ART4619C - Assignment #3

James Rosenquist

Nomad (1963)

Oil on canvas, plastic, and wood

James Rosenquist was an influential artist in the pop art movement around the 1960’s. Many of his pieces, including the piece above, deal with popular culture and the consumption of consumer objects. Ironically, Rosenquist worked formerly as a billboard painter and in that way was familiar with the world of advertising, with which he was definitely making a commentary of in his work. In his piece, Nomad, Rosenquist combines both painting and sculpture to create a massive art piece that is hard to get away from. On one side of the piece is a flimsy plastic that is somewhat funnel like, covered in paint drips. Under the funnel is the word “New” with bits of paint dripping from it, like the paint had come down from the plastic above. On the panels are images layered over each other of ballet dancers, a light bulb, pasta, picnic tables, and a brand of laundry detergent. While it is not immediately apparent these objects all hold some underlying trait that ties them together. What is this trait? What do ballet dancers and picnic tables have to do with one another? It can be said that the legs of the ballet dancers and the legs of the picnic table hold similar shapes, but that would really only be a part of it. Rosenquist, through the use of layering images on and next to each other, is creating a commentary on mass production and an over communicated society that is constantly being bombarded through the use of media objects.

Robert Rauschenberg

Booster (1967)

Lithograph and serigraph

Rauschenberg was an artist who was involved in both the abstract expressionist and pop art movement. His piece, Booster, is a self-portrait. According to author, Jonathan Fineberg, “Booster filtered through the distance of technological language – the x-ray, the astronomer’s chart of celestial movement for the year 1967, and the magazine images of drills with arrows diagramming their movement.” The piece along with all of the imagery mentioned contains an image of an empty chair, which may suggest a certain amount of emptiness. Along with being a self portrait, Booster, like most, if not all of Rauschenberg’s work is a reaction against the distance of mass culture… and how personal things can be made impersonal by an over communicated society.