F-111
JAMES ROSENQUIST, 1964-65
So Rosenquist spent his twenties painting billboards. Whiskey. Movies. Faces two stories tall. You know, Times Square stuff. And when you're up there painting one, you're way too close to see the whole thing. You can only see it from the street. So he takes that way of working and makes this. The F-111. The fighter plane America was building while the war in Vietnam kept getting worse. Bright. Shiny. Brand new. And he runs it through everything else America was selling at the time. Cake. Tires. Hair dryers. Spaghetti. The plane goes nose to tail underneath all of it. Eighty-six feet long. Ten feet tall. Wrapping around four walls. So you're basically back on the billboard scaffold. Too close to take the whole thing in. Rosenquist called it a plane flying through flak. Flak, like anti-aircraft fire. Stuff exploding around a plane. The spaghetti? That's flak. His word, not mine. Except none of this stuff is shooting the plane down. It's paying for it. Rosenquist said the little girl under the hair dryer is the pilot. Because the people building the plane had good jobs. Those jobs bought the house. The car. The hair dryer. Their taxes bought the plane. The plane kept the jobs going. So the hair dryer isn't sitting next to the war machine. It's flying it. When this opened at Leo Castelli in 1965, the panels were supposed to be sold separately. A slice of cake here. A slab of bomber there. You know. Something for every room. Rosenquist called that a dark joke. You could buy a piece of a weapons system your taxes had already paid for. Retail twice. Then Robert Scull bought the whole thing. Taxi money. Literally. He owned a fleet of cabs. Probably for the best. This thing does not behave over a couch. It wants the room.