James Rosenquist

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  print September 2008

  JAMES ROSENQUIST

  WITH BOB RAUSCHENBERG, we have lost a great mind and an extremely generous individual. Bob had the design ability and finesse to take throwaways and assemble them to make them sparkle intellectually.

  Bob’s thrill was the chance encounter. He shot from the hip. He didn’t edit his photos or his work. There was no good or bad. Often, the bad became brilliant. Once I walked into a show of his in New York with Isamu Noguchi. Bob had a bent oil barrel on the floor next to a bent car bumper. Isamu said, “Boy, he can really do it, can’t he?” I said, “Do what?”

  I met Bob when I first came to New York, when

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  print September 2004

  ELECTORAL COLLAGE: A PORTFOLIO

  FOLLOWING THE RELEASE OF THE INDELIBLE Abu Ghraib photographs this past spring, Richard Serra produced Stop Bush, a print that he has distributed widely both in art venues and in mainstream publications, as well as on the Internet. Serra insists that the piece is not an artwork but rather a “way to just get the message out,” a tack that inspired Artforum to invite other artists to take up the cause. Our brief was simple and open-ended: We asked fourteen artists to make an original contribution to these pages on the occasion of the American presidential election. A few, like Tom Sachs (whose

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  print April 1995

  R.S.V.P.

  I met Ray Johnson In September 1956, when he invited Peggy Smith and me to a party to view a huge fireworks exhibition on the Hudson River put on by Macy’s and the Japanese. I met two young, shy fellows there named Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg. When I got a loft in downtown Manhattan on Coenties Slip, in 1959, it was Ray who introduced me to Agnes Martin and Lenore Tawney, who lived nearby. A short time later he called me around midnight and said "Do you want to go to Helen Keller’s and get blind?” So I got out of bed to see what this was, and it turned out to be a waterfront bar called