James Rosenquist Interview (page: 5 / 8) Pop Art Master	Print Interview

You said that when you were younger, the concept of being a fine artist seemed really remote. It wasn't something that you grew up with. Was it in New York that you realized this could be your life?

James Rosenquist: No. Because...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The artists who I respected who were living in New York were really ne'er-do-wells, and they really... Let's say like Bill de Kooning, the artist, he wore an old pair of bib overalls, he had a cheap loft, he painted seven days a week, 11 months a year, and I think one month out of the year he'd get totally drunk. Then he'd go back, that was his vacation. Then he'd start all over again. And his habit was... he was really an extremely hard worker. Other artists, like Franz Kline had big underground reputations, but they didn't seem to... you know, they certainly weren't living any kind of fancy lifestyle, or any kind of luxury. They looked very poor. That seemed to typify the Abstract Expressionist artists. So it was very difficult to see them and meet them, and wondering if this was any kind of a life to have, because it seemed so bad. But however, it was private. It was totally private. The luxury seemed to be if one could live in a metropolitan city without having to deal with it, and just having enough money, not having to deal with it, you could really walk around and enjoy life. And that was also the time of the "beat generation," where people hitchhiked around a lot, which I did. I moved around a lot. I mean, at one point, I had an apartment for 30 bucks a month, a studio for 45 dollars a month, breakfast was a quarter at the Students Institute; two eggs, toast and tea. I didn't have any money but I was rich! That was the feeling. That's really impossible now to do that in Manhattan. At the same time, in other cities in the United States, it was more expensive at that point than it was in New York. A person could come back from the Army, could come back from something, could start in New York, very cheaply, and get a footing. Not anymore, I don't think. It's very hard. I think other parts of the country and other parts of the world are easier.

Do you feel like art chose you more than you chose art? That's what we've heard from some other artists and musicians.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Rosenquist: Well, if a person is born with talent to do a certain thing -- I mean, can draw -- it's like the pronator muscle, like from mind to pointer. And being able to point and describe and even draw something simple, like a map -- or that ability to point, to shoot an arrow, to shoot a gun, to describe -- if someone has that, that's talent. And then the next thing is to have the spirit to do something else. And I know. I was in Russia. I had a big show in Moscow recently, in January and February, and there were a lot of people who could draw well academically in there but didn't have any spirit. It was missing. And they are really subjugated, and put down. So it takes a couple of things. It takes sort of an outgoing -- well, not necessarily outgoing, but it takes -- besides being able to say it, there has to be some need to say something. And again, there are a lot of people who have a great urge to say something, and don't know how to do it. And that comes out too. That comes out in other forms. And it's hard to say one is more valid. But I like defined performance.

Where do your ideas come from? Do you work every day or do you need inspiration to start a new painting?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Rosenquist: Sometimes a title might occur to me. And a title will just stick out in my mind. And then I will think in terms, everything I think of I will think in terms of that title. For instance, I did a painting called Four New Clear Women. It meant, if women became powerful, and they are, like women who own large stock in the stock market, or become president like Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi, will they be "New Clear Women" or "Nuclear Women?" Will they blow us up, or are they smart? Something like that. So, then I met -- there was this actress named Liv Ullmann, and she started painting. And she said, "Oh, what are you going to do next?" And I said, "I'm going to do The Persistence of Electrical Nymphs in Space." And she said, "Oh, what's that about?" and I said, "Well, that's the sound of all the souls after the earth blows up." And she says, "Oh, yeah." That was very... she probably talked with Ingmar Bergman about that. But that was great. So those are titles that I would think about, before I would start working. Then, to think about how young people want to live in the future, too, is another interesting thing. People are animals, and still have all the vestigial... I mean still have all the vestiges. I mean they have claws, fangs, ears, noses, just like animals you see running around here. And then you go to New York, I see beautiful girls that have claws, fangs, noses, everything. And I see they are very sophisticated, and they smell nice, but they are still animals. So I wonder, how will a young person like to live, in a really high-tech environment, like say in a rocket ship, or in an apartment, or a business place like that, or would they prefer to live a pastoral life, like little lambs in a meadow? Would they like that? So I think that's curious, what the future generations will select as an environment.

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I mean the environment is going to hell. There's oil slicks all over, and Saddam Hussein burnt oil fields down, and all of that, and one wonders, "Will people get busy cleaning it up? Or are they interested?" Or whatever. It's curious. So I'm interested as to what people will select.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I started making a painting that looked like people reincarnating into flowers, or starting to be intermixed with flora and fauna, and machines too. They were sort of pieces of flesh starting to be connected to machines, or to flowers, and I did those, and the images cut in shards so that with the least amount of suggestion, you could see an image of something, yet there was a whole ground to put another image in. There was a lot of area left over. And then that would be a specific image. And then the mixture of both of those, I was hoping for a third image. It would be as if... all artists have cross hatched, including Michelangelo and Rembrandt and everybody -- and that's like scribbling, "Chhh chhh chhh" like that. And in those scribbles, I was doing one day, and in that, I thought, "Hey, in this cross hatching, I could, like this for instance, put two images, overlap like this." You could see both images at the same time and still have more area to paint in. And you could even describe with pieces of imagery, which no one has done before, yet. So, I mean, using imagery as a sketch to describe another image. That would be really confusing, or illuminating. So that was one inspiration.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My first inspirations, first starting, was that I thought I could devise a new space, from painting outdoor billboards in Times Square. And that was, as a kid I was subject to Rinso White commercials, early television commercials, our commercial society, which was quite unlike Russia, for instance. And I thought -- my job was to paint big pictures of movie stars, and to paint objects to sell, and if I could paint them really well, the company would sell them, and if I didn't, I'd get fired. I had to paint beer to look beautiful. I had to paint beautiful beer, beautiful shirts, beautiful everything. So a salesman would come in and say, "That beer's got too much hops in it. Tell that kid to change it. Gotta change it." So that only meant me making a slightly different color yellow, and repainting the whole damn thing slightly. So I'd take that beer with too much hops in it, that color, which was only yellow, I'd take that home with me. And I'd take Franco-American spaghetti orange, I'd take that home. Which was like red dye number 2 and yellow. I'd take that home and I'd make abstract paintings out of these. And then I thought, "Hey, I'll use imagery, magnified imagery that spilled out of the picture plane, and I'd set it up so the closest thing you would see would be recognized last, because it would be too personal, and it would irritate people. So that's how my so-called "Pop Art" paintings started. And I really used generic things, unlike say, Andy Warhol who used Campbell's Soup. I painted spaghetti, I painted soup, I painted hot dogs, jeans, I painted cars, all kinds of things, really generically. I didn't care about the labels.

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