Editor's note: The following catalogue introduction was reprinted in Resource Library on January 29, 2007 with the permission of the Neuberger Museum of Art. If you have questions or comments regarding the text please contact the Neuberger Museum of Art directly through either this phone number or web address
Fugitive Artist: The Early Work of Richard Prince, 1974-77
January 28, 2007 - June 24, 2007
Introduction to the Catalogue
by Michael Lobel
This catalogue and the exhibition it accompanies survey the early career of the artist Richard Prince. In the last several decades, Prince has emerged as one of the leading artists of his generation. He and his contemporaries-including such artists as Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman-have often been labeled the Pictures generation, after the title of an exhibition held at New York's Artists Space in 1977.[1] These artists came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s with work that was seen to fully engage with a mass-media-oriented culture of the image.
Prince's work has long been identified with the artistic strategy known as appropriation. In the late 1970s he developed an approach in which he took preexisting photographs -- often from advertisements in newspapers and magazines -- and re-photographed them. (This approach was more complicated than it may first appear; in the process of re-photographing the artist often made subtle but significant changes to the image through techniques like cropping, shooting at an angle, and shifting color values.) By the early 1980s the resulting images -- of such subjects as living rooms, fashion models, and luxury items like watches, pens, and jewelry -- had been identified with the broader strategy of appropriation, which saw artists often minimally reworking preexisting imagery. Yet the origins of this impulse in Prince's art have remained largely obscure. What led up to his adoption of these strategies? Out of what contexts, -- artistic, historical -- did they emerge?
Such questions prompt us to reconsider a relatively under-investigated period in art. In recent years there has been a significant amount of attention paid to art of the 1960s and early 1970s, particularly that identified with Minimalism and Conceptual art and their offshoots. There has also been a good deal of writing on the mature work of the Pictures generation, particularly because of its embrace by many of the writers identified with the so-called October school.[2] But what of the transition between those two moments, that is to say between late-1960s Conceptualism and Pictures work, which emerged in the late 1970s and flourished in the 1980s? We still do not have a substantive account of the complex relationship between those two impulses. This sense of a still under-investigated period in the mid-1970s is for me best exemplified by a term coined by the art historian David Joselit: the Invisible Seventies.[3] Some of the best retrospective writing about that period has been by artists. For instance, Mike Kelley has written eloquently, through his personal experience studying with Douglas Huebler at the California Institute of the Arts in the mid-1970s, on the relation between Conceptualism and Neoconceptualism (the latter being his own term for a category that would include the Pictures artists).[4] My own thinking about this period-and its relative lack of visibility-has been influenced by the writing of the artist Carroll Dunham. Reflecting on that moment, Dunham has written,
In the article from which this excerpt is taken, Dunham is most concerned with what he calls "more eccentric, less easily categorizable practitioners" (the piece itself focuses on the work of Joe Zucker). But we can extend his account further. While Minimalism, Conceptualism, and their offshoots take center stage in current art historical and critical treatments of the period, the movements he mentions -- Photorealism, Pattern and Decoration, New Image, and Bad Painting -- are relatively under-investigated, if not completely ignored. (To cite another example, in the main essay in this catalogue I will discuss a short-lived offshoot of Conceptual art, called at the time Narrative art or Story art, which, although by this point relatively forgotten, seems to have exerted a good deal of influence on Prince.) Similarly, a full accounting of the emergence of Pictures art has only begun to be sketched.[6] I take as symptomatic of this general tendency the fact that when several years ago Artforum magazine devoted two issues to a retrospective view of 1980s art, the accompanying chronological listing started with the year 1980 -- as if the major impulses identified with art in that moment had sprung forth, fully formed, on January 1 of the new decade. In fact, a full accounting of the art associated with that period has to fully engage with its roots in the 1970s.
The present exhibition explores the 1970s roots of Prince's art. If its purpose is fairly straightforward, this catalogue is nevertheless somewhat out of the ordinary. This is perhaps most evident in the fact that its pages contain no photographic reproductions-a result of Prince's refusal to grant permission for us to reproduce his work. One major reason for this, one surmises, is that he has worked to excise his pre-appropriationist activities from the public record. None of the works in the exhibition has been reproduced in thirty years; to the best of my knowledge, none has been publicly exhibited in that time either. In most of the recent published literature on Prince's work-not to mention the record of his practice as it has been presented in monographic museum and gallery exhibitions-his career is effectively understood to begin in 1977, with his photographic appropriations of commercial subjects.[7] There is an occasional mention of his making work prior to 1977, but the discussion is generally cursory at best, with virtually no photographic documentation of his early works.[8]
This shaping of the public record of Prince's early career has been going on for some time now, and is particularly evident in the catalogue of the artist's first major museum retrospective, which was curated by Lisa Phillips for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992 (the show went on to tour to Düsseldorf, San Francisco, and Rotterdam). Phillips begins her catalogue essay with a description of an untitled 1975 work that contains two photographs taken through a car's windshield, one at night and one during the day. Phillips describes other features-drawings of roads, "ghostly handwritten phrases" -- yet we are denied any visual access to these.[9] The accompanying reproduction is a detail; it shows only the two photographs -- the rest of the work has been cropped out. This gesture is, I think, telling, in that it predicts the way the public understanding of Prince's early career would be shaped over the years: the focus is placed on the photographic underpinnings of his project, while other features (drawing, collage, narrative) are elided or erased. This logic extended to the show itself, which contained no works made before 1977. Yet Phillips did fill the reader in on works that she had obviously seen but that were not shown in the exhibition:
Those works, we might note, only grew more obscure in subsequent years.
As noted, in the more recent (one might say official) literature, the artist's exhibition history begins after 1977.[11] Phillips' 1992 catalogue, however, does offer additional clues to the artist's career prior to his move to appropriation. The exhibition history at the back of the catalogue lists several early one-person shows at the Angus Whyte Gallery in Boston and at the Ellen Sragow and Kathryn Markel Galleries, both in New York.[12] (The present show contains a good number of works generously loaned by these three dealers, who gave Prince his earliest gallery representation.) It also attests to the fact that Prince's pre-appropriation works were shown in exhibitions at major museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art's downtown branch. The inclusion of early works by the artist in exhibitions at major museums demonstrates unequivocally that the work included in the present exhibition was at that time considered neither as student work nor as juvenilia. It was exhibited publicly-and widely, it was reviewed in major art magazines (including Artforum), and it entered an array of private, corporate, and museum collections.
If this body of early work has effectively been purged from the official record of Prince's career, it is important to note that this is not a unique or rare occurrence. Artists have long been attentive to the public reception and historical narration of their careers. As far back as Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, a significant component of the myth of the artist centers on the question of origins: When did the artist's creative abilities first make themselves known? To what moment can we trace the emergence of the artist's mature sensibility? Artists sensitive to narrativizing their careers have acted accordingly, at times re-dating, altering, or destroying early work to shape those narratives. For example, well-known modern artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian are known to have re-dated early paintings in order to create an appropriate narrative arc for their careers-in both of their cases, one that described the development of abstract art. Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein both destroyed early or transitional works, likely with similar ends in mind. For his part, the Conceptual artist John Baldessari -- an influential figure for Prince's generation of artists -- made this very act of destruction into a work. In 1970 he executed a piece entitled Cremation Project, which involved "cremating" all of his own works in his possession that had been made between May 1953 and March 1966. In September 1970 he showed the resulting piece -- which included a bronze plaque and urn, a box of ashes, and six color photographs mounted on board -- in a show at the Jewish Museum in New York.[13]
Such a gesture, of course, poses a significant problem for those who want to document an artist's career. In such cases the artist and the art historian are at something of cross-purposes. The artist wants to offer up a particular view of the development of his or her work. In contrast, the art historian is concerned with providing an accurate and adequate historical account of the development of the artist's practice.
This exhibition, then, has presented a difficult task: to strike a balance between providing an adequate account of the art historical record and maintaining a sensitivity to the artist's stated wishes as to the documentation and presentation of his work. Again, this is not an uncommon situation, and it is instructive to consider an earlier instance in which an artist's intentions conflicted with the project of adequately documenting his career. In 1997, on the occasion of a traveling retrospective of work by the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (who had passed away just a year prior), a catalogue raisonné of his work was compiled. That catalogue contains, in addition to an ostensibly complete inventory of the artist's works, two additional categories: one a "catalogue of additional material," the other a "catalogue of registered non-works." Although works in these categories are given full textual listings in the catalogue, none are illustrated, thus underscoring the ambiguous status they were assigned within the artist's oeuvre. The first category is composed mostly of student work and works either given as gifts or traded with friends. The second is a bit more peculiar. According to the supporting text written by Dietmar Elger, "These are works which have been shown in exhibitions, published in the literature and listed in the inventory book but were later no longer acknowledged by the artist as constituting art and hence stricken-by him-from the oeuvre."[14]
There is something peculiar about the logic employed here. One wonders what could be more indicative of an artwork's public life than the features described as characteristic of these so-called "non-works" by Gonzalez-Torres: having been shown in public exhibitions; having been written about in published accounts; and having been recorded in the official inventory book kept by the artist's gallery. To an art historian, these are some of the key features that tell us an artwork has had a public life, that it has become part of the historical record. We can certainly allow that there are categories of work that should not be included in the official record, or that at the very least have an ambiguous status: student works, for instance, or pieces that never leave the studio and thus are never fully realized or executed. But once a work has been executed and exhibited and written about, and perhaps even bought and sold, are we really to allow an artist to edit or erase the historical record? My short answer is no. Perhaps, in addition to bringing Prince's early work to public attention, this exhibition might also stimulate broader discussion about these sorts of questions. Although one might think that questions of attribution are only relevant to the study of art made long ago (in which case the connection between artist and work is not always clear), they are in fact quite relevant to the study of recent art. The rise of ephemeral modes of art-making in the 1960s has in certain cases intensified the problem of attribution, since a work may exist only as a photograph, a set of written instructions, or some other form of documentation. This is, however, not the case with Prince's early works; in fact, in most cases these are inarguably material objects with a documented history of public reception.
The purpose of this catalogue -- as expanded upon in the essay that follows -- is to reconsider those objects, the artistic practice from which they emerged, and the circumstances of their reception. It is one of the contentions of this exhibition that an investigation of Prince's early work will help illuminate some of the major themes and approaches evident in his practice after 1977. Ideally, it will also shed some light on the broader context in which this work was made.
Notes:
Editor's note:
Resource Library wishes to extend appreciation to Carolyn Mandelker, President, Harrison Edwards Public Relations & Marketing, 51 Babbitt Road - S7, Bedford Hills, New York 10507, for her help concerning permissions for reprinting the above text from the exhibition brochure.
Footnotes pending.
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