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These are straight examples from the mass media but each quotation is singular and, unlike Andy Warhol, Rosenquist's best paintings consist of a conjunction of dissimilar images between which the artist elicits not quite evident connections. His structure is like cinematic or photographic montage: the "superimposition of several shots to form a single image" (Random House unabridged).
Diverse materials are added to some of the paintings of 1962-63, such as Bed Spring, a cutout canvas stretched with string like a back-breaking trampoline. Blue spark with Small Fish-pole and Bedsheet picture, Morning Sun, and Two 1959 People, include fishing poles, shore, boyish improvisations, somewhat Huck Finnish. Plastic shreds and pieces are added to other paintings of the time, such as Early in the Morning, Morning sun, and Nomad. Rosenquist, was therefore, as his painting skill attained mastery, immediately willing to disrupt the homogeneity of the painted surface with raw and loose bits of the world. (The use of glass in Blue Feet [Look Alive], 1961, Rainbow, and Four Young Revolutionaries is part of the same impulse to keep his technical resources stretched.) A group of sculptures emerged from this use of materials in 1963; their combination of fragility and casual appearance was remarkable compared to the sculpture being done at the time. The objects look vulnerable, as if they might fall apart and slip back into the world from which they seem so carelessly taken. Three of them are about the collision of different forms, in ways that imply a shaky art-nature relationship. Soap Ad Tree, Capillary Action 2, and He swallowed the Chain are of this sort, as is suggested by Rosenquist's account of genesis of Soap Ad Tree in his interview with Siegel. The contrast of the dead tree and pushy ad is picking up in Capillary Action 2 where the plastic tatters in a frame suggest that the juice of life has run out of the tree and into the frame. Finally the tree appears as a single pole tied to the picture He Swallowed the chain: round the edges of the stretcher are the remains of a painting tied to a knot in the center, like Bedspring in reverse. 
Catwalk is a ramshackle walk-on structure, like part of an improvised tree house, though Rosenquist links it with scaffolding above Times Square. It is paint-splashed, a trace of process as in Nomad, and participatory, prefiguring not the way of Rosenquist was to develop but a good deal of other sculpture. In Tumbleweed the relation of art and nature is not ironic or disparate but lyrically in gear. The basic support of three crossed sticks. A ball of springy chromed barbwire. and the quivering track of blue neon are oddly congruent with the plant that gave the work its name. The sticks are paint-splashed, work-marked, compared to the effortless flow of the light and the shine of the wire, suggesting that the tumbleweed has run up against a man-made fence and is stuck. 
Recently Rosenquist has been using mylar both as reflective surface in painting and as free-hanging structure. Avalanche is a polished an elliptical example which floats painted forms on very thin transparent surfaces. There is a block of blue, liquid, like unfrozen water in the shape of an ice cube and, lower on a second sheet of mylar, the top of a paper bag for groceries, but gaping open as if it rotted by damp contents. On the floor the outline of a falling fir tree concludes the theme of descent suggested by the order of images. Domestic and forest episodes are linked, with a startling obliqueness, by the theme of falling.
In the Whitney, sculpture court is a new piece by Rosenquist, an extension of the glowing color panels of Slush Thrust, 1969, and Horizon Home Sweet Home, 1967-70. The court has never looked better than it does now, surrounded by tall panels of glamorous color and reflective plastic. When Lucy Lippard wrote on Rosenquist in 1966 she concluded by looking forward to his "break-through into the nonobjective which has been imminent for at least two years."17 My own vie of the new work is that absence of recognizable imagery is not enough to make it"non-objective." There is in these panels the interplay of the real and the illusive that marks his iconography as a whole. Tonal Gradations and Shifting reflections animate the surrounding walls. In an interview Rosenquist said that "using imagery enabled me to set up a time sequence in the painting: a certain thing would be recognized at a certain rate of speed." 18 This at present untitled work is an environmental piece which in its scale- 53 panels (through the number is variable) and 12 feet tall- an in its disembodiment by reflections, maintain Rosenquist's ambition to paint a derealized epic. It is intended to release dry ice in the court, at which time the panels will rear out of the instant, knee-high fog, their present mooring effaced. This is closer to leisure and architecture and science fiction tripping than it is to abstract art. "I thought of the fog as a white drawing," Rosenquist said, and "Geez - I can't see my knees." 
1. John Rublovsky, Pop Art, New York, 1965, p. 90.
2. Brydon Smith, James Rosenquist, catalogue for the National Gallery of Canada, 1968, p. 88.
3. Ibid. 
4. Rublovsky, Pop Art, p. 87.
5. Robert Rauschenberg, "Random Order," Location, I, no. 1, 1963. pp. 27-31.
6. Gene Swenson, "What is Pop Art?," Art News, February, 1964, pp 40-43
7. Gene Swenson, "The F-111," Partisan Review, Fall, 1965, p. 598 
8. Ibid., p. 599.
9.Nicholas and Elena Calas, Icons and Images of the 60s, New York, 1971, p. 122
10. "Aside from the human face, it originally included some cows, a hand shaking salt on a lapel, a naked man committing suicide."
Lucy Lippard, Changing, New York, 1971, p. 89.
11. Other paintings are Gold Star Mother, Brighter than the Sun, and Balcony.
12. Marcia Tucker, James Rosenquist, a catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972, p. 17.
13. Lippard, Changing, p. 195.
14. Tucker, Rosenquist, p. 24.
15.Rublovsky, Pop Art, pp. 95-96, 99, 106, 107.
16. Smith, Rosenquist, p. 88.
17. Lippard, Changing, p. 97.
18. Peter Schjeldahl, "An Interview with James Rosenquist," Opus International, December 1971, p. 114.