James Rosenquist, "F-111," 1964-65
About this video
James Rosenquist explains his huge 1964-65 painting F-111, named after a new American fighter-bomber. He links the plane to the economy and suburban consumer dreams, describes the everyday images he mixed in, the joke about taxes, and his interest in peripheral vision, noting that critics read it as a protest though it had many ideas behind it.
You'll be able to
- explain how Rosenquist connected the F-111 war plane to the American economy.
- describe how images like spaghetti, cake and a little girl under a hair dryer carry meaning in the painting.
- explain why Rosenquist says the painting had many ideas, not just one.
Key words
- Fighter bomber
- A military plane designed both to fight other aircraft and to drop bombs, like the F-111.
- Peripheral vision
- What you see at the edges of your sight, from the corner of the eye.
- Atomic holocaust
- Mass destruction from nuclear war, a fear Rosenquist links to the gasping swimmer.
- Suburbs
- Residential areas outside cities; Rosenquist mentions 'a house in the suburbs' as part of the consumer dream.
Transcript
Voiceover: I painted the F-111 in 1964. F-111 was the latest American Fighter Bomber in the planning stage. Its mission seemed obsolete before it was finished. It seemed the prime [forest] of this war machine was to economically keep people employed in Texas and Long Island.
At the time, I thought people involved in it's making were headed for something but I didn't know what. By doing this, they could achieved two and a half children, three and a half cars, and a house in the suburbs. In the painting I incorporated orange spaghetti, cake, light bulbs, flowers and many other things.
It felt to me like a plane flying through the flack of an economy. The little girl was the pilot under a hair dryer. The swimmer gulping air was like searching for air during an atomic holocaust. I had heard that the Chinese had originally invented income taxes as a donation to static community.
Now that taxes were in demand, I thought if I sold this painting the joke would be that the buyer had already bought a real F-111 with his taxes. I was concerned with peripheral vision. I wanted to specify that whenever one looked at would exist because of the peripheral vision that extends from the corner of the eye.
Thus one would question, one's own self-consciousness. In the 1960s the painting was critically taken as an anti-work protest but there were a multiplicity of ideas that caused its existence.
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