Lost and Found: Splicing Time in America
Why shouldn’t it be done with that power and gusto [of advertising], with that impact?
James Rosenquist’s Big American Pictures
I’m somewhere beneath the great blue in a landscape of corn and crops I can’t identify. The horizons ride out into the distance where the unseen dogs howl in vast pastures and flocks of birds collide in drifting murmurations. My world here in the not-so-great midwest, is nothing like that of James Rosenquist’s. Yet somehow he started out in a country like this, in North Dakota. Flat and often surreal. A little anonymous boy that could draw. Not so different from me. But man-o-man what a life he made of it, and how much richer we are for his big American pictures.
I’ve actually never even seen a James Rosenquist painting, I’ve lived in cities and traveled a lot; not always tethered to these windblown plains where the sky is stitched to the tassels of cornfields. Maybe I’ve never seen one because the paintings are just too goddam big to have happened into them. The biggest painting I ever saw was by Cy Twombly. I saw it at the Modern in New York. It was an enormous gray and white scribbled picture. I have also seen some monumental Richard Serra sculptures at the indoor - now defunct - Temporary Contemporary in LA, but never have I seen one of James Rosenquist’s big boys.
I have an idea that I can get further in my work by pre-planning and pre-thinking an idea and preparing a lot. In other words, instead of approaching the canvas with a lot of emotion and feeling and hitting it with paint and hoping for some reflection or some feeling to come back at me from my mark, I try to plan in advance as far as I can think and then I prepare very carefully…
Maybe that’s disqualifying, but I think, having been living with him for the past few months, James probably would be ok with it. He’d probably just shrug, do an impression and move on.
There’s a lot to think about his paintings once you get past their inconceivable execution, but my favorite thing about them is that they are just enormous collages disguised as paintings. At his website, https://www.jamesrosenquiststudio.com/artworks/source-collages, you can see the little handmade collages that he used to make his big paintings. They are beautiful young little birds, like the Norman Rockwell studies his wife preferred to his finished paintings. They’re gorgeous.
This whole collage thing began, I guess - and of course it did - with Picasso in about 1912, in a painting that used real chair caning. It feels like such a perfect Modern invention. It’s the next step to express the world when it got too big - got too complicated to paint. It tapped into something beneath surreal, something mystical and profound. It miraculously compresses time and collapses it into pictorial expression. It exacts from the world slices of time in the form of images and juxtaposes them in a singular presentation that is seen all-at-once. Which in turn, in a kind of jujitsu move, the viewer unravels in real time. The exquisite innovation of 20th century art.
I want to show myself what I’m thinking about.
When I was in school, Charles Moone, my painting teacher told me, “There are artists I like as much as Bonnard and Vuillard, but none I like more.” That’s the impact of collage for me; there are painters I like, but none more than the ones that use collage. And most of them now do. James Rosenquist was new pals with Robert Rauschenberg in 1956 when he saw Bob’s mystical Combines. He must have been blown away (who wouldn’t be, can you imagine seeing those things in the 1950s?), because I am certain that it was the specific and particular pivot point that set James Rosenquist’s lifelong aesthetic search.
The versatility and potential of collage is transcendent. Rosenquist took his experience with scale and storytelling, burnished them with an uncompromising witness to American folly and POW they packed a punch. I love this picture of him painting himself into a corner with the detritus of a million magazines spread in the foreground. Each image, like every piece of Rauchenberg’s Combines, had spoken to him, it whispered to him, and this is the miracle: The dead fragments of lost worlds are called to service and through the filter of personal experience they create something oddly recognizable (like Andre Breton said, in the way that two brothers look alike). In the 1980s, James must have been getting his wavelengths jammed because he created a crosshatching splicing technique and talked about how it enabled him to make two images visible simultaneously which then in turn engendered a third unexpected meaning. These strange arrangements filter through us. We recognize them as a whole and they have some vague meaning for us because our subconscious goes to work making sense of them. Once that happens, they become talismans, they are reborn, and that is profound.
Here we are in our natural environment and the mysteries of the universe are all around us. I want to paint these mysteries.
Artists use of collage is as distinct as themselves, so everyone uses it differently. Kurt Schwitters, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell all used the technique to different ends, but I think fundamentally it’s a surrealist activity - a way to unlock a mystery - it’s enigmatic. The symbols that JR used are ironically so common that they provide a familiar portal into the greater ambition of his paintings. Another jujitsu move… and once you’re in, the mystery begins.
I was fourteen in 1970 and I had been fearing Vietnam from my basement bedroom for years already. I was too young to know about James Rosenquist, but he was working his big American creations: expressing his quaint ideas about hard work, kindness, generosity, gratitude, strength of character under the umbrella of war and consumerism. It all blew up - of course it did - and James’ aural acuity led into the mysterious portal of American contradiction. What he called, “The terrible temper of our times.”
Joseph Conrad has a line about lying in Heart of Darkness:
There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies,
Collage is truth - it does the exact opposite. Things, images, pictures, colors, textures left for dead in waste bins and scrap heaps are resurrected, reborn. They are given life anew in the form of collage - another life to be better, something different - something not yet imagined. There is a genuineness in the forgotten, the disposed of, the lost, the shards of life that animate the better angels. The originals. They are what remains. The leftover bits that may have been part of another story - another life. They remain. Particularly themselves. As true as can be true: nothing left of the lie, only the parts, the first parts the original sources. They are born again and ultimately - in another jujitsu move - give life in deeper, richer harmonics.
“To me, they [the paintings] only make sense as a question. Through my life, weird juxtapositions of time, ideas, and seeing things made me wonder about my own existence. I try to put that down in a picture.”
James Rosenquist made American paintings with a jolt. They were giant and ambitious as the country, but it was the pieces that told the true story. They were the ciphers, the codes, the speakers in tongues. I can imagine him - because I have done this myself - looking through his studio under papers and magazines, under shifting images and torn pages, under pieces of coil, rope, string, aluminum foil, paper cups, paint jars, looking - wait - let me say it this way, clearly - listening for the sound of the forlorn, the lost calling him to be found. And with an exquisitely acute ear he could hear the murmuring vibration and, through his imagination, the forgotten spoke to millions in a language that was the keenest articulation of the madness of life in America at the time of 20th to the 21st centuries. As Robert Hughes said: “An Eden compromised by its own violence”.
The collages that sprang to life beneath his hand gave James Rosenquist his extraordinary life. He may have been, like me, just a kid in the American midwest that could draw, but these collages, these secret parts, these alchemical keys, affirmed his direction for a lifetime. They were the fodder, the scribbles that lit the way through the portals of his imagination and need. They lifted him. They carried him along the American wave. Surfing the American dream from John Kennedy to the cosmos. From billboards to the stars.
POW!
There’s so much we know nothing about.