Rosenquist, Sander, and the Matter of Facts
Rosenquist, Sander, and the Matter of Facts
Concerning a Visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, New York, USA, in the Summer of 2024
Inspired by the bright and colorful magazines and advertisements of the 1960s, Rosenquist layered images of everyday objects—like a hair dryer—with images related to the Vietnam War, such as the F-111 bomber jet this painting was named after. Look for other objects you recognize in the painting. Which objects would you include in an artwork that describes our time?
–Museum of Modern Art“Kids” label from 2023
About a month ago, I was in New York City for the weekend, and between the end (at noon) of the movie marathon I had come down for and the start of the reading I had been invited to that evening, I found myself with a few hours to kill. Arguably these would have been best spent sleeping (something I hadn’t done since around 10:30 the previous morning), but I hadn’t used up my stimulants yet, so I decided to go to the Museum of Modern Art instead. If you’ve never visited, you might not be aware that MoMA is kind of a nightmare: a sprawling tourist trap whose endless, overstuffed exhibition rooms project an attitude of open hostility towards anyone who might want to stop in front of a piece for longer than the one or two minutes it takes for the audio guide (available free through the Bloomberg Connect™ app! download the Bloomberg Connect™ app today!) to tell you what to think about it. I went on a Sunday afternoon, while there was some sort of parade happening a block away, so no doubt it was especially bad – but bad crowds are exactly what it’s designed to accommodate, five hundred moms an hour seeing nothing and taking pictures of everything, mistaking the map for the territory in that way particular to the bourgeoisie, 2.5 bored and overstimulated children in tow. The real issue, though, is that MoMA unquestionably has one of the best collections of art after the French Revolution (or wherever you prefer to situate the beginning of Modernism) in the the country, if not the world – at any given time you can be confident there will be a good dozen works on display which will justify the $30 admission all on their own. Thus the decision to visit, despite knowing, more or less, what I was getting myself into.
Something important to understand is that the works which will justify the price of admission are emphatically not the ones around which the crowds will be clustered – your Starry Nights, your Demoiselles d'Avignon, etc. I don’t mean this in a contrarian way, or to signal my superior discernment (that will come later) – these pieces are simply, in every meaningful sense of the term, impossible to see in the present day. It’s not just the physical obstruction of the bodies jockeying for position, or the psychological pressure, if you do find yourself an adequate vantage point, not to linger “in the way” for too long, although these are real, serious problems (which, to be fair, I think it’s beyond any curator’s abilities to really solve). No, the thing is that even if all of these obstacles were removed, even if I had the gallery entirely to myself for as long as I desired, such works would remain absolutely inaccessible, functionally imperceptible to me – their cultural status is so hopelessly immense and overbearing that it effectively erases the object itself, like the moon blotting out the sun. I stand in front of Matisse’s Dance (I) and, try as I might, I cannot separate the experience from that of a dentist’s waiting room; this is a violence done by our culture, of course, for which the work itself is blameless (van Gogh might have killed himself far sooner if he knew what his work would become) – but the violence has been done, and I am not mad or brilliant enough to perceive the truth which it disfigures, and neither, almost certainly, are you. Such was the case with almost all the pieces that had been deemed worthy of their own dedicated benches, at least out of what I saw in the three or so hours I was there, i.e. less than a third of the permanent collection space (likely this effect I’m speaking of is much less of an issue in the post-1980s galleries, as it’s a function of Time above all else; but, then again, the work there is generally much weaker, so…) – there were, however, two notable exceptions, works with benches parked right in front of them which did not feel like simulacra of themselves: a set of August Sander portraits, mostly of couples, and F-111, by James Rosenquist.
One of the peculiarities of photography as an image-making medium is how ill-suited it is to gallery exhibition. Between the relatively minor scale of most photographic art prints (at least those made prior to, I don’t know, the 1960s?) and, of course, their intrinsic lack of Aura (not a bad thing, of course), I was struck again and again by just how insubstantial many great, iconic pictures felt hanging framed on the wall, in comparison to how they have struck me when I encounter them reproduced online or in a book. But there were exceptions, photographs which not only held their own but revealed themselves anew: a set of Eugène Atget prints from the turn of the century, documenting decorative elements of Parisian buildings in a manner clearly prefiguring the sign-and-window Americana of Walker Evans, were absolutely arresting despite being among the most diminutive objects on display; the Sander portraits, of course, were another. There is something uniquely transfixing about a Sander photograph, a clarity and distance which MoMA’s slightly precious hanging (two long rows, alternating art world figures and a conspicuously class-diverse array of what might be called “ordinary people” in a conspicuously harmonious checkerboard arrangement) did little to diminish. His portraits are not just historical but somehow of history; Time’s unbridgeable gulf is somehow there in the image; it’s part of it, you can see it. I sat in front of these portraits for a long time, staring first into one set of eyes, then another, as humans tend to do. Lesser photographers often like to say the eyes are the windows to the soul, or some equally threadbare platitude – they believe that it is a great accomplishment to take a picture which seems to reveal some supposed profundity “within” them, some hidden, secret Truth; Sander knows better. In his portraits, eyes are not portals of divination or wells of mystery – they are facts, clear and fathomless and more than enough, in themselves, to occupy a lifetime. His images are not “objective”, because nothing is objective save dust, but they also do not lie, or flatter, or make any lofty claims. They simply present a man, a woman, a small group sat before a backdrop, standing by the side of a road, well lit, without prejudice – here, the picture says, is a person, here is a day; this was, it no longer is; the rest is up to you. It is this astringent clarity, this commitment to the photograph as nothing more or less than the presentation of a fact, that enabled him to be a great photographer (the only great photographer) of both Nazis and those they sought to exterminate. That he maintained this commitment even as the whole of his society was being swallowed by the great, demented illusions of the Reich… I do not have the language for it. I am not sure such language exists.
It didn’t surprise me that there was little competition for the bench in front of Sander’s photographs – they’re the opposite of flashy, will look like nothing through a phone camera. The only other people that used it while I was there, I’m pretty sure, were only using it to rest. That these pictures were afford such a luxury at all I still find a bit surprising – situated in a small side gallery away from the major flows of traffic, perhaps the curators felt that if the weird, solitary tryhards like me must linger somewhere, it might as well be there. In any case, I was surprised that the bench for the Rosenquist was similarly accessible. Admittedly, by the time I got there it was less than an hour until closing, so the crowds had begun to thin out, but still, F-111 is a monumental, eye-popping classic of Pop Art – it had been given an entire room to itself (in the middle of one of the main thoroughfares, even), and it looks great through a phone camera. The expectation, on the part of the curators, seems to be that probably it won’t get swarmed like, say, Monet’s Water Lilies, but it should be in the same ballpark. Nonetheless, the bench was free when I got there, and while I sat and took the piece in, I watched visitor after visitor wander in, pause for a few moments, and move on. A few took the time to get up close and get a shot this or that detail, one girl quickly posed for a friend, but no one really seemed to want to stay. If anything, most people seemed anxious to leave. Again, I’m sure a sense of time crunch was a factor here – F-111 is installed on the middle floor of the permanent collection space, probably not the place you want to be if you’re an hour out from closing and still want to see everything (I’d long since let go of this foolish ambition, of course). The longer I sat in front of it, though, the more convinced I became that what people were responding to, above all else, was something in the work itself, something that was not what they had come to see.
A museum is, at best, a retirement home for culture – a place of preservation rather than growth. I don’t mean this as a dismissal: true contact with the past is necessary before one can go out and make a worthy future. But one does have to go out for that; it doesn’t happen within the museum, and it never will. Attempts by curators and marketing teams to work around or (more embarrassingly) “challenge” this simple reality are as numerous as they are ineffectual, an institutional nervous tic both understandable and unfortunate, given Babylon’s preference for that which exists in an eternal present, never threatening History’s status as a settled matter (thus the importance of the free Bloomberg Connect™ app, and similar ideological guardrails). And, of course, most most of the time a museum is not even a retirement home – most of the time, it’s a mausoleum. I say all this to convey some sense of how surprising it was, sitting in front of F-111, to slowly realize that the work was not only still “alive” but still sharp and vital – that it was not a passive subject on which I was performing an interpretive operation, but rather, that it was acting on me.
F-111 is a very large painting, even by today’s inflated standards; ten feet high by eighty-six feet long, its scale is closer to that of a public works commission, a mural for a plaza, say, or a train station, than a piece intended for gallery exhibition – but this was exactly the intent, and really, it couldn’t be anything else; its dimensions match those of the front room of the Leo Castelli Gallery, where it was first exhibited wrapping around all four walls. In its present installation at MoMA it covers only three – leaving room for the proverbial studio audience in all their proverbial sovereignty. This variance in install is enabled by the modular nature of the painting, its panorama spread across fifty-nine discrete panels, mostly canvas, a few aluminum – fifty-nine, and not sixty, because there’s one missing near the bottom-middle, disrupting the uniform rectangularity of the image plane. This is not necessarily the first thing one notices when confronted by the piece, but once one does, it becomes impossible to ignore, the most obvious of several dissonant notes which bring all of the painting’s apparent harmonies into question.
This is a painting which, superficially, seems like it should be a crowdpleaser – bright colors, monumental scale, a visual lexicon cribbed largely from an advertising vernacular long since rendered entirely quaint and non-threatening by the passage of time. But that missing panel. Something is not right here. Something is not as it seems. The truth, which becomes more obvious the longer one sits with it, is that F-111 is a real, bloodcurdling horror show, one of the scariest pieces in the whole museum. This, I think, is why most visitors seemed so quick to move on – not because of the missing panel particularly, but something of the same order, some detail that said to them, “Please, don’t be shy, come closer. Look deeper. But, fair warning: you might not like what you find here.” There are any number of potential culprits – the industrial coldness of the unpainted aluminum into which the work fades away at its edge; the vague nausea of the section dominated by oversized, greying spaghetti; the cheapness and tackiness of the wallpaper patterns rendered over certain swaths of the pictorial space; or, maybe, the umbrella pasted over the mushroom cloud, a joke which is so lazy and crude and obvious it starts to feel like not a joke at all. If you’re a regular person, any or all of this could be enough to stop you from lingering – you might enjoy the scale, the colors, the vintage vibes, but then move on before that vague, uneasy feeling in the back of your mind gets concrete enough to start complicating things. If you’re like me, though, which is to say freakish and maladjusted, the more of this you notice, the deeper inwards you’ll be drawn, until suddenly you can feel its nightmare underneath your skin, in the pit of your stomach, at the base of your spine.
F-111, of course, has its own spine – the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark, a nuclear-capable, supersonic fighter jet whose sleek, deadly profile runs the length of the painting, obscured beneath the detritus of American mass culture (light bulbs, rubber tires, angel food cake, the little girl in the hair dryer that serves as its “pilot”) like beast in the jungle. What’s important to realize here is that the plane was still in development when Rosenquist completed his painting – thus, it can only be a symbol of the future. This, I think, is how F-111 evades the embalming operation Official History (of which MoMA, as an institution, is of course only too happy to participate in) attempts to perform on objects like this, how it continues to live – it positions itself within the present but oriented towards the future, and not a speculative one, not a utopia or a dystopia, but something concrete, real, quantifiable – a future, like Sander’s photographs, that is a matter of facts. MoMA’s wall label (see above) asks children about objects that describe “our time”. Read between the lines and the message is clear: “Well, yes, okay, this is how things were back then – but come on, live in the present! Everything is different now.” This is a nasty lie to tell a child, but hardly an uncommon one. “That’s all in the past, don’t worry about it” – billions of dollars are spent every year selling this ridiculous worldview, this learned idiocy. F-111, to be reconciled with such, has to be made, by force, into something dated, a relic, an artifact – historically important, of course, and perhaps even a masterpiece, but a masterpiece of then, to be placed in that context and kept there. The problem is, it doesn’t work. Despite their best efforts, they can’t make the frame fit. You only have to look at the painting to see this: the plane, the blocks of color shifting on its surface, the words “U.S. AIR FORCE” gleefully detaching from the fuselage to run across the mushroom cloud, the little girl, the missing panel, the blank aluminum – this is the past, yes, but the past writes the present; it doesn’t just go away. The F-111 in F-111 was not yet, in 1965, raining fire on Vietnamese children and their protectors, but for Rosenquist, and anyone else paying attention, there was no doubt it would, in the future – and it did. I don’t think I’ve said the word “Gaza” yet in this essay. I guess it’s a bad practice for a writer to leave the most important point for the end. But in a time of genocide, is there any other kind?