James Rosenquist, "F-111," 1964-65

Voiceover: I painted the F-111 in 1964. F-111 was the latest American Fighter Bomber in the planning stage. Its mission seemed obsolete before it was finished. It seemed the prime [forest] of this war machine was to economically keep people employed in Texas and Long Island. At the time, I thought people involved in it's making were headed for something but I didn't know what. By doing this, they could achieved two and a half children, three and a half cars, and a house in the suburbs. In the painting I incorporated orange spaghetti, cake, light bulbs, flowers and many other things. It felt to me like a plane flying through the flack of an economy. The little girl was the pilot under a hair dryer. The swimmer gulping air was like searching for air during an atomic holocaust. I had heard that the Chinese had originally invented income taxes as a donation to static community. Now that taxes were in demand, I thought if I sold this painting the joke would be that the buyer had already bought a real F-111 with his taxes. I was concerned with peripheral vision. I wanted to specify that whenever one looked at would exist because of the peripheral vision that extends from the corner of the eye. Thus one would question, one's own self-consciousness. In the 1960s the painting was critically taken as an anti-work protest but there were a multiplicity of ideas that caused its existence.