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Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Ave.
612-375-7600
Minneapolis
Galleries 4, 5, 6
Richard Prince:
Spiritual America
March 22-September 14, 2008

Nobody cannibalizes an image like Richard Prince, who has carved his place in contemporary art by recycling, reflecting, and reframing photographs, cartoons, advertisements, and other images already existing in the public sphere. It’s a practice cut from 1970s and ’80s SoHo — Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, and Sherrie Levine are among his contemporaries. But more than his peers, Prince sees himself as a funnel rather than a filter: he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of pop culture and recasts these appropriated images in a new light, embracing and at the same time critiquing a distinct American sensibility.

The works of Richard Prince, (born 1949 in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, now part of Republic of Panama), an American painter and photographer, have often been the subject of debates within the art world. Trained as a figure painter, Prince began creating collages containing photographs in 1975. His image, ‘Untitled (Cowboy), a rephotograph constructed from cigarette advertisements, was the first “photograph” to sell for more than $1 million at auction when it was sold at Christie's New York in 2005.

In 1977, Prince’s simple yet controversial act of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in a new, critical approach to art-making — one that questioned notions of originality. This plays out through his reframings of the Marlboro man, topless women atop Harley-Davidsons (culled from pictures in biker magazines such as Easyriders), comedians, cars, cartoons (hand-copied from The New Yorker and Playboy, among others), neglected landscapes, pulp fiction, side-by-side pinups of Hollywood starlets, nurses in surgical masks and, most recently, homages to the paintings of Willem de Kooning.

There are well-known pieces — the appropriated image of a naked Brooke Shields at age 10, which gives this exhibition its name, had a controversial history even before the artist cast a new light on it. The 1983 photo, Spiritual America, is quintessential Prince, playing to conflicting impulses — the seeking of attention while maintaining a high moral ground — that are at the heart of contemporary American culture. Prince also turned his fascination with celebrity culture inward with a series of paintings layered with his own canceled novelty checks.

While the Walker began collecting and showing the artist’s work in 1984, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, organized by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, is the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective since 1992. Philippe Vergne, the Walker’s chief curator and deputy director, sees a “cruel elegance” threading Prince’s work and considers the exhibition essential both to the Walker and to anyone interested in the visual — and visceral — dissection of Americana. “We have the cowboys, hoods, girlfriends, early photographs, the core of his career in our collection,” he says. “What people will see now is a depth of practice.”

Prince’s work has been among the most innovative art produced in the United States during the past 30 years. His deceptively simple act in 1977 of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to art-making — one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object. Prince’s technique involves appropriation; he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of popular culture to create works that simultaneously embrace and critique a quintessentially American sensibility: the Marlboro Man, muscle cars, biker chicks, off-color jokes, gag cartoons, and pulp fiction. While previous examinations of his art have emphasized its central role as a catalyst for postmodernist criticism, the Guggenheim exhibition and its accompanying catalogue also focus on the work’s iconography and how it registers prevalent themes in our social landscape, including a fascination with rebellion, an obsession with fame, and a preoccupation with the tawdry and the illicit.

Nurse paintings is a series of paintings of nurses by Prince based on the covers of pulp romance novels.

Actual covers of books were scanned to create the foundation for the paintings — the titles and the images of the nurses. They are ink jet print on canvas with acrylic overlay and are fairly large in scale.

Richard Prince pioneered the technique of modern rephotography and this series is notable for the technique of layering digital and analogue media: the application of an analogue medium (acrylic) to a digitalized print (ink jet) of a digitalized image (scan) of an analogue print (book cover) of an analogue artwork (original art portrayed on the book cover).

In the series of 19 paintings, the nurses all wear caps and their mouths are covered by surgical masks, although in some of the paintings the red lips bleed through the masks. The final presentations preserve the title and nurse image from each of the book covers, though all else is obscured.

Prince’s most recent series of paintings appear at fist glance to be a throwback to more traditional genres of figurative art, and a departure from the pulpy and kitschy content of the Nurse and Jokes series respectively. In these newest works, all from the beginning of 2007, Prince utilizes semi-pornographic collaged inkjet prints overlaid with acrylic paint in the style of DeKooning. Notably, it is the faces and extremities — hands and feet — that get the most direct treatment from the artist, bulging and distorting with an elegantly contained expressive energy. These works lack the obvious linguistic recontextualizing of the Jokes series, opting instead for a purely visual idiom. This overlaying of paint onto photo would seem to suggest the implicit failure of either medium to truly represent the subject, instead referencing the act of the artist as curator of discreet visual input. In this sense then, Prince holds fast to the methodology of appropriation, whilst simultaneously opening up the visual surface for more directly expressive treatments, thereby enriching the meaning of both.

While Pop Art has largely appropriated pop culture, Prince makes this process circular by creating art that appropriates and later becomes part of popular culture itself. Previous examinations of his art have emphasized its role in postmodern criticism. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue not only focus on the artist’s fascination with rebellion, obsession with fame, and preoccupation with the tawdry and the illicit, but also connect them to the fabric of our social landscape. Nancy Spector, chief curator at the Guggenheim, writes in the exhibition catalogue that Prince entered a metaphoric life of crime in 1977 and went underground, adopting aliases to evade identification and escape definition. “His specialty is a carefully constructed hybrid that is also some kind of joke, charged by conflicting notions of high, low and lower,” New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote of Prince in a September 2007 review of this show. “His work disturbs, amuses and then splinters in the mind. It unsettles assumptions about art, originality and value, class and sexual difference and creativity.”

Controversial and seductive, edgy and classical, ultimately beautiful, Richard Prince: Spiritual America shows him as a chameleon in style and form. Through all his work, Prince compels his audience to notice the ordinary and see commonalities with the extraordinary. “He relinquished the role of artist as high priest, which he had originally aspired to in his reverence for Kline and Pollock, and took on that of the fugitive,” Spector writes. “He even created an artistic alter ego known as John Dogg, who had his own exhibitions and fleeting 15 minutes of fame … In the end, the question ‘Who is Richard Prince?’ is a rhetorical one.”

Richard Prince: Spiritual America is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.