Push Button, 1961
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 83 x 106 x 2 in. (210.82 x 269.24 x 5.08 cm)
- Accession Number
- 86.19
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Panza Collection
Before his success as a fine
artist, James Rosenquist made his living as a billboard painter, andPush Button’s smooth surface and bold
imagery are clearly linked with commercial advertising. Rosenquist assumes that
in our image-saturated, mass-media culture, where we speed by billboards on the
highway, flip through glossy magazines, and watch quick visual montages in
movies and on TV, viewers will be fully able to scan his painting’s fragmentary
juxtapositions. Likewise, they will be adept at decoding the adman’s appeals to
heterosexual desire, such as the suggestion of a hand brushing a leg, or the
innuendo behind “push my button.” The black-and-white rendering associates the
ankles, hand, and buttons, perhaps of a 1960s dashboard radio, with the black-and-white
photography of print advertising. That, in turn, reinforces the sense these are
not private images, but public messages, and the viewer is literate in their
language.
