| Artist: | James Rosenquist |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | I Love You with My Ford | |
| Date: | 1961 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Signscape | |
| Movement: | Pop Art | |
| Materials: | oil on canvas | |
| Subject: signage; mass media and billboard advertising;blasted allegory (John Baldessari's term);montage of American values: the automobile, sex, and spaghetti-O's. Allbrought together in a broken narrative that suggests commodity, sex, and death: a modern Vanitas image; perhaps his true subject is perception itself in an age of fast cars, the strip, and fast food; vision on the run, fragmented and decentered. Style: montage of conflicting, fragmented images; a collision of images, decentered and unclear in terms of an allegorical read; the sequence suggests multiple reads for our fragmented time; odd croppings and discrepancies of scale; the disjunctive that forces us to read inbetween the lines; like the sweep of the TV dial. Context: mass media and billboard advertising of the 60s that sends conflicting, mixed messages to the public at large; makes us critically question how we take in and process perceptions in an image world, how we read the signs; makes us question allegory, as well, and how the concept of the storytelling picture gets blasted in a decentered, fragmented postmodern world (the artist worked as a billboard painter in the 50s, and thus draws from signage directly). | ||
