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See p.31 "Hey Let's go for a Ride" [[?]]

AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES ROSENQUIST
Rosenquist - Art Forum June 1972

[[image of a painting on left side with caption]]
James Rosenquist, Necktie, o/c, 14" x 10", 1961.

JEANNE SIEGEL

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 growth 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. 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, attitude, 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 Astor Theater and have them look out the window of the sign into Times Square to let them see the color and the feeling. 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. I had these possibilities working for Artkraft Strauss — there'd be a desk in the front office with imagery there I could pick out          30

Transcription Notes:
Indents are purposeful, also signify interview questions versus answer.