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Periodical Unknown

JAMES ROSENQUIST

While attending the University of Minnesota, I worked one summer for an industrial decorating company. At least, that's what they called themselves. Actually, we traveled through the Midwest painting the outsides of warehouses and huge storage bins. Some of them were ten stories high and half a city block long. We painted everything the same color. I remember miles of the same monotonous shade of gray.

One day, we began working on a group of these storage bins-I think that they held surplus wheat- and this fellow began painting one of them by himself. Now picture this scene: there's this stretch of wall at least as big as a football field, and way down in one corner is this little man with a bucket of paint-gray paint-and an eight-inch brush in his hand. Slowly, deliberately, hopelessly, he begins to apply paint to that endless, unrelieved expanse of wall.

Who should come walking by but the foreman. The guy painting did not notice him and kept right on painting in the same slow, lackadaisical way. The foreman must have stood there watching him for a good ten minutes; I guess he was building up a head of steam. When he couldn't take any more, the foreman hollered: "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?" Believe me, that foreman knew how to yell.

The guy painting, though, just turned around, paintbrush in hand. He stared at the foreman and then glanced back over his shoulder at the huge wall. "Hunh?" he said. On the road, a trailer truck roared by and an airplane flew overhead.

The story describes a bizarre and rather wonderful visual experience; it describes the world of James Rosenquist. There is a juxtaposition of visual elements here that is at once ordinary and utterly extraordinary. It is a juxtaposition that could have occurred only at this particular point in time. Here is all the extravagance of imagery--the disjointed elements and the forced perspective that have come to be the identifying characteristics of the art of James Rosenquist.

Rosenquist tells the story with relish, emphasizing points with

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