn’t have that much to do with it.

You’ve spoken of the problem of peripheral vision in connection with F-111.

The idea there is to walk into an enclosure and to more or less look directly at one thing and more or less try to just look at it and you get a reaction whether it’s exciting or boring or whatever, but what happens is that the peripheral vision that occurs from setting up a sequence, from say looking at one thing and saying, that’s what it is, that is only it, that is the thing, but then the eye, the senses are filled from the side with other colors so they make whatever you look at more or less interesting, depending on what the peripheral vision is. I like the idea of questioning what I see by what I set up on the side. I’ve been involved in a lot of things having to do with billboard painting where I would lower myself down on a high wall, 300 feet wide and 58 feet tall and after snapping a horizontal line I would begin painting the top area red and the bottom cream color. From the bridge of my nose the edges of my vision stretched way out while looking straight ahead. I could still see the space except when I turned around and looked down into Times Square.

Marcel Duchamp did a door that opens in different ways in a corner and in this room I had corners that I was dealing with. One corner of the F-111 painting was largely very bright, soft, fluorescent colors and that’s very strange to put brilliant fluorescent paintings in a corner shape because it makes the corner disappear. It makes that corner rounded. So there are an amazing number of experiments and feelings that have never been dealt with as far as perception goes.

There seems to be some confusion about your original intention. Did you intend to have the 51 panels that constitute the mural sold as separate units?

Yes, the whole thing was actually sold in pieces for about $54,000 but Bob Scull came along and bought it all, thinking he was saving it so that it wouldn’t get scattered to the winds.

I heard a lecture on Marcel Duchamp at the Guggenheim Museum by Richard Hamilton and he gave a detailed explanation of metaphors of Duchamp’s glass piece, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. I was impressed by the laborious thing that Richard Hamilton was doing in the explanation. The function of each thing in this piece had nothing to do with what it looked like but the visual form looked strangely modern. I thought, I’m going to do a painting and divide it up into panels so that each panel isolated might look like something. Each piece would be only a fragment that would be scattered about and then later some piece might assume an identity of style. You should have seen some of the pieces—some were color, lines here and lines up there and a diagonal and something else, and that is all. And I thought people might look at them on the walls and say, look what I’ve got. And that would become a form. Actually it was humor. And then, if the painting was ever to be shown again, people would have to get together and loan them and they could be shown as one piece again. But I thought originally that, like Duchamp, the look of it would be or could be the form of the future, of the fragments—not of the complete whole.

Another feeling that was the basis of the beginning of this was that I used to collect cornices from old buildings in Manhattan (that’s how I met Ivan Karp)—gargoyles and heads, and so forth, and as I collected them I thought what are these going to be replaced with—rectangles or aluminum? And who’s going to go home with those? And I began to think that when a soldier dies in battle and he reaches in his pocket, is he going, to look at a picture of his mother or at a piece of aluminum. That’s why I thought of the new idea of nostalgia and this was a carry on. I didn’t know if those fragments would be of any value—value to look at, value to feel, value as a style (nothing to do with money), valueless.

I was concerned with the vacuum of my feelings and the position of my mind trying to fit into society while I worked on the painting. I kept thinking of Cellini at that time—Cellini making something beautiful and offering it up to society. A person making something beautiful and precious in this society seemed ridiculous according to everything that was going on about me so I wanted to make a big vast emptiness or extravagance and see what would happen then. And something happened. I sold the F-111 painting to someone who had probably bought the real thing many times by paying income taxes. There was this joke that if you made an anti-war painting Lyndon Johnson was really going to stay up all night now and walk the floor of the White House—and it was a dim joke, a dark joke.

I’d like to return to this question of peripheral vision in connection with Slush Thrust.

This room was entirely covered with vertical strips of painted colored horizons, interspersed with reflecting mylar panels of the same size and fog on the floor. It was supposed to have an open sky ceiling up above. If you looked directly at one panel what you saw was either more or less according to the other colors that jumped into the side of one’s eye. I tried to set the color all the way around so that everything would be as exciting as possible. It was called Slush Thrust (slush is a name from my sign-painting days of all leftover paint in a bucket and that paint would usually come up sort of a brown or purple). The reflecting mylar would reflect color across the room—an illusion almost like mirrors in a fun house. The floor was eliminated and made opaque by fog so the floor could be as shallow or as deep as you felt like it. I thought of the fog as a white drawing. When I was in it my arches felt like they were falling but my knees felt soft, like—Geez—I can’t see my knees. And people could lie down and not be seen. And the white fog going up to the colored panels would make a vertical feeling, and the white fog going up the mirror carried the illusion into the mirror which at that point was a vertical and you know there was something vertical going down below that. And the vertical parts of the painting were a series of slices of sky horizons, atmospheric horizons.

When I was working for Artkraft Strauss on walls there were experiences that are nothing, but I think about them. There were a lot of devices we used. We would take a gallon can and tie a string on it to form a chalk line, and drop it down about four stories and snap a vertical line that went out of sight. You know there’s a line down there somewhere but you couldn’t see it. I’m making an environmental film where a person can walk into a room with four empty walls and the walls would appear to fall over in slow motion revealing each wall a different color like the petals on a flower. After the walls optically fall over, a landscape of the jungle on all four walls is seen, and you realize that you’re still inside a space. I’m interested in something exhilarating, something colorful, the vantage point, but by being presented with the explanation of it at the same time I may get to feel something else.

Interviewer: Jeanne Siegel

RESEARCH - Part 2

Confirm copying