James Rosenquist Interview (page: 2 / 8) Pop Art Master	Print Interview

There's a fascinating collision of seemingly unrelated images in so much of your work, starting in the '60s. How did you want people to look at these incongruous images. What did you want them to feel?

James Rosenquist: Well, I would like them to realize how much can come out of a little paint pot! Just open up a little pot of paint, it flies all over the place! That's a thing that students don't know.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I've taught very few times, but when I've been to a school for boys and girls, they're trying to make an expression from a little tube of paint, and they don't know how to mix paint or do any of that, anything practical. So they get very frustrated. And they take a cigarette, they put it out in the mess, and they go home. And everything is dirty and a mess, everything. And so I show them how to take the paint out of the tube, and smear it up, and how much space they could cover with just the little bit of paint in that tube. I show them how to do that, and after a while, they could make these big beautiful abstract paintings, and I said, "Fantastic! Now you have to have an idea, that's the next part." But it's the same with film. To be able to use it, to be able to do it. To be able to light things, to be able to do all that takes someone to show you the knack of how to do that. It's craft.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Speaking of incongruity, let's talk about I Love You with My Ford. There's a big mass of spaghetti, a pair of lovers, and a Ford.

James Rosenquist: The front of a car, yeah. That really was just an electronic focal vision. It was like short ends of film or something. It was just another kind of composition where you just see this here, and this there, and this there, and it's that simple. Just bing, bang, boom, instead of the old Renaissance structure and push-and-pull composition. It's like the eye just picks out, looks at things. I don't know how to describe it. It's like a pointless electrical computer. It just picks out whatever it wants to pick out, and it doesn't push this composition to the left, and move this composition up, and move this around. My mind doesn't work that way.

It's a startling effect, standing in front of one of your paintings. I gather that you want to jar people with your art. You don't want them to just stand there and think, "Oh, what a lovely composition."

James Rosenquist: Well, I think they're lovely! I think they are lovely, quiet compositions. I think it is all in how you see things. I don't know what's jarring anymore. I mean, you could say, "Well, there's a landscape painting from the 19th century, it's gorgeous." Whatever. As time goes by, I don't know what's jarring. Artists have always looked for brutality aesthetically in their work. For instance, a French Impressionist painter would go out in the field, take Van Gogh, for instance. Go out in the field, and he'd make a painting, and he'd bring it in, and there would be little pieces of grass and straw in it, and he'd bring it inside a house. Now, wrenching something from nature, transforming it by bringing it into a sitting room or a dining room or a house, is a big brutality, a big strange thing right there. That's strange. From doing something aesthetically, out in a field, next to a straw stack or something, and then transforming that by bringing and taking pieces of grass of it, and putting it in a living room, this powerful piece of nature out there that is done -- not nature -- from nature, is already terrifying. It seems very, very strong and unusual. It doesn't go with the furniture. It doesn't go with the wall paper. It doesn't go with anything. So that originally was very shocking and brutal. It seems like every generation of artists has been looking for that kind of transformation.

And in your case, a six-foot-tall fingernail painted red is a shocking thing to see in a living room.

James Rosenquist: Well, it's a fingernail cut like a pen point. I don't think it's very shocking. In a room? I don't know.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I started painting, I thought my pictures would stand out, because I would be in a group show with other kinds of art work. And then what really happened was that my work was grouped with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and so forth, and so on. So it so it didn't stand out as much, because that was the terrible temper of the times. Now, who knows what is shocking anymore? I really don't know. How can anyone shock anybody now? I'm sure they can. Or what kind of vision could a youngster put on a two-dimensional canvas or surface now? And I think there is millions of things to do. A lot of people say, well, it's all been done. Not true. You think of every artist, if they seem to start in a group, if someone calls them a group, their lives send them out in diverging paths, and they get further and further, their whole art work becomes further and further away from each other. That happens with every group. They seem to start with similar enthusiasm, but then as they grow older, it's much more divergent. Their paintings start to look quite different, and much, much different. If you look at all the Abstract Expressionists, so-called Abstract Expressionists, like say Mark Rothko and De Kooning and Jackson Pollack, how different they all are.

It's too bad they didn't get to live longer. Pollack died when he was 45 years old, I guess.

Was Pollack an important artist for you, early on?

James Rosenquist: Yes, of course. Of course. Of course he was. I never met him. I think I saw him once -- but I never met him -- at the Cedar Bar. Students would go to a Miró show and a Pollack show, which would be simultaneous in Manhattan. And they'd say, "You know, Pollack, he's terrific, but you know, it's really Miró. He's really the genius." Pollack was influenced by Miró. And you'd see something by Andre Masson, and you'd say, "Pollack, he's terrific, but really, you know, Andre Masson invented it all. He's the one." Then, when Pollack had this big show, after he was dead, at the Museum of Modern Art, his work was showed chronologically, and at the end these big paintings occurred and he sort of went up and out the window! The show was really the spirit of a great person and a great artist. He went out in a blaze of glory, even though the last few years of his life were difficult, unlike the performance curve of a lot of artists who are very expansive at some points and then they go back down again. Up and down and up and down. So sure, he was very, very important.

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