Viewing page 27 of 36

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[image - painting]]
James Rosenquist, Lanai, o/c, 62" x 186", 1964. (Collection: Kimko and John Powers.)

DEREALIZED EPIC

LAWRENCE ALLOWAY
 Rosenquist's stories, oblique, rambling, and vivid, give a sense of his take on America. "He was black with dust, but there were white circles around his eyes outlining the goggles he wore while plowing."[[superscript]]1[[/superscript]] "In Six Flags Over Texas, an amusement park near Fort Worth, I got into the simulated Louisiana Riverboat. A young man in costume began to pole the boat through an s-shaped ditch filled with water. The boat started with a jerk, actually being propelled by huge teeth coming out of the water."[[superscript]]2[[/superscript]]Here is an earlier version of a story recorded by Jeanne Siegel in her interview in the present [[italics]]Artforum[[/italics]]: "I was working on top of the Latin Quarter roof in Times Square, painting a 'Join the Navy' sign. Above me five more stories in the ironwork were electricians repairing light bulbs in the Canadian Club sign.  As a practical joke they dropped four boxes of light bulbs down on me. For about thirty seconds I was showered with breaking light bulbs."[[superscript]]3[[/superscript]] There is a tangy flavor of American life to these stories which is very much present in his painting, a folk-realism of encounters and surprises. "On the road, a trailer truck roared by and an airplane flew overhead."[[superscript]]4[[/superscript]] Compare this truck with those referred to by Robert Rauschenberg in his notes on "random order": "with sound scale and insistency trucks mobilize words and broadside our culture by a combination of law and local motivation that cannot be described as accidental."[[superscript]]5[[/superscript] The urban diversity of Rauschenberg's verbal image, the equivalent of his silkscreened paintings, is such that we do not expect any single image to be accounted for by terms that refer to all the other images. Rosenquist's clusters of discontinuous objects are not discrete and scattered in this way; he has not relinquished causal relationships, even though their sequence may not always be clear. 
 Rosenquist's America is more like Robert Indiana's, an example of which is in Indiana's linking in [[italics]]The Melville Triptych[[/italics]], 1961, of Coenties Slip where he had a studio, with Moby Dick, in which Slip is mentioned. Rosenquist does not evoke the 19th century, but he does have a sense of America as a large but united place, in which all kinds of bonds exist between people and objects. The crowded present, not the historic past, is his area of reference. Referring to [[italics]]I Love You With My Ford[[/italics]], Rosenquist defined his notion of time as a devalued zone between now and the past. "In 1960 and '61 I painted the front of a 1950 Ford. I felt it was an anonymous image" from, "a time we haven't started to ferret out as history yet."[[superscript]]6[[/superscript]] [[italcics]]Four 1949 Guys[[/italics]] is another example of this feeling for neutral style and for a period which is post-historical but not fully the present. In the early '60s even his colors were recurrently red, white, and blue, not only in Uncle Sam's hat as flower pot or cornucopia in the World's Fair mural, 1964, but in a group of billboard or CinemaScope format paintings, such as [[italics]]President Elect, A Lot to Like, Silver Skies, Nomad, Lanai[[/italics]], and [[italics]]Taxi[[/italics]].
 [[italics]]F-111[[/italics]], 1965, is the painting in which Rosenquist's sense of America as a continental presence and as technology are most clearly stated. In program the painting is not unlike a WPA mural, just as [[italics]]Horse Blinders[[/italics]] is not unlike a Wonders of the Technological Age mural or a foldout in an encyclopedia. Once this is said, of course, it is seen not to be accurate enough: it does not take into account the brilliant personal control of the former or the personal obscurity of the latter. Rosenquist thinks in terms of objects and conjunctions of objects with symbolic meaning unlike, say, Roy Lichtenstein who minimizes levels of reference. Marcia Tucker in the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum, discounts Rosenquist's iconography and suggests the process of perception as his real subject. If this is so it does not get rid of the problem of signification, because Rosenquist cannot, nor can any artist, depict the process of perception that occurs in an infinite field on a delimited plane. If an artist paints perceptual processes it becomes a diagram of perception and, as one particular diagram is isolated from among others, it is subject to the iconographical interpretation we already bring to bear on objects and their locations in space. Rosenquist has an allegorical imagination which takes as its subject the man-made landscape and our positions within it. In the 17th century, Dutch still-life artists could assign symbolic meanings, vanity, or appetite, to realistic objects without compromising the concreteness of the things shown, but this cannot be done without a shared set of symbols. The sign systems that we do have in common are provided by advertising and the mass media, and Rosenquist uses these, but liberated from thematic constraint.
 At one point the fuselage of the F-111, which runs through the whole painting, is interrupted by a smiling child under a hair drier. According to the artist, "the little girl is the female form in the picture. It is like someone having her hair dried on the lawn, in Texas or Long Island."[[superscript]]7[[/superscript]] Both the plane and the girl are elements that can be reconciled within Rosenquist's epic view of things American. Or the child can be read as a contrast to what is literally the war machine; she is happy now, but what will the future bring? In addition, the hair drier with its lustrous high-