Prince: ‘Spiritual America’

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The New York Sun

When the expertly organized and relentlessly needling Richard Prince retrospective opens tomorrow at the Guggenheim Museum, one hopes it won’t so completely delight the art world that it fails to confound them, or confound most uninitiated visitors when it also ought to delight them.

The title, “Spiritual America,” was aptly lifted from one of the artist’s early, and more notorious, works, a photograph of a 10-year-old Brooke Shields, naked and oiled like a porn star, taken by Gary Gross in 1976. In 1983, Mr. Prince framed and exhibited the image, using the title of an Alfred Stieglitz photograph of a horse’s backside. That Mr. Prince’s oeuvre always entails appropriation is widely known, yet the fact explains only a small part of what he’s about.

If art holds a mirror to the world, Mr. Prince’s reflects its object with utter clarity because it has been washed, lovingly, in vinegar. What it reflects is America, its cars and cowboys, its obsession with celebrity and kitsch and consumption.

Mr. Prince began, while working in the tear-sheet department at Time Life, with photo appropriations, cropping out the text from advertisements for jeweled necklaces or fancy pens, and displaying them, framed, as artworks. Yet once begun, he rarely stops. He works in series, and though his approach to each tends to morph over time, the series remain recognizably distinct. Thus Nancy Spector, the museum’s chief curator, has organized the exhibition thematically rather than chronologically.

Among the best known of the photo appropriations are those in the Cowboys series, photos taken from Marlboro ads, which Mr. Prince began in 1980, after the election of the cowboy president Ronald Reagan. The most recent example on view, “Untitled (cowboy),” depicting a man in hat and chaps jumping through a lasso, comes from 2003. Like almost all of his works, it is at once a celebration — of the romance of the west, of individualism, etc. — and a subtle, vinegary jab. Look at a group of the cowboy images together and you can’t escape the homoeroticism Mr. Prince discerns in them or deny the irony of depicting healthy men under clear skies in cigarette ads.

And then, of course, there’s the issue of originality. Early on the photo appropriations not-so-imply questioned the notion that it is the artist’s hand that confers authenticity, but Mr. Prince has been stretching and ultimately popping that problem like bubble gum ever since. A series called Monochromatic Joke paintings took common jokes and placed them on single-color canvases — a reference, in part, to the industrial look of Minimalism. One reads: “I went to see a psychiatrist. He said, ‘Tell me everything.’ I did, and now he’s doing my act.”

Mr. Prince has been doing other people’s shticks for 30 years. He has pilfered the racy images of girlfriends sent in to biker magazines. He has paired New Yorker or Playboy cartoons with unrelated jokes and applied them to canvases. And in one series, Nurses, he borrows the cover imagery from pulp novels and paints them, with brushy bravura, on large canvases. Indeed, he often steals imagery from one source and the artistic style from another.

“People Keep Asking” (1990) conjoins the hand-painted outlines of an interior with barely legible silk-screened photographs and text — an homage to Robert Rauschenberg’s silk screen paintings — appending, at the bottom of the canvas, a joke. Many of the later joke paintings (there are several variant series), merge stenciled texts with highly energetic brush strokes that both refer to and mock Abstract Expressionism. These marks, stains, and drips are deftly applied, and yet somehow seem rote and decorative.

Similarly, for the de Kooning paintings, Mr. Prince melds convincingly rendered figures from Willem de Kooning’s women series with photographs of hard-core pornography. What, he asks us, do we find original in what we think of as the most authentic expressions of the self? Are those marks more “authentic,” more full of feeling than, say, the signatures on the publicity images of Kate Moss or Nicole Kidman that he also displays?

And does it matter that we don’t know whether the artist, the actor, or some assistant of one or the other signed the publicity images? Mr. Prince’s Check paintings — in which jokes and expressive brush stroking overlay a grid of the artist’s own canceled checks, signature and all — spotlight the monetary value we place on such authentic marks.

Perhaps the truest expressions of this artist’s own sensibility are found in a series called “Untitled (Upstate),” photographs taken by Mr. Prince in a deliberately found or vernacular style. These snapshots capture the odd profile of the area in upstate New York where he lives: a basketball hoop stands in a field of wildflowers; a section of highway divider lies on a disused gravel road, and skid marks, like brush strokes on a canvas, veer careening down a street. They are some of the most visually satisfying works in a show that feeds the mind much more than it does the eye.

Does this highly polished mirror reflect something empty in the spirit of America? Richard Prince offers the conundrum of a skillful, probing, perhaps even great artist, who makes work that is nevertheless soulless.

September 28 through January 9 (1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th Street, 212-423-3500).


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