"There is always the impulse to express things one has experienced. If you've had an unusual experience, you want to try to describe it in some sort of abstract way to someone else.”
—James Rosenquist Small Doorstop explores Rosenquist’s fascination with American domesticity, the ephemerality of light, and the true nature of freedom. The impetus for its came from Rosenquist’s friend Wally, an ex-convict and fellow sign painter, who often invited the young artist out to drink in the 1950s. When Rosenquist first went to visit Wally at his house, Wally, an extremely guarded host, suspiciously peered through the window before letting him enter; soon after, Wally was wandering around the house “like a caged animal,” Rosenquist recalled, “like he’d been in jail.” Watching Wally go from room to room reminded Rosenquist of a pinball machine, bouncing from one location to another seemingly at random, a visually compelling memory Rosenquist aimed to memorialize in an artwork. “Doorstop is about wandering around a house plan,” Rosenquist declared. “That’s what it’s about. It’s about the itinerary of someone in cage.” Curator Judith Goldman further articulated the dichotomy the work tackles, remarking, “it's about confinement and freedom, about defining one’s place. Doorstops are used to keep doors open, but the title carries a pun that implies confinement.” The naked light bulbs, controlled by individual pull cords, pay homage to the apparently random nature of Wally’s wandering within his own confinement, allowing different, arbitrary combinations of the bulbs to be turned off or on at any given moment.
Reflecting the floorplan of a typical American home onto the ceiling, Small Doorstop is a smaller-scale iteration of Rosenquist’s ceiling-mounted painting Doorstop, presently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
