Sex, Lies, and History

Sex, Lies, and History looks at the early work of James Rosenquist, interpreting his collage-based paintings as prescient critiques of advertising—especially of sexual stereotypes—in the mass media. Inspired by the writings of Marshall McLuhan, Rosenquist deployed visual splicing and verbal puns to parody the incessant stimulation and false promises of the hot sell. At the same time, Rosenquist, by comparison to Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, emerges as the history painter of the Cold War generation: his epic-scaled canvases provide a trenchant, if indirect, commentary on the political consequences of plentitude and narcissism: the complacency of the American public toward the "military industrial complex" and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Written in a colloquial style that pays homage to both McLuhan's prose and Rosenquist's paintings, Sex, Lies, and History offers a revisionist view of the seemingly cynical or complacent position of Pop art in the cultural landscape of the 1960s.