(Here’s an image of James Rosenquist that appeared in a New Yorker review by Peter Schjeldahl Oct. 27, 2003. It was photographed by Dennis Hopper, in a billboard factory in Los Angeles in 1964. We like it better upside down. Notice Rosenquist’s resemblance to a young Andy Warhol this way.)
We liked what Schjeldahl had to say, but we stopped short at this sentence and had an epiphany. This sentence, written by a poet, is really a haiku in disguise. Here’s the original sentence:
“A recent painting in the Guggenheim show, the gigantic “The Stowaway Peers Out at the Speed of Light” (2000), seventeen feet high by forty-six feet long, is a congeries of swirling, crumpled, highlight-bedizened, unindentifiable shapes pulled flat by uniformly fuzzed brushwork.”
Here’s the haiku:
A recent painting
in the Guggenhim show, the
gigantic “The Stow-
away Peers Out at
the Speed of Light” (2000),
seventeen feet high
by forty-six feet
long, is a congeries of
swirling, crumpled, high-
light-bedizened, un-
indentifiable shapes
pulled flat by uni-
formly fuzzed brush work.
It is beautiful.
