For those who can't take in the huge James Rosenquist retrospective organized by the Guggenheim Museum—wouldn't it be nice if we still had a big Guggenheim space for it?—the Godt Cleary Gallery in Mandalay Place offers a small-scale alternative.
This focused selection of large prints hardly qualifies as a retrospective, but it does touch upon two periods of Rosenquist's career: the mid to late 1980s, and works done around 2000. Over the years, much has been made of Rosenquist's employment during the late 1950s as a billboard painter, and how manipulating images in immense scale informed his sometimes room-filling paintings. But Rosenquist also has been a prolific and determined printmaker, often re-imagining on paper the collage-like collisions of vividly rendered objects he devised for canvas.
Thus is derived the series from the 1980s that combines monoprint and lithograph. Monoprints are unique impressions of ink first applied to a surface and then transferred to paper, and in these works the technique provides a kind of dense and sometimes messy physicality rarely found in Rosenquist's sharp, polished paintings. On top of these surfaces he would then apply cut-out formations from color lithographs, the splintered edges of more pale tones contrasting in several ways with the bright, splotchy monoprint.
In an interview for February's Art in America, Rosenquist traces these "sliver" compositions to varied ruminations about reincarnation, the space program, and the notion of metamorphosis. The third of these makes sense here. In works such as "Cross Hatch and Mutation" (1986) or "Flowers and Females" (1986), women's faces in the sliced lithograph layers could be imagined as transforming into flowers. But given Rosenquist's history, and his development as an artist in the heady days of 1960s Pop, it's hard not to read something crustier into these works. The model's red lips of "Shriek" (1986) remind us of the enduring relation between sales and sex, and what are flowers, in this case richly toned, erupting irises, but nature's sales pitch?
Elsewhere, the sliver stratagem suggests the ways images slice into us, as well as the ways we splinter the world in perceiving it. Eyeballs center the black-and-white aquatints "The Prickly Dark" (1989) and "Welcome to the Water Planet" (1987), as if to steer us to this reading. The former has a literally sinister edge, serrated in fact; while in the latter, the horizon divides floral and sea forms from an energetic night sky.
Most of the recent pieces are smaller, color lithographs from the Speed of Light series. In the Art in America interview, Rosenquist invokes Einstein to explain them: "The traveler and the spectator look at the same thing and they see it differently because of the speed of light." But velocity here is metaphorical, apparently separating the vagabond artist and the stationary gallery-goer, who fails to perceive the artist's "archeology" in the welter of distorted forms. "Navigator" (2000), a 10-color lithograph, is almost entirely abstract, with interlocking concentric and radiant formations and tubular cavities. Could these be part of that archeology, a reference to the lipstick tubes of the 1960s Rosenquist?
The tubular form is absent from "Sailor" (2000), but the eyeball turns up again in a taut, dynamic composition that includes dreamy regions of grisaille. "Passenger" (2000) and "After Berlin V" (1999), are somewhat sketchier entries from the Speed of Light series, and less satisfying; they seem to resist resolving into anything. But of course that is a mere spectator's opinion; the artist blazing by at warp speed knows better, presumably.
This tidy little show will not take the place of the retrospective, but it's revealing, nonetheless.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.