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James Rosenquist: A Retrospective
Poetry and Metaphor
“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
Although Rosenquist avoids storytelling and explicit narrative, his paintings are full of meaning. The fragmented images and strange juxtapositions of objects actually serve to increase the possibilities for multiple meanings and levels of interpretation.
Like a good poem, a Rosenquist painting asks you to seek out information. The strange couplings, abrupt changes in color, and scale disrupt the process of recognition. They are filled with contradictions in scale and context that suggest metaphors rather than specific stories. Separately, the various images convey their own conventional meanings; taken together, they convey new meaning that remains open to individual interpretation. Like complex poetry, Rosenquist’s paintings require time. Unlike advertising images, they cannot be taken in at a glance.
Star Thief is a prime example. It has been described as a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that do not fit. Like many of Rosenquist’s pictures it has created a controversy. When it was selected for installation in Miami’s International Airport, the decision divided the community. The most outspoken member of the opposition was the president of Eastern Airlines, former astronaut Frank Borman, who upon seeing Star Thief announced, “I have had some exposure to space flight and I can tell you without any equivocation that there is no correlation… between the artist’s depicting and the real thing.” Although Borman thought that Rosenquist had missed the mark in his depiction of outer space, Rosenquist describes the intent of the painting not as a depiction of space travel in the literal sense, but as a metaphor for creative exploration. According to Rosenquist, the star represents your focus on a goal, but once you have reached that star, that goal, you may gain a new perspective and travel in a new direction. In this painting, “The star is the original attraction. Once you reach the star, you make a diversion because you can see even further. So, the star is the ‘thief’ that brings you to all the places you didn’t originally plan to go. It is like thinking: the more [thinking] you do, the deeper you go, and the more mysteries you see and want to discover.”
| View + Discuss |
James Rosenquist (b. 1933) |
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| Art Explorations | |
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Have students contribute
any everyday object to a central collection spot. Students should sit
in a circle around the pile of objects. Ask the first student to choose
an object and think about what each object looks like. I see (the name of the object)... It looks like... Pass the object to the next student, so that they can contribute the next metaphor. Encourage them to make as many as many illogical comparisons (aka metaphors and similes) as they can. Example: I see a pair of scissors... It looks like a person doing jumping jacks… a hungry bird… a rocket ship... They should think about far-fetched and the ridiculous comparisons as well as logical ones. The last student to contribute a metaphor for the object gets to choose the next object from the pile. |
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Use the lists of objects and descriptive words that were compiled in response to viewing Star Thief (see View + Discuss section). This should provide the class with an extensive list of both nouns and adjectives that grow out of responding to the painting. Write a poem by selecting from only these words. Repeat, delete, or change the order of the words as you please—but don’t add anything that was not on the original lists. The new poem should not be a description of Star Thief, but rather a springboard for your new invention using words harvested from the painting. When the poems are complete students should read them to the class. |
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Jot down snippets of conversation that you hear over a one-week period—at school, on the bus, on the radio, in the park. Take these bits of conversation and weave them together into a poem. |
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Star Thief was the focus of a public debate because powerful individuals objected to it being installed in the Miami International Airport. Are there certain guidelines that public art should meet? Stage a class debate to decide whether Star Thief should be displayed in your local airport. |
Additional Resources |
Collom, Jack and Sheryl Noethe. Poetry Everywhere. New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1994. Fletcher, Ralph. Poetry Matters:
Writing a Poem From the Inside Out. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Goldsmith Wooldridge, Susan. Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996. Livingston, Myra Cohn. Poem-Making: Ways to Begin Writing Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. |
Vocabulary |
ABSTRACT Not related to material objects. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM A movement in American painting that developed in New York during the 1940s and stressed the spontaneous expression of emotion without reference to any representation of physical reality. BEATS Beginning in the 1950s, artists, poets, and musicians who defied social norms by adopting a bohemian lifestyle and rejecting traditional American values and material possessions. COLLAGE Two-dimensional works made of pasted paper pieces, cloth, or other materials. CUBIST Referring to a style of art originated by George Braque and Pablo Picasso. The Cubists fragmented objects and pictorial space into semitransparent, overlapping faceted planes. GRID A network of evenly spaced horizontal and vertical lines, as found on graph paper. GRISAILLE A style of painting that uses only gray tints to render images. ICONOGRAPHY Symbols and images that have a particular meaning, either learned or universal. The visual imagery used to convey meaning in a work of art. MEDIA MESSAGES Communication that reaches us through information and entertainment technologies that may use a combination of words, images, and sounds to capture our attention. METAPHOR A figure of speech or visual presentation in which a word, phrase, or image is used in place of another to suggest a likeness between them, while in the process formulating a new concept for the imagination. POP ART An art movement with its roots in the 1950s that explored the image world of popular culture, from which its name derives. Basing their techniques, style, and imagery on certain aspects of mass reproduction, the media, and consumer society, these artists took inspiration from advertising, pulp magazines, billboards, movies, television, comic strips, and shop windows. These images, presented with (and sometimes transformed by) humor, wit, and irony, can be seen as both a celebration and a critique of popular culture. POPULAR CULTURE The common set of arts, entertainment, customs, beliefs, and values shared by large segments of society. SCALING-UP A technique traditionally used in commercial art to enlarge an image by using a proportional grid. SURREALISM A 20th-century art movement in art and literature that sought to express what is in the subconscious mind by depicting objects and events as seen in dreams. |