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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 soldier dies in battle and he reaches in his pocket, is he going to look at a picture of his other 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 these 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 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.

[IMAGE]
James Rosenquist, Tumbleweed, m/m. 75" X 79" X 95", 1964-66.
(Collection: Mr. and Mrs. Bagley Wright.)

[IMAGE]
James Rosenquist, Tumbleweed, pencil and chalk crayon on paper, 22" X 29 3/4", n.d.