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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.

[[image]]
James Rosenquist, Untitled (Catwalk), m/m, approx. 96" x 72" x 36", 1963. Destroyed.

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 and 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 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 have 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