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ART
Lawrence Alloway
James Rosenquist has done another giant painting in sections: the first, in 1965, was "F-111"; the second, painted last year, was "Horse Blinders," recently on view at Leo Castelli's Gallery. The size of both paintings, about 10 feet high and something more than 80 feet long, is dictated by the dimensions of the gallery. The spectator, stepping into Castelli's second-floor front room, was walled in with huge images. The "F-111" had fifty-one sections and Rosenquist told G. R. Swenson that originally he expected it to be sold a piece at a time: each bit would be incomplete, a souvenir of the original. In the end the painting stayed together so that the radical idea of atomistic dispersal was lost. "Horse Blinders" has fewer sections (I counted fourteen vertical ones) and it looks as if Rosenquist has withdrawn from his distribution-by-fragmentation idea. These canvases are interspersed with aluminum sheets, which always occur at the corners of the rooms so that they reflect, in reverse and somewhat blurred, the painting at right angles to them. Breaking up the sequence, or even hanging "Horse Blinders" in another space, would reduce the changing reflections which are, I think, a part of its success.
Rosenquist's earlier work tends to fall short as color; his tonal handling of form (be was trained in the sky above Times Square) was expert and convincing, but his color was subservient to tonal values, that is to say to colors used one at a time. He established color zones: one would be all pink, another all gun-metal gray, another the orange of spaghetti. These zones have been intensifying in color lately but not until now has his color really become active, the equal, as a pictorial factor, of his tonal definition of form. The aluminum sheets, which in "F-111" were used to give what the artist called "a brittle feeling," in contrast to the canvas, contribute to his new vivid color. There is a full range over the spectrum: flaring orange, cloudy purple, pale blue, brilliant yellow, livid red. And the colors fuse with one another, overlap and infiltrate, with a coloristic resource not found in the earlier paintings.
What is the subject of "Horse Blinders"? The title refers to the apparatus worn by horses to block peripheral vision and thus reduce sources of sudden alarm, horses being nervous creatures. The connection of this to the painting isn't clear, though presumably the artist is either (1) freeing us of our blinders so we can see more widely, or (2) implying that the objects in his painting act like horse blinders on us, their users. In terms of object recognition, the picture is about kitchen technology. Reading from right to left, which is the way attention moved in the gallery, the following items are legible: a finger (like an image from an ad for touch control); an ATT cable, its color-coded wires opening out like a bouquet; a motion study of a spoon beating food in a bowl, followed by energy patterns in wave form; a block of butter melting in a pan over a glowing burner; finally a telephone cord (motion study again) and a blurred mass (flesh?).
Rosenquist's method of composition is that of montage, the photographic and figurative extension of collage. Whereas in Cubist collage separate bits of material are assembled in a mainly flat space, montage unites imagery from separate sources in a scenic way. It is the method of Soviet movies of the twenties, and of iconographically ambitious WPA murals in which allegorical figures, representative American types, and pylons mingle and interpenetrate. In Rosenquist's pictures slices of images, each one highly naturalistic in detail, are taken from half-legible sources. Forms are defined as obscure bosses of advancing detail or as amorphous surfaces that expand into what the artist once called "immediate infinity." The effect is of objects slipping out of focus, losing their boundaries. Enlargement and identity loss reinforce each other: the result of his giantism is doubt, not clarity. Often the transitions from one zone of a painting to another are more emphatic in their color change than in the objects defined internally in each zone.
Rosenquist explained the significance of a detail in the earlier big picture, which included an A-bomb mushroom, by saying: "Then next, that's an underwater swimmer wearing a helmet with an air bubble above his head, an exhaust air bubble that's related to the breath of the atomic bomb. His 'gulp' of breath is like the 'gulp' of the explosion. It's an unnatural force, man made." There is no doubt that the objects in their order in "Horse Blinders" could also be annotated in this way. However, just as his objects are painted in a way that makes them simultaneously explicit yet evasive, so the interjection of allegory is felt by the spectator, but without his becoming dependent on the artist's explanation. There is, I think, an inherent obscurity in Rosenquist's work, though I do not mean this in a derogatory sense. Indeed, the function of obscurity in his work is to protect him from the banal. The "F-111" is, in format, like a WPA mural; "Horse Blinders," except for its obscurity, could be a "Wonders of the Technical Age" mural or a fold-out in an encyclopedia. Undoubtedly, Rosenquist thinks in terms of objects with symbolic meanings and in terms of allegories about man's place in society, but his moralism, though articulate, is secretive.
Rosenquist's forms are all derived from recognizable objects split off from their familiar context. In this respect his practice resembles that of the Pop artists with whom he used to be associated. Pop art made a great play in the recontextualizing of common materials and unprocessed objects within the traditional field of art. Though highly aware of the sign system they were using, Pop artists to a man refrained from assigning symbolic function to their forms. Rosenquist, though equally sensitive to the manmade landscape, seems always to have thought about it allegorically, in terms of what was good for man or what machines were doing to people. He has failed to materialize these Great Thoughts, but he has done something else infinitely more interesting.
Dutch artists of the 17th century could assign symbolic meaning to their realistic subjects without weakening the illusion of things seen, but Rosenquist cannot communicate with society in unshared symbols. What we can do, as spectators, however, is to view his art in relation to our common experience of objects, even if the system by which they are ordered is out of reach. Then we can see the brilliance of his achievement as, by means of a naturalistic technique, he presents us with de-realized objects. Rosenquist is the painter of the objects and spaces of our world, but as they slip out of focus, enormous but lost. It has been said that Pop art has shown us the art and objects of the city, bringing neglected aspects of life back into view. Rosenquist, who more than anybody else was responsible for realizing a realistic potential within Pop art, does the reverse. He paints the world in all those episodes in which we lose our grip on it.
The Nation, May 5, 1969: 581-82
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