James Rosenquist Interview (page: 7 / 8) Pop Art Master	Print Interview

How did you respond to criticism early on? Did you take it seriously?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Rosenquist: Criticism in the art world is much different than say, the theater world, where a big, mass effort lives or dies according to a theater critic. An artist is happy if they get their picture shown or their name in print. I mean, I've been called everything. I've been called "death warmed over" by John Canaday and everything else. I wrote him back a letter in The New York Times, saying I know more about death than he does. So he quit writing the art criticism, and started doing cooking! But when a young artist starts, and everyone says he or she is a genius, and they are put in all sorts of shows, and then they decline, things decline, and they are taken out of a show, or they are not put in, that can be rough on some people, to get your first hard criticism. If you withstand that, and just continue to work, you become resilient, and then you sort of get hardened to criticism, and it really doesn't mean a thing. I mean, the criticisms I like is if they have got a handle on what I'm trying to do, whether I'm successful or not. If they have an inclination about this is the direction that I'm going in, instead of being totally confused, and they say, "It's terrible! It's horrible!" and they haven't got a clue, and it's all confused as to the momentum of what it is. That I don't like. I mean, I like criticism though. It's other people's input, other people's idea. And I think it would be very hard to be an art critic, or any kind of a critic, because it would be hard to be in people's minds. I was on a panel discussion with Marshall McLuhan, back in 1966 or '67. Phillip Morris put us there. And someone in the audience says, "Mr. McLuhan, I read all your books, and I happen to disagree with naw-naw-naw-naw... something." And he says, "Oh, you've read all my books? Then you only know half the story." So it's hard to figure out. Someone asked him, "Mr. McLuhan, can you tell me the metaphor between this and that?" And he says, "Metaphor. Metaphor. A man's grasp must exceed his reach, or what's a metaphor?"

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Don't you have to have kind of a thick skin, though? If somebody calls your work "death warmed over?"

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Rosenquist: There are art critics who are extremely stupid. I don't want to mention their names, but the one is Hilton Kramer, I can mention his name. They paint a little bit themselves, and they really don't know how to paint very well, and then they think art should be this or should be that, because they've tried, and they know it's hard, but they resent it if they think you have some shortcut to fame, or some shortcut to something. A lot of people are baffled by money too, including art critics. Baffled. They don't know how to handle that. Artists are baffled by money too. They'll say, "Man, I do it because it's art, man. I love it. It's art, but how come I don't get any respect? Now how come I don't sell any paintings?" And one minute, "Hey, take it. It's free, it's yours." And the next -- and then an art dealer will make money, sell it and make money, and they won't get much, and then they complain. Printmakers are like that. They say they don't get no respect. But if someone makes money from one's work, I think a person should benefit from that. I lobbied at the doorways of the Senate with Marion Javits and Bob Rauschenberg for an artists' royalty law, 15 percent. And it passed the Senate, but it failed the House.

That's way back in the '70s. Now that's been put to bed. A law was passed in California for one percent, I think, by Alan Sieroty. It's like my friend Jerry Leiber, who wrote "You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog." I said, "How much did you get for that?"

A lot of songwriters got ripped off in those days. Getting back to inspiration, you talked about starting off with a title sometimes, but is there more to it?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Rosenquist: I think another idea about making things or creating things is to accumulate a number of experiences or ideas, or senses, or feelings, and then try to figure out what medium to put them in. Instead of saying, "Well I'm going to paint this." Or "I'm going to do a certain medium, but I don't know how to do it." The opposite would be to know how to paint very well and do a craft very well, but not have any ideas. So to take a number of feelings and try to put them together and make them more... be more impactive, or have more gravity, or I mean to take some very, very peculiar dreams, or anything, and manage to make something that will suggest what happened to you, the feelings that happened to you. So a feeling of falling out of an airplane, or the feeling of being up against a big billboard sign, huge, like being a bug up against the big, flat plane. Something that has to do with senses or feeling. How to show that to someone else, and how to make that, is a challenge, and how do you do that? One piece I did back in 1970 was a room of vertical colored panels, and then I put a dry ice fog on the floor and Claude Picasso came and started taking photographs of it. I had just met him. And the colors seemed to disappear right into the floor, and the floor seemed non-existent. It was a fog. And with reflective panels. So the reflection that went into the fog was very unusual too. Because the energy from the reflection disappeared as it went into the fog. So that's the way I accomplished that feeling. I did one version that was called Home Sweet Home, and the other one was called Slush Thrust.

Right now, I'm doing some things about time and clocks. I did a painting that has the minute and hour hands sticking straight out at you, like a knife that comes out of the surface of the canvas. Instead of going around like a clock, clockwise, it points out like this, like a knife. It comes out of the surface of the canvas. I'm doing some things like that. Also, I've been working with color blindness colors -- they are close-value colors -- to describe things that aren't expressive or emotional. They are already-tested color dots, to test people for color blindness. That's an interesting thing to do. And I just did a print for the Philadelphia Museum, and it has the outline of a light bulb. It's all color blindness dots. It's called For the Young Artist, and it has the letter I, the letter C, U, number 2, R, and a star. "I see you, too, are a star" in these color blindness dots. I did some paintings with a knife, fork, and spoon on a big color blindness plate with the earth and a meteor and a whole lot of other things. So when I'm working, the first priority when I start something new, is how to devise a new pictorial idea that has never been seen before. Or in a new way, like using color blindness dots or whatever. The second is content. My first consideration is trying to show something in a way that's never been seen before, and that's also not trying to look like anyone else's paintings.

James Rosenquist Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8