Memories Scaled and Scrambled

There are pure painters and there are American painters, and James Rosenquist, a survey of whose work since 1961 fills a floor of New York City's Whitney Museum this summer, is decidedly one of the latter. What other artist in the past 25 years has scanned the American scene more faithfully or brought such a compelling if fractured narrative out of its weird slippages and layerings of imagery? In the heyday of pop art, there was more stress on Rosenquist's means and less on his ends. One saw the devices from advertising, the billboard manner; one felt affronted by its "vulgarity" and by the schematic thinness and neatness of the paint, so heartless looking when compared with the thick, spontaneous and (it was assumed) emotionally stronger surface of late abstract expressionism. None of that seems a problem anymore. Rosenquist's ingenuities $ as a formal artist have floated to the top. And the subject is clearer: the vicissitudes of a certain kind of American dream.

Looking at a big Rosenquist (a small one is 10 ft. wide, and Star Thief, 1980, the mural whose installation at Miami International Airport was successfully opposed by Frank Borman, then president of Eastern Airlines, is 17 ft. by 46 ft.) is a bit like seeing one of the lost panoramas that were so popular in 19th century America scrolling creakily past, a journey re-created as spectacle, stripped of its pastoral imagery and retooled in terms of media glut. Hey, look! you hear the nasal voice of the artist saying: this is what the banks of the electronic Mississippi look like as they glide by. Here is a succession of odd dreams, bigger than life: a red fingernail the size of a mudguard, a slough of squirming orange spaghetti, a girl whose perfect, impersonal beauty has to advertise something other than herself, the black void of outer space, a paper clip, crinkled silver Mylar and bristling sheaves of fiber-optic cables and the Ford in your future.

Born in North Dakota in 1933, Rosenquist backed into being a painter through grass-roots advertising: he started painting Phillips 66 signs for a Minnesota paint contractor and gradually moved up to supporting himself as a billboard artist in New York City in the 1950s. Turning out these mammoth images, high above the city streets, had the most obvious connection to his later art: the problem of how you make something that looks perfectly realistic a quarter- mile away when you are close up against it and cannot see it as a whole. The huge fragmentary paintings of the '60s and '70s are imposing but not tactile; very big but oddly weightless, with none of the haptic intensity that is the gift of denser painting. They look hard to understand because they are easy to read. As Art Historian Judith Goldman points out in her recent book on Rosenquist, most of his images are not just culled, collage-wise, from advertising; they are shards of personal experience, of memories scaled up and colloquially scrambled. Nevertheless there was a certain tone of image that Rosenquist sought. He did not want to paint old things that provoked nostalgia. What he liked, as he put it, were images "common enough to pass without notice." Hence the '50s-ish look of his paintings from the '60s, which, ironically, seem more nostalgic now than they did then. Unlike other pop artists with whom he was classed, such as Andy Warhol or Claes Oldenburg, * Rosenquist was not an ironist. "He rendered his blue-collar view of American things without mockery," writes Goldman, "with a deadpan literalness and a directness that suggested innocence."

It also suggested surrealism, and to a degree that Goldman perhaps underrates. Early Rosenquists from 1962--like Noon, Capillary Action or Untitled (Blue Sky), with their small canvases that hover clear of the surface while still carrying the sky or grass of the background--quote Magritte with an almost naive directness. True, Rosenquist could not be less interested in the literary and sexual side of surrealism, but the way disconnected images have always floated together in his work (the duck's head, tire tread and huge cropped face in Silver Skies, 1962; the immense rashers of bacon, their fat glistening among the stars, in Star Thief ) does not come only from America.

Though he was never a "political artist" as such, a political current --generally of a milky, liberal kind--surfaces in Rosenquist's work. It produced a number of bland icons but one real masterpiece as well: F-111, 1965, the 86-ft.-long, multipanel anti-Viet Nam mural that caused a hullabaloo when the Metropolitan Museum chose to exhibit it in the '60s. Unlike most political art of the time, it looks unpolemical at first, and that is the source of its power. It sums up Rosenquist's vision of America as an Eden compromised by its own violence. The impact of its neon colors and yowling discharge of images has slackened little in 20 years. Like a shark silently threading a reef, the sleek body of the bomber passes through a succession of signs denoting the good life and ways of defending it; a bubble of air from an Aqua-Lung regulator mimics the burst of a nuclear cloud, over which is set an umbrella; the hole in a frosted ring cake suggests a missile silo; a chillingly winsome little blond muffin sits precociously under a hair dryer, whose gleaming cone evokes the nose of an ICBM; and so on.

F-111 may not be, as has sometimes been claimed, the Guernica of the '60s, but it has much in common with the apocalyptic tone that broke into popular culture at the time, through rock lyrics, and it affected people in a way few works of political art had done since the murals of Diego Rivera in the 1930s. It suited its time, just as Rosenquist's lusher paintings of the '80s, with their candied colors and peculiarly deceitful overlays of motif--the sumptuous presentation of dying fetishes of American culture, like the space program --suit theirs. Rosenquist, in short, is one of the few former pop artists whose work continues unabatedly to have something to say, however elliptic the mode of saying it turns out to be.