Word: rosenquists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...quotation that runs from Dada to Pop art -- random citation from the image haze that envelops us, with some T. and A. for signature. Its "relevance" consists only of the accuracy with which it mirrors the inattentiveness of a culture benumbed by television. Its main debts are to James Rosenquist, for the big, juxtaposed image fragments, and to Francis Picabia, for the unassimilated layering of outline images over solid ones in that painter's late, wretchedly bad paintings. But where appropriation is concerned, it is not etiquette to speak of debt...
Looking at a big Rosenquist (a small one is 10 ft. wide, and Star Thief, 1980, the mural whose installation at Miami International Airport was successfully opposed by Frank Borman, then president of Eastern Airlines, is 17 ft. by 46 ft.) is a bit like seeing one of the lost panoramas that were so popular in 19th century America scrolling creakily past, a journey re-created as spectacle, stripped of its pastoral imagery and retooled in terms of media glut. Hey, look! you hear the nasal voice of the artist saying: this is what the banks of the electronic Mississippi...
Born in North Dakota in 1933, Rosenquist backed into being a painter through grass-roots advertising: he started painting Phillips 66 signs for a Minnesota paint contractor and gradually moved up to supporting himself as a billboard artist in New York City in the 1950s. Turning out these mammoth images, high above the city streets, had the most obvious connection to his later art: the problem of how you make something that looks perfectly realistic a quarter- mile away when you are close up against it and cannot see it as a whole. The huge fragmentary paintings...
...also suggested surrealism, and to a degree that Goldman perhaps underrates. Early Rosenquists from 1962--like Noon, Capillary Action or Untitled (Blue Sky), with their small canvases that hover clear of the surface while still carrying the sky or grass of the background--quote Magritte with an almost naive directness. True, Rosenquist could not be less interested in the literary and sexual side of surrealism, but the way disconnected images have always floated together in his work (the duck's head, tire tread and huge cropped face in Silver Skies, 1962; the immense rashers of bacon, their fat glistening among...
Though he was never a "political artist" as such, a political current --generally of a milky, liberal kind--surfaces in Rosenquist's work. It produced a number of bland icons but one real masterpiece as well: F-111, 1965, the 86-ft.-long, multipanel anti-Viet Nam mural that caused a hullabaloo when the Metropolitan Museum chose to exhibit it in the '60s. Unlike most political art of the time, it looks unpolemical at first, and that is the source of its power. It sums up Rosenquist's vision of America as an Eden compromised by its own violence...