James Rosenquist's autobiography, "Painting Below Zero."
Regardless of how you feel about Rosenquist's painting, his stories of growing up on the Northern Plains and his stories about his life as an artist are wonderful: visually descriptive and often funny. His childhood seems like a typically American story, which I guess is why it seems so familiar to me, even though he was older, and a boy. His parents were into flying, they moved often, he spent long stretches on his grandparents' farm, they lived in fairly rustic situations, he liked to play war and make most of his own toys. He grew up without television but his mother was an amateur painter and took him to art museums when she could. He spent a lot of time in and around Minneapolis, and briefly Chicago, before heading to New York to paint billboards for awhile before getting his own studio. He said painting billboards was like training for the Olympics and after that he never had a problem getting work ready for a show.
The book is written like Rosenquist talks: direct, to the point, funny, quickly changing scenes but always describing a perfect little moment. I'm guessing he dictated most of it to David Dalton.
He's a sunny, forward-looking, can-do guy so when he got to New York and met the beats, his assessment was hilariously predictable and self revelatory: "they were peculiar people, a bit nostalgic, doomy. They were nihilists, really."
I love the way he casually tosses off little bits of wisdom like, "it was easy to get sidetracked and end up a boxer or a tree on Broadway." He inserts descriptions of technique into stories about various projects and if you're paying attention, you could learn something.
He seems to have met everybody and remembers most of them affectionately. He describes Agnes Martin, "... buying coffee in her pajamas at the Sailor's Home on the waterfront." He visited Joseph Cornell and shared Kool-Aid & cookies made by Cornell's mother. He visited bars with Bob Rauschenberg for seven months, waking up with a hangover every morning. He shot Niki de Saint Phalle's sculptures with a .22 rifle and watched as paint exploded out of them. He dodged his Soviet minders to visit the Russian artist Eugene Rukhin and later helped Rukhin's widow get his paintings out of the country.
He says his Paris gallery was popular because the toilets were stocked with American toilet paper. Giacometti visited his show there and said, "It may be some kind of poetry but it isn't painting." He stumbled through a surreal lunch with Salvatore Dali who literally applauded Rosenquist's misunderstandings as intentional statements.
Then there was the time he was in his studio, too sick to get off the couch, when some big collectors came by. The door was unlocked, they let themselves in, and just then a big wharf rat stood up in the middle of the floor. The collectors saw the rat, the artist, and the painting in one take. They yelled "we'll take it" and were out the door.
Like his paintings, his story is not linear. It keeps opening up new topics and then turning a corner into a time and place he showed us before, only this time from a slightly different angle, and then he suddenly catapults us forward again. Sometimes he repeats himself almost word-for-word. I have good friends who do that, I probably do too. Rosenquist thinks of his paintings "... as memory banks; they remind me of different parts of my life - where I was and what I did. It keeps my sanity." Also on memory, he said, "The memory of something is often more interesting than the real thing. That goes back to when they asked Cocteau what he would save if his house burned down. He said, 'The memory of the fire.' "
Near the end of the book, he talks about his obsession with space-time and his attempts to work it out in painting. I think you're better off just looking at the paintings. As he said himself, "In a visual work, you try for some kind of magic, something that is readable in another part of the mind. ... it only makes sense if you can't translate it into words."
But I must leave you with my favorite James Rosenquist quote from this book:
"When things become peculiar, frustrating, and strange, I think it's a good time to start a painting."
-- Posted From My iPad
The book is written like Rosenquist talks: direct, to the point, funny, quickly changing scenes but always describing a perfect little moment. I'm guessing he dictated most of it to David Dalton.
He's a sunny, forward-looking, can-do guy so when he got to New York and met the beats, his assessment was hilariously predictable and self revelatory: "they were peculiar people, a bit nostalgic, doomy. They were nihilists, really."
I love the way he casually tosses off little bits of wisdom like, "it was easy to get sidetracked and end up a boxer or a tree on Broadway." He inserts descriptions of technique into stories about various projects and if you're paying attention, you could learn something.
He seems to have met everybody and remembers most of them affectionately. He describes Agnes Martin, "... buying coffee in her pajamas at the Sailor's Home on the waterfront." He visited Joseph Cornell and shared Kool-Aid & cookies made by Cornell's mother. He visited bars with Bob Rauschenberg for seven months, waking up with a hangover every morning. He shot Niki de Saint Phalle's sculptures with a .22 rifle and watched as paint exploded out of them. He dodged his Soviet minders to visit the Russian artist Eugene Rukhin and later helped Rukhin's widow get his paintings out of the country.
He says his Paris gallery was popular because the toilets were stocked with American toilet paper. Giacometti visited his show there and said, "It may be some kind of poetry but it isn't painting." He stumbled through a surreal lunch with Salvatore Dali who literally applauded Rosenquist's misunderstandings as intentional statements.
Then there was the time he was in his studio, too sick to get off the couch, when some big collectors came by. The door was unlocked, they let themselves in, and just then a big wharf rat stood up in the middle of the floor. The collectors saw the rat, the artist, and the painting in one take. They yelled "we'll take it" and were out the door.
Like his paintings, his story is not linear. It keeps opening up new topics and then turning a corner into a time and place he showed us before, only this time from a slightly different angle, and then he suddenly catapults us forward again. Sometimes he repeats himself almost word-for-word. I have good friends who do that, I probably do too. Rosenquist thinks of his paintings "... as memory banks; they remind me of different parts of my life - where I was and what I did. It keeps my sanity." Also on memory, he said, "The memory of something is often more interesting than the real thing. That goes back to when they asked Cocteau what he would save if his house burned down. He said, 'The memory of the fire.' "
Near the end of the book, he talks about his obsession with space-time and his attempts to work it out in painting. I think you're better off just looking at the paintings. As he said himself, "In a visual work, you try for some kind of magic, something that is readable in another part of the mind. ... it only makes sense if you can't translate it into words."
But I must leave you with my favorite James Rosenquist quote from this book:
"When things become peculiar, frustrating, and strange, I think it's a good time to start a painting."
-- Posted From My iPad
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