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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. 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 as 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 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. 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 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 

James Rosenquist, Forest Ranger, oil on mylar, 91/2' high, 1967.
[[Image]]

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 the rooming houses and there was spit in the hallway and tobacco juice and dirty 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," 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 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, 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 changes 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 wish I hadn't sold it - I'd like too 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 the 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 the 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