F-111, painting
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ART |
Art analysis:
F-111 shows a series of images which include: The F-111, a cake, a Firestone tire, light bulbs, a girl with a hairdryer, an explosion and an umbrella, an underwater swimmer and spaghetti. Rosenquist began this painting in 1964, at a tense and violent moment in this country, as the Vietnam War steadily escalated away and anti-war activism grew at home. The subject, the F-111 fighter-bomber plane, was in development at the time as part of a military initiative that ended up costing a lot and financed by American tax dollars. Rosenquist painted the body of the plane, and also he distributed spliced-in images of commercial products and references to war, that were fragments of the criticism of consumer society. He positioned his main subject, the F-111 military plane, which was in development at the time, flying through fragmented images of consumer products and related thoughts and events to war. Through its long series of visual concepts, F-111 addresses the connections between the Vietnam War, income taxes, consumerism, and advertising. The taxpayers’ money was being spent terribly on the war weapon that was going to rain death down on some innocent population halfway around the world for some purpose they didn’t even understand, while at the same time the warplane is providing a profitable lifestyle for aircraft workers in the U.S. You ask yourself: Why is this new plane, the F-111, being built? For defense against what? When you think of the conflagrations and all the money spent on obsolete weapons that could have gone into health research, hospitals, and public works, it was such misguided thinking. So, one idea included in this painting was about the indiscretion in their primary responsibility. And they were being subjected to an even bigger money collector: the Vietnam War.
The hole in the angel food cake was a metaphor for the missile silo or a launch facility, which was a vertical cylindrical structure constructed underground. Rosenquist colored the tread on the bottom of the snow tire, which suggests something cold, in a very bold, precise way. It reminds you of a king’s crown, and it implies the idea of industry, and represents some sort of capitalistic enterprise. The light bulbs in the picture are falling from the plane. They are pastel colors like Easter eggs. Here is the idea of the fragile light bulb and eggshell, which both burst when dropped like bombs. The little girl under that bomb-shaped hair dryer represents the statement that apparently contradicts itself and yet might be true of all these middle-class families prospering from building a death-dealing machine. So the little girl under the hairdryer is a metaphor since she is the thing that was pushing the market that built war weapons and the motivation and the benefits of this way of life. The grass behind her is painted in radioactive shades of green. The little girl in the painting was a child model. The umbrella represents how at resorts they used to advertise: “Come and watch an atomic bomb test,” as if it were a show and people would sit under beach umbrellas with their iced drinks and watch these mushroom clouds in the desert. It’s as if you were at a resort and watching an enormous atomic bomb go off as someone gulps for air or is being killed. The diver with the aqualung gasping for air is like the big gulp of air that a nuclear explosion consumes, which relates to the other image of a nuclear explosion.
The hole in the angel food cake was a metaphor for the missile silo or a launch facility, which was a vertical cylindrical structure constructed underground. Rosenquist colored the tread on the bottom of the snow tire, which suggests something cold, in a very bold, precise way. It reminds you of a king’s crown, and it implies the idea of industry, and represents some sort of capitalistic enterprise. The light bulbs in the picture are falling from the plane. They are pastel colors like Easter eggs. Here is the idea of the fragile light bulb and eggshell, which both burst when dropped like bombs. The little girl under that bomb-shaped hair dryer represents the statement that apparently contradicts itself and yet might be true of all these middle-class families prospering from building a death-dealing machine. So the little girl under the hairdryer is a metaphor since she is the thing that was pushing the market that built war weapons and the motivation and the benefits of this way of life. The grass behind her is painted in radioactive shades of green. The little girl in the painting was a child model. The umbrella represents how at resorts they used to advertise: “Come and watch an atomic bomb test,” as if it were a show and people would sit under beach umbrellas with their iced drinks and watch these mushroom clouds in the desert. It’s as if you were at a resort and watching an enormous atomic bomb go off as someone gulps for air or is being killed. The diver with the aqualung gasping for air is like the big gulp of air that a nuclear explosion consumes, which relates to the other image of a nuclear explosion.