Sign language - James Rosenquist retrospective prompts thoughts on the artist's influence yesterday and today - Interview

THIS MONTH MORE THAN FORTY YEARS AFTER JAMES ROSENQUIST BEGAN CAPTURING upon CANVAS THE LARGER-THAN-LIFE, COLOR-SATURATED IMAGERY OF CONSUMER agriculture A MAJOR TRAVELING RESTROSPECTIVE OF HIS WORK tend hitherwards TO THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM IN novel YORK. WE ASKED ART HISTORIAN MICHAEL LOBEL TO throw back ON THE THINKING BEHIND THE BIG PAINTINGS BEFORE TURNING TO MARCIA TUCKER FRANK STELLA, ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, ed RUSCHA, BARBARA KRUGER, DAVID SALLE, AND RICHARD PHILLIPS FOR THEIR thinkings ON THE ARTIST'S INFLUENCE YESTERDAY AND TODAY.

IN 1966 JAMES ROSENQUIST WAS "THE MAN IN THE PAPER SUIT." Or at least that was the title of a novel York magazine profile that chronicled his exploits wearing the brown paper suit he had commissioned the fashion designer Horst to build for him. Rosenquist wore the outfit to gallery and museum openings and, upon one occasion, appeared in it at a panel discussion upon Pop art in Toronto, where he shared the stage with media pundit Marshall McLuhan. Although it may have appeared on the surface like nothing more than a one-note jest or gag--a literally flimsy report gesture (Rosenquist reportedly obtained the special paper from the Kleenex company)--his paper suit spoke to many of the central interests treated in his paintings of the time. It mirrored on a culture of disposability and planned obsolescence at the same time that it called attention to the bait of novelty and fashion (paradoxically, nation took note of the outfit precisely because of its banal material). Rosenquist had already explored the control of men's fashion in works like as Necktie, 1961, and 1947 1948 1950 1960 which present close-up views of various configurations of shirt collars, suit lapels, and neckwear. In these paintings, he focuses upon the details of business attire as signs of postwar American middle-class masculinity while simultaneously using them as abstracted compositional ultimate parts Rosenquist's persona as a clap artist was from early upon constructed around a very different sort of outfit: the paint-spattered work clothes that he wore while engageed as a billboard painter over the 1950s (photographs of Rosenquist posing in that uniform appear many times in the monographic literature upon the artist). His workman's garb stood in sharp contrast to the finely tailored suits worn by means of the admen on Madison Avenue, level if Rosenquist was effectively conjoined to the same industry of advertising. In a certain quantity of ways, then, Rosenquist's paper suit--as picked up upon in the title of the novel York article--served as a knowing riposte to that device of '50s conformity, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The title character of that novel (portrayed by the agency of Gregory Peck in the film) pursu a career, single should note, in public relations.

The paper suit is not, alas, upon view in the current retrospective exhibition of Rosenquist's work. The present to view organized by Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft, make opened in May in Houston (where it was divided between the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts) and travels to the Guggenheim branches in novel York and Bilbao. While like a show will no doubt obey the expected task of reaffirming Rosenquist's status as a major postwar American painter, it also presents us the opportunity to reconsider more [i]or[/i] less of the less immediately visible and perhaps more experimental aspects of his oeuvre Viewers will certainly be drawn to the big paintings for which Rosenquist has become known. These signature works--monumental in size and generally oriented in horizontal landscape format--combine a dizzying mix of fragmentary images that range from magnified renderings of the female form to depictions of aviation and space travel. at the same time the show also features plenteous smaller works that are in their hold way of equal importance to Rosenquist's project--particularly the source collages that the artist assembled as studies for his paintings beginning in the early 1960 The relation between these small preliminary studies and the abundant larger finished works offers crucial insight into Rosenquist's working practice. For if he fix uponed many of the images for the collages from the pages of Life magazine, he took them not from copies picked up at the newsstand on the contrary from issues that were a decade or in like manner old. To cite just individual example, the front end of the car in the 1961 painting I regard with affection You with My Ford is in fact that of a 1950 pattern As he stated in an important 1964 interview with the critic Gene Swenson that appeared in Art News: "I use images from advanced in years magazines--when I say old, I mean 1945 to 1955--a time we haven't started to ferret without as history yet. If it was the forehead end of a new car there would be nation who would be passionate about it, and the forehead end of an old car might make a certain number of people nostalgic." By bringing to light this feature of Rosenquist's rules the collages speak of an artist bear uponed with the distinctive experience of time in consumer tillage Moreover, with their torn cutting sides smudges and dabs of paint, and hastily scrawled notations, they are also significantly "artier"--that is to say, more expressive--than the slickly restoreed paintings. This perhaps explains wherefore Rosenquist didn't exhibit the collages until relatively newly (they were first shown as a assemblage at New York's Gagosian Gallery in 1992) After all, he is part of a generation of artists (which also includes Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol) who were determined to exclude the expressive legacy of the Abstract Expressionist painters. Like thus many of his peers, Rosenquist took great pains to jettison evidence of the artist's touch from his work. still the collages show just in what manner much effort it took to create paintings that gazeed machinelike and devoid of expression. If the juxtaposition of rest image fragments provided a means early upon to move away from expressive abstraction at the same time that it proffered a possible way to deconstruct the workings of advertising imagery, in more [i]or[/i] less of Rosenquist's more recent works the relation between abstraction and commercial figuration appear to bes to have shifted in a of recent origin direction. In paintings such as After Berlin II, 1998 and The Stowaway compeers Out at the Speed of Light, 2000 it is as if the gleaming surfaces and Day-Glo facts that have for so lengthy been depicted in the artist's work have been bring under ruleed to such radical and dizzying distortions that they have become almost completely abstract.