(To my fellow RepGeek Rounders, some of you are mentioned. Luman, it turns out I am like you, unable to fade away with dignity. LOL)
Unlike Takashi Murakami, I believe Richard Prince's work is easier to come to terms with, albeit opinions splinter in relation to it's subject matter and themes quite regularly. I managed to catch his retrospective at the 11th hour at the Guggenheim in January and was far more into it than I thought I would have been. He's been described as a prince among (art) men as well as the Prince of Thieves because of his techniques. He has for more than 30 years, spending unequal time in both obscurity and the limelight, taken advertisements, photographs, canceled checks, car hoods, tires, ribald American jokes, pulp novel covers, (child) pornography, whole automobiles, houses, celebrity head shots, even big waves and regurgitated the images we loved, idealized and in some cases made famous, secretly or openly, and threw them back at us with doses of compassionate contempt, pleasure, disgust and wonder. The Media's standard images (from "liberal" to "conservative" to "other"), particularly advertising images, pervades every nook and cranny of our lives, taking up precious space in our collective psyche, and Richard Prince is sweeping that filth into a pile for any and all of us to pilfer meaning from or leave rotting where it lays. Roberta Smith said, if Prince were The Statue of Liberty, the bronze plaque (plated in gold no less) on his base would say in neon green: "Give me your tired, your poor, but also your traveling salesmen and faithless wives; your biker girlfriends, porn stars, custom-car aficionados and wannabe celebrities; as well as your first-edition book collectors . . ." An artist with something for anyone but, depending on who you are, could that something just as easily be nothing?
At first, I was a little incredulous about what Prince was doing being actual fine or even rough art, and I was especially unnerved at it being called "original" art. How can a guy taking a photo of another person's photo be called his own? The art world has struggled with this paradox since artists like Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Jeff Koons stepped on the scene with their controversial, at the time, concepts about art, with boundaries between fair use and outright copyright infringement blurred. But then I began to look at it more abstractly and study his background, his intentions, interpretations of critics and listening to my heart about what might be really going on in the pieces. I now liken Richard Prince's "rephotography" and appropriation to that of a DJ doing a remix of another musical artist's whole song or taking just a portion to revamp in a new track. Viewed from that basis, many of his pieces take on a new meaning or make you more compliant to what he's trying to convey to you. I found myself quickly softening and warming to what his perspectives on the American culture's material highs and meth lab lows might actually be about. The eerie familiarity one has with a lot of his work because of where it is culled, practically disappears when you look at with a new sense of why he created it; only at that point does it cease being a bad copy and become a Good Revolution.
One could say he has manged to outlast at least some of his contemporaries and trump their techniques which should be expected, as he claims to have really been the first to use this particular method of creating art. But as time has passed, I really believe Prince has finally honed the few skills he has into something approaching "acceptable" contemporary art, something I wouldn't have said aloud even 10 years. I think he has certainly made more of an impact than Levine or Sherman and may have finally caught up with Koons; because there's certainly something within each piece that is wholly his own, so much more so than any of the others who have tried to emulate a few but not nearly enough of his peculiar methods. And if you still harbor any misgivings about him after taking in his body of work, artists like Wade Guyton or Kelley Walker will send you back into Prince's arms forever once you see what they are passing off as art. It appears that what was once the artistic exburbs has been finally been incorporated by Fine Art City with those who willingly choose to live in the rural area trying to produce art with what appears to be the contents of an outhouse, expecting YOU to eat it in every sense of the word. The young artists coming from art's far, far fringe are REALLY stretching Sunsan Sonntag's philosophy that not all art requires interpretation and should simply exist. I do feel this way sometimes, especially when viewing contemporary art, BUT there are limits. You could say, that Prince is playing a colossal joke on the art world and that may in fact be true; I think if anything he's laughing WITH us, if we are indeed even laughing; the new artists clinging to his coat tails are laughing AT us. Google their names and you'll see.
Although his early beginnings are vague and filled with inconsistencies, it is most probable that Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone to parents who worked for the government in some capacity that may or may not have been secretive in nature . . . allegedly. He spent his formative years growing up in the Boston suburb of Braintree whereupon turning 18 and finishing high school, he flew to Europe and traveled the continent via train on a sort of unconventional Grand Tour, stopping in cities that had museums that housed the pieces he had seen in textbooks throughout the years. When he returned back home, he attended some university somewhere in Maine . . . allegedly. He came of age at period of time within art that was ascended, for better or worse, by the likes of Pollock, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein who were all making a splash on the scene in New York and would unquestionably have been influenced by them. Just as those contemporary giants bucked the prevailing trends of art at that time, Prince set a new standard that I think owed just as much to Salvador Dali as Marcel Duchamp. The freewheeling and open atmosphere of New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s allowed Prince and his colleagues to if not exactly thrive to at least survive, at least until recently. Today, the world of fine art is a VERY, VERY exclusive club and, without strong institutional support, many truly deserving artist never make it inside.
Richard Prince's fascination with and eventual dissection of materialism, the fantasy worlds of advertising converging with deferred desire through abject consumerism, began in the basement of Time-Life in New York during the late 1970s. He was painting somewhat in his spare time but not doing anything of note during this period. During his years at Time-Life, he was in charge of cutting out articles from magazines for staff writer's on the upper floors to use, since computer archiving was in its infancy. At the end of these very long days, he was had piles and piles of advertisements strewn about his desk and around his office. The worlds contained in each ad, what the companies were tempting us with and promising, must have been provocative to Prince after seeing them day in and day out; it is well established that we yearn for and envy what we see most often but perversely, as Prince points out in his art, we are eventually unaffected or even annoyed by it and have to, sooner or later, deconstruct its true meaning. What are we buying into really? What is the covenant made between the consumer and product? It's during this inquest that he hit upon the idea to photograph the parts of ads he liked or wanted us to explore more closely, enlarging some of them up to monolithic proportions to give them urgency, immediacy and greater psychological power, starting with things as seemingly common as a Marlboro ad or a Rolex (of which he now has many). One of his cowboys set the record for the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction; shortly thereafter, this record was broken--by another of his own photographs.
The piece that caused a stir in early 1980s, after causing a stir in the 1970s upon its "discovery", was his photo of Gary Gross' photo of Brooke Shields naked in a bathtub at the age of 10. Let me first state that I fully agree that the original photo taken by Mr. GROSS is unequivocally child pornography, leaving aside Prince's remix of the photo. This photo was not art in the 1970s and I'm loathe to call art in the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s; and, yes, I'm fully aware that an argument all the way around could be made and you wish to try and make it, I'll be more than pleased to reply to your comment. But you better make it REALLY good.
In this photo below, Brooke Shields is standing in way that would be considered seductive, if she were older. Her face is painted in an adult fashion and she is staring straight into the camera (or viewer's eyes), signals which in this context can only mean sexual preparedness. Brooke Shields' early career is littered with the choices her mother made to sell her daughter's sexuality, whether in subtle ways like the film Pretty Baby or patently like in Gross' photo (which netted her $450). I fervently believe photos of this nature bring about fantasies which could in fact lead to actions that strip some child somewhere in this world of his or her innocence, as evidenced by the appalling and remarkably hilarious To Catch A Predator series. Where was Chris Hansen when Gary Gross was taking this photo?
The photograph, Spiritual America, is viewable at YOUR OWN DISCRETION at Richard Prince Art.
This photo may have been taken over 30 years ago but what it fundamentally represents has never been more acute than now; the photo brings to the forefront a multitude of germane social issues with the main one the continued categorical sexualization of everything, including children (especially little girls), which is itself part and parcel to rampant consumerism and materialism we see now. But another topic it raises is the one of fame and celebrity at any cost--while preserving an elevated moral position--and what we will sacrifice in order to achieve it; Shields' mother, like any good and deranged stage parent worth her salt, placed her daughter at the vanguard of this battle, a war that is still ongoing with Miley Cyrus recently having to take up arms. The opiates that are fame and materialism, and their affect on us as a society, is a thesis featured prominently throughout many of Prince's works.
But just as he is concerned with the commercialization of everything that surrounds us, he goes to the depths with his flashlight pointed squarely at certain subcultures which seem to care little for the mainstream, time-honored objects of material wealth, professional gain or status except for those groups in which they belong. The hardcore biker culture is filled with misogyny, drugs, sex and a contempt for authority that rivals their contempt for soap. Bikers often measure their success with three things: their motorcycle, their motorcycle and their girlfriends, in that order. In his Gangs series, he examines the way these men show their devotion in a very public way by photographing their "old ladies" draped, with as little clothing as possible, across their motorcycles and send the pictures to prominent and virtually unknown motorcycle enthusiast magazines; the men taking these photographs keep their sanctity and their anonymity but there's no obscuring the faces of their women or keeping of their identities private. This misplaced pride and subconscious commodification suffuses this series with an extra layer of subtext; we've managed to reduce a human being to just another material possession, like the motorcycle or Rolex. If inanimate objects can and sometimes have to be anthropomorphized within a consumerist culture, then there should be no doubt that a person can be equally stripped of human dignity and objectified, to very ill effect, for that same culture. This is a slippery slope that has disastrous consequences for civilized society as a whole and we play at the edge of that slope everyday.
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It is important to remember that the women depicted in the World of Richard Prince are NOT strong, mature or sexually authoritative beings; they are, like a woman from Asia or Russia brought to a Western country by a socially clumsy man, merely a living material good to stroke someone's ego. His critique of the post-modern man, in all his guises, is adroit and scathing. He is not pointing today's wayward man in the direction he feels they should go; he is pointing out the sights along the way, past and present, and leaving the way toward the future all up to him. And don't give Richard Prince (or me) too much credit in the way of old school feminism because, like John Milton said in The Devil's Advocate, at the end of the day, he's a fan of man! He celebrates masculinity as much as he lambastes it which makes even his more dubious works palatable to me; he respects women, and even men, in ways that other artists, who would be called chauvinist or feminist (there's an awful lot of both), do not.
Prince also turns his gaze upward to the sprawling Middle America in his Jokes paintings. Through these ubiquitous, now authorless jokes, he explores the mores, fears, insecurities and clandestine turpitude of this highly hypocritical portion of America, teeming with sexual repression (male and female), frustration (again, male and female) and a longing for expression and something, anything, atypical. Remember how I said earlier that Prince was laughing with us? Yeah, about that, um, he's no longer completely laughing so much as he is crying, short, low sobs between chuckles. Prince, who is married with two children, is quick to raise his, uh . . . hand for sex; any jokes in his paintings, which are usually funny if not a little sad, are often raunchy and immediately make you look at your own relationships right after laughing. Behind a lot of humor is hurt and he makes sure that you realize that; the selection of the jokes used in his paintings is NOT random, with some of the same jokes he favors making appearances in different pieces. Is he condemning you? No, not really. He feels your pain and is exploiting it for profit, in proper American fashion.
Richard Prince is not only collected but a collector himself. He has a massive collection of books, with a great number of them rare first editions, that rivals his monumental stockpile of straight and gay pornography, all of which have made it into his recent works. In this collection of books, there are a great many erotic pulp novels from the 1950s and 1960s. Within this genre of literature is a smaller sub-genre of erotic medical fiction that revolves around a hospital or people who work in the hospital setting. It's here that Prince has based the subject matter of his latest works and they are, at least in my opinion, his masterpieces. Each painting, which calls to mind Mark Rothko with all its drippy, layered colors, is EXTRAORDINARY. Their magnetism, due in part to their size, and the attention they command really CANNOT be experienced via a computer monitor. All of the paintings made by Prince are really, really large, like so many things in our society; some collector's were finding that they could not fit these works into their homes which persuaded some to actually sell their houses! Many things in the luxury bracket have little real substance so they try compensate by overwhelming you with size, and in today's marketplace art is no longer the exception. So in addition to GINORMOUS McMansions, GINORMOUS watches, GINORMOUS handbags, GINORMOUS cars, GINORMOUS commutes and GINORMOUS stomachs, we now have JUMBO GINORMOUS art. Great. Sometimes bigger is NOT better; sometimes, it's just big.
Even though their size is something that irritates the hell out of me, I really cannot get enough of these particular paintings; everything else he's produced, the strong social messages notwithstanding, I could take or leave. I couldn't say with confidence that how I feel is completely in part to more involvement by the artist himself but that's at least a very big part of why; I will always prefer some level of craftsmanship, no matter how trivial it may seem to others. In 2002, it was difficult for Barbara Gladstone to get anyone to pay the $50-$60,000 she was asking for most of them. Now, they are untouchable for anything less than seven figures. I LOVE THESE PAINTINGS!
Everything in the world today is connected, ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. With the advent and proliferation of the Internet, 24-hour a day television and instant communication, we are quicker to be affected and transformed by things than ever before. In creative and design circles who are responsible for the very things we purchase and want to purchase, this raging torrent of ideas is even more prevalent, which automatically comes back packaged to us in the products and services we consume on a daily basis, sometimes without nary a second thought. There are some VERY naive individuals who think that these items, whether they are houses or the rags they wear, just occur and that not much thought or consideration goes into their creation. But the truth is everything you do is in some way connected to someone else in some way, large or small. I think Meryl Streep's character Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada glosses over some of the complexities but sums it up quite succinctly and beautifully in a monologue toward the beginning of the film:
"Stuff? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002 Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was St. Laurent, wasn't it?, who showed a selection of cerulean military jackets. And then cerulean quickly showed up in collections of eight different designers. It filtered down through the department stores, and then trickled down into some tragic Casual Corner where you undoubtedly fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of comical how you think you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this very room... from "a pile of stuff."
Case in point, nurses, and fetishism surrounding them, have been a part of America, and the world, for some time. Recently, the profiles of nurses has been raised significantly through film, music and even video games, with some of the images and portrayals anatgonizing groups like The Center for Nursing Advocacy (nursingadvocacy.org ). We have to remember that the images surrounding nurses right now are no longer those of Diahann Carroll's endearing and eloquent Julia, a show about a nurse that ran from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. What we are seeing now are the terrifying, undead monsters who really haunt your mind long after the likeness is gone. A video game I played in the mid-1990s called Silent Hill, which the movie you're thinking of the same name is based, was fun but I was afraid to play alone so my sister had to be there with me in order for me to be able to play. I never beat the game because it was simply too frightening to continue; my sister and I would scream if something happened on-screen and my parents eventually got tired of it and gave us both the ultimatum to stop yelling or stop playing; we chose the latter. But take a look at the reason why we were screaming:
The game series, I know now, has a quite a bit of psychological depth and a great deal of substance when examined at distance, which gives their interpretation of nurses much more gravitas than Prince's. When the movie Silent Hill came out in 2006, this group of women below was used to promote the film. The only thing scary about them is the length of their dresses. If there was robbery and they had to put their hands up, the crooks would get a lot more than a sponge bath and Jell-O. Who was the stylist responsible for THIS nightmare?:
The irony within these images and paintings is that nurses on the whole save lives and provide important support to physicians or when physicians are unavailable; the nurses we see here could kill and may have already, ON PURPOSE. And it should be incredibly obvious that all these nurses are women when in reality there are a good number of male nurses, some just as sinister and devious as these nurses above. In The Dark Knight, we see Heath Ledger playing The Joker dressed up as a nurse and ready to give you an enema you won't soon forget:
Chip Wrecked, is that you?
And as I said before, the influence between the worlds of business, art, fashion, literature, film and the general public is felt in all the places you never think to look. Sonic Youth, who are big Richard Prince fans, wrote a song called Dude Ranch Nurse after the painting of the same name inspired them. After writing the song, they asked him to paint a nurse painting which they used on the cover of their fantastic 2004 album Sonic Nurse, which is of course named after the cover's painting. The group had been following Prince's career for years and he finally recalled, during his work with them on the cover, that he'd met them years prior at a party in Greenwich Village in the early 1980s. I actually like this painting (cover) a great deal because the colors are far more subdued than many of his other works.
In 2003, right after the debut of the Nurse paintings, he was asked, along with other artists, to shoot a picture for a special layout in W magazine. He chose the world's favorite wonkey-eyed coke waif, Kate Mose, to model a vinyl nurse getup while standing in front of one of his paintings. The picture, while looking pretty tame in comparison to, well, anything, really nettled The Center for Nursing Advocacy, with a representative from them stating that a nurse would be unable to perform something as simple as a bed check with a uniform of that nature. Some from the CNA have inferred that while Prince may not have intended it, the nurses, their ominous surroundings made hazy by paint and the masks worn by them, always covering the mouths, are saying that the continued silence and "invisibility" of nurses will spell doom for the whole profession unless they move to action. If the art increase the awareness of the importance of nurses in some way, maybe they are far more vital than thought.
Kate Moss by Richard Prince: She carries her own brand of anesthetic.
It must be said, in all seriousness, that female and male nurses provide critical care in hospitals and clinics all around the world. Right now, there is a dangerous shortage of qualified nurses in the world and I urge those who aren't too squeamish to visit Nursingadvocacy.org and see if you could join this true group of soldiers with romanticized "Spartan" spirit. We have some members of the board here who are nurses and we respect what you do everyday and thank you for taking time to nurture, care for and preserve life. I can't stress the value of your time and expertise enough; you know who you are! Let me start off by saying that I really like what these bags stand for. I'm a very serious proponent of knowing EXACTLY why you buy something and knowing what the product or company that sells that product represent, their history included. Buying anything without being entirely sure what it symbolizes is reckless and irresponsible. I think the days of mindless consumerism are over, or at least they should be. Buying something that has some sort of meaning or values you identify with, even if it's not clearly apparent to you at first, can actually increase your appreciation and enjoyment of the item in question. You can usually tell which people have the least amount of taste, they often have the most stuff. Their impetuosity means don't say no to anything!
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Daniel Lalonde the tall, SUPER FINE CEO of Louis Vuitton, North America. He is the man responsible for raising LV NA's profits over 25% since being promoted from LVMH's watch and jewelry division in 2005. When arrived in the watch and jewelry division, TAG Heuer was languishing near last in luxury watch sales, between fourth and fifth. When he left, they were number two behind, you guessed it, Rolex.
Bearing that in mind, these paintings below, which were effectively turned into handbags, I like a great deal more so than I like these bags. Wait, wait, WAIT; let me explain why! The bags are, like Prince's nurse paintings themselves, pastiches. The colors and names used on the bags are taken from specific nurse paintings BUT they also include jokes, one or several, printed all over them, and this is the part that makes me smile and even entertain their existence. I think these bags are dreadfully tacky, not unlike a lot of Prince's art, but the jokes make you laugh and I don't believe fashion has a commitment to always be serious. What I think fashion should be is provocative, exciting, gratifying to eye and, every once in a while, it should do something unexpected, just like any other art form. If that unanticipated detail is humor, so be it. These bags may not be classy in the orthodox way, but they represent an artist, company and message to which I'm very agreeable. Like Murakami's art and bags, it offers you something DIFFERENT.
He's so f*cking fine I had to do a closeup. If I had a fever, I'd let him stick his thermometer wherever he wanted. Why he's not pushing product like Chrysler's Dr. Z I have NO idea.
I don't look at a Monogram Jokes bag and think, "How wonderfully derivative! It looks everything else I've seen and I like that!" I look at one and think, "The colors are garish. The jokes are vulgar. The shapes are unwieldy. Those bags seem to represent everything Louis Vuitton is not . . . how ironic, like Richard Prince. I want one." Actually, the conversation in my head goes like this: "That's an ugly f*ckin' purse. Oh, wait . . . That joke is funny as sh*t! I'll take it!" These are the perfect one season bags, for those who have asked me about those. You wouldn't be able to bring them out into public again for at least five years after 2008. I know that my write-up of these bags, like the Murakamis, is a little late but I haven't always been as active of a member as I am now.
Let me say that the bags below are not for everybody, in a different way that Murakami or even Monogram Canvas bags are not for everybody. If the you or the person you are buying one of these for is conservative in an Anita bryant or June Cleaver way, just skip these. They simply will not be comprehended by this Tipper Gore in a Talbot's Twins Set segment. This is actually a good thing because the last thing I ever want to see is some frumpy woman in Chrysler Town & Country rocking a bag I own; it really just ruins my day. LOL
Dude Ranch Nurse
This painting is gorgeous in person and is far less amped up in tone than any of his other nurse paintings; the other paintings are practically fluorescing. I consider this my favorite of all the Nurse paintings. The pose of the nurse is what makes me like it. She's the most normal of them all almost. She's probably wondering how she ended up in a Richard Prince painting at all. But she's resigned to the fact she's going to be here a while. I'm listening to the Dixie Chick's version of Landslide right now so maybe the way I feel about this is being governed by Natalie Maines and Stevie Nicks.
The bag based on this painting does not give me a fuzzy feeling as much as Landslide but I love a great tote design and a bag with some depth. This is a nice size bag. The replica of this particular bag should only have ONE joke on it. And, like all the other bags, it uses a primary color from the painting for which it is named which in this case is green. It makes the perfect anti-diaper bag.
If none of the nurses fit their titles, this one does. She really looks like she is not only man crazy, but homicidal crazy. This painting has quite a history that I think is a little interesting. It was bought by Douglas Cramer for $100,000 in 2002, not too long after the Nurses made their debut, and kept it on display in his home. IFast forward a few years to early 2007, a collector called Mr. Cramer and offered him $10 million dollars for this painting which he promptly refused. Christie's called eight months after that phone conversation and basically begged him to let them sell it. They offered him a guarantee, one he couldn't really refuse, and he allowed them to auction it. The painting sold for $7.5 million dollars. Cramer was pleased with the gavel price but he's very much afraid that he is getting ripped off even though it is not very apparent right now. Auction houses the world over are trying to get the current Richard Prince's, especially the Nurses, out of private hands to sell.
This bag is the most uniform in color of all the Monogram Jokes bags. It's roomy and has some of the less offensive jokes on its exterior. But that doesn't make this a bag you'll want to take to mass, believe you me. But if you're doing blow at Roberto Cavalli's house, take it in this.
The face of this nurse is almost obliterated, appearing as only a blob of white against blood red. I don't like this painting as much as I like the ones above but I love the bag of the same name. It's not as cumbersome as the bags above have the potential to be and it has some of the funniest jokes of the whole damn line on it. I mean, they're so corny but they're hilarious! The jokes on each of these bags are actually not available.
The width of the bag is simply perfect. And if you need some quick material for your stand-up act, this is the bag I'd take on stage. In comedy jargon, it kills!
Richard Prince has successfully transplanted himself from the donor of Insignificance to the breathing, vital body of Artistic Relevance. At first, Artistic Relevance rejected him but now it seems he's doing well within it, his work and price premiums have improving dramatically over the years. Although he's worked with car parts for years, like fiberglass hoods ordered from the backs of magazines and treated like sculpture, he's recently begun working with whole cars. He's interested primarily in American muscle cars and it shows with some of his latest works, like Covering Hannah which, underneath the breasts, is a 1987 Buick Grand National:
And he has also "done" three working 1970 Dodge Challengers in cooperation with XV Motorsports, with one of them appearing in this Louis Vuitton ad showcasing his handbags. Although most of the work on the vehicle was done by XV, he is said to have had a a lot of input into every detail of the cars. He plans on tweaking them further with cosmetic customizations.
Richard Prince 1970 Dodge Challenger
This car was featured this summer in this international Louis Vuitton ad campaign featuring models like Naomi Campbell and Stephanie Seymour done up in a 1950s pulp vamp style:
For our members in the UK, he has an exhibition right now going on at the beautiful Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. If you have not already gone, you really should because it's going to be open until the 7th which is this upcoming Sunday.
As before, comments, questions and debate on art and art history are always welcome.
