590
G. R. SWENSON
he plans his third automobile and his ruth child because he
is
a
technician and has work for the next couple of years. Then
the
original idea is expanded, another thing is invented; and the plane
already seems obsolete. The prime force of this thing has been
to
keep people working, an economic tool; but behind it, this is a
war machine.
SWENSON:
What about the man who makes the F-l11?
ROSENQUIST:
He is just misguided. Masses of people are being snagged
into a life and then continue that life, being enticed a little bit more
and a little bit more in the wrong direction.
SWENSON:
What h:ave you tried to do
in
this painting?
ROSENQUIST:
I think of it like a beam at the airport. A man in
an
airplane approaching a
beam
at the airport, he may fly twenty or
thirty miles laterally, out of the exact way, but he continues to
be
on the beam. As he approaches closer to what he wants, or to the
airport, he can be less divergent because the beam is a little narrower,
maybe only one or two miles out of the way, and less and less until
when he gets right on it; then he'll
be
there.
The ambience of the painting is involved with people who are
all going toward a similar thing. All the ideas in the whole picture
ate
very divergent, but I think they all seem to go toward some basic
meaning. They're divergent so it's allowable to have orange spaghetti,
cake, light bulbs, flowers . . .
SWENSON:
Going toward what?
ROSENQUIST:
Some blinding light, like a bug hitting a light bulb.
I think of the picture as being shoveled into a boiler. The picture
is my personal reaction as an individual to the heavy ideas of mass
media and communication and to other ideas that affect artists. I
gather mys'elf up to do something in a specific time, to produce
something that could be exposed as a human idea of the extreme
acceleration of feelings. The way technology appears to me now
is
that to take a stance-in a painting, for example--on some human
qualities seems to be taking a stance on a conveyor belt: the minute
you take a position on a question or on an idea, then the acceleration
of technology, plus other things, will in a short time already have
moved you down the conveyor belt. The painting is like a sacrifice
from my side of the idea to the other side of society.
I can only hope to grasp things with the aid of a companion
like an IBM machine. I would try to inject the humanity into the
IBM machine; and myself and it, this extreme tool, would go forward.
I hope to do things in spite of my own fallacies.
