Women's Intuition, after Aspen 1998

Curator: James Rosenquist's "Women's Intuition, after Aspen" from 1998. It's a powerful mixed-media piece, mainly acrylic paint with a thick impasto application. What's your initial take on it? Editor: Immediate reaction? Controlled chaos. It's like a beauty counter exploded, all bright colours and swirling shapes but anchored, strangely, by what seems to be...lipsticks? Curator: Indeed. Considering Rosenquist's pop art background, it's easy to read those lipsticks as signifiers within the construct of feminine beauty. However, note that “after Aspen” suggests perhaps Aspen magazine as an artifact representing certain aspirations around feminine identity in its own social moment. Editor: Okay, so you’re suggesting that we shouldn't ignore the history of magazines shaping desires and anxieties around what women buy. We're not just talking cosmetics here, it's a visual language constructed around the business of selling. But that explosion, it reads as defiance? Curator: Or perhaps a deconstruction. Rosenquist often collaged disparate images to disrupt meaning, and this painting performs a similar operation, albeit through abstraction and impasto rather than collage. We see a dialogue with the media, consumerism and how gender plays a part. Editor: Let’s not forget the texture though; the visible brushstrokes. It really highlights the materiality of the paint, and it grounds that visual language, giving it an urgency. And also reminds me of Abstract Expressionism’s gesture towards expressing the human spirit through art. Is this a critique or just playing with form? Curator: The tension between critique and celebration is classic Rosenquist. His work always walks that line, prompting us to consider the cultural forces shaping our perceptions without offering easy answers. And looking at the composition overall, it’s clear that the explosion contains the lipsticks, it almost bursts out, defying the gendered constraints that keep these tools fixed in society. Editor: So, it's less about a fixed definition of 'feminine intuition,' more about an unbottling of forces, disrupting the expectations and labor that are socially placed around this gender performance. It makes me question all that swirling visual activity - the process, really. What effort went into creating that effect of “intuitive” energy? Curator: Precisely. It’s a reminder of how these visual spectacles are constructed, piece by piece. Thank you; that truly adds a dimension of the real to the intuition in this. Editor: A pleasure. From my perspective, considering how something like this is made puts into question assumptions on what is marketed for women, it might push viewers towards rethinking gender in society.