Editor's note: The following catalogue essay, without illustrations, was reprinted in Resource Library on January 31, 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
The Early Work of Richard Prince
by Michael Lobel
In 1988 Richard Prince was interviewed by the art critic Paul Taylor. Their discussion, which was subsequently published in Flash Art magazine, began on a retrospective note:
What the artist describes here is an intense disavowal, one that resulted in the complete destruction of his early work. By the time of the interview, Prince had become utterly identified with the practice of appropriation, as indicated by his comment, "if you don't like your own pictures and you like someone else's better, well, take theirs." In fact, the interview was published alongside an article that explored the meanings behind the rephotographed images he had begun to produce around 1977.[2] Note, however, how by his own account the disavowal of authorship is effected through two linked moves: by borrowing images made by others and by destroying his own, earlier works. Though he describes a scene of wholesale destruction, there is a subtle interruption in his account: "I think everything has been, you know, destroyed." Might that telltale "you know," which signals a pause or hesitation, suggest some ambivalence on his part-some regret that he had destroyed such a large body of works? Or might it mark his recognition that this act of erasure may not have been quite so complete as he describes? Prince's later work bears evidence of this sort of hesitation. In the years since that interview he has repeatedly seen fit to return to the works he made prior to his move to appropriation, either by reconsidering the historical moment in which they were made or even at times incorporating them into later pieces.
In 2005 two new publications surveyed a body of works by Prince referred to as the Hippie Drawings. One publication was a supplement to the magazine Purple Fashion; the other was a catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, a London gallery.[3] Most of these works are drawings of single figures rendered in childish scrawls, their juvenile qualities underscored by the materials (crayons and colored magic markers) used. The drawings make frequent references to the hippie era; the figures, many of them rendered in psychedelic colors, wear or flash peace signs; one sits with legs crossed in the lotus position. The drawings themselves seem to be of fairly recent vintage; a note in the back of the Sadie Coles HQ exhibition catalogue, Richard Prince: Hippie Drawings, indicates that they were all executed between 1996 and 1999.[4] Nevertheless, both the front and back covers of that book feature a photograph of Prince dating from 1969, his twentieth year [fig. 1]. But the cover image is not just a photograph; it is in fact a rephotographed image of Prince in his younger days. In the process of rephotographing, two elements were laid on top of the image: a button with a decorative swirl design in red and white and a metallic pin that reads "HENDRIX," its last letter formed by two crossed guitars. The addition of these elements, along with the Hippie Drawings logo, significantly modifies the meaning of the image by identifying it with a particular historical moment. In effect, Prince used the strategy of rephotography with which his work has long been identified to retrospectively revise his self-image at an earlier moment in his career.
The same impulse is at work in the Purple Fashion magazine supplement. Here the images are reproduced in black and white. They are simpler, and many of them are line drawings. Like the Sadie Coles HQ catalogue, this publication features a photograph of the artist in his younger days on its cover [fig. 2]. It shows him with long hair and a beard, looking much like a hippie himself. He holds a pen in his left hand, which is poised over what looks to be a sketchbook or notebook. Behind him is a brick fireplace, above which hangs an antique rifle.[5] In the lower center of the slightly damaged photograph (the image has been eaten away in much of the lower right), a handwritten caption dates the image to 1972, and identifies the place as North Berwick, Maine. The artist's signature is scrawled below. Inside the magazine supplement, interspersed among the drawings, are additional photographs of Prince that date from the same period. One such photograph, which appears to show the artist with an unidentified young woman, faces a page that contains a drawing that also shows a pair of figures, one female and one male [fig. 3]. The drawing is different from any other in this publication or in the Sadie Coles HQ catalogue. The figures are not cartoonish but rather are depicted in fairly conventional pictorial terms, and the rendering is neither crude nor childlike. A technique of loose, parallel hatchings has been used to model certain parts of the figures and their surround.
The magazine supplement contains no information about the works or the photographs of the artist reproduced in its pages. Hence this dual-figure drawing could very well be of recent vintage. But I take it instead to be an early work by the artist, probably dating from 1974. In some ways it is similar to a 1974 drawing by Prince entitled Study for "Second Story Interior" (Portrait of Shelley Mills) [fig. 4]. True, the rendering is somewhat different: the more subtle tonal gradations of the portrait contrast with the looser hatching of the dual-figure drawing. Yet the overall approach to the figure is similar: shaded and modeled areas (particularly in the face, neck, and shoulders) are juxtaposed with areas in which bodily form is rendered only by the barest indication of line. Moreover, the head of the male figure at right bears a close resemblance to the images in a series of eight monotypes executed by Prince in 1974 entitled Homogenized to Picasso [fig. 5]. Each print in that series contains a variation on the same image, namely the bust of a young man. The format of these busts closely resembles the head and shoulders of the male figure in the Purple Fashion magazine-supplement drawing, particularly in the long, almost vertical nose, the distinctive shape of the pursed lips, and the long vertical lines of the neck that meet the shoulders at almost right angles.[6]
If this dual-figure study reproduced in a 2005 publication is indeed a mid-1970s work by the artist, it demonstrates his recent interest not only in making broader allusions to that historical moment (as exemplified by the title Hippie Drawings), but also in explicitly reconsidering the work he produced in that period. This is not, upon closer consideration, a new development. In about 1995 Prince produced a group of works that seem to incorporate, via the medium of collage, drawings he had produced in the 1970s. These works further demonstrate his interest in reexamining his early career, and suggest his willingness to play with the historical record itself. They also may belie his claim (made to Taylor) that he had destroyed all the pre-appropriation works in his possession. Each of these mid-1990s pieces is an untitled, mixed-media work on paper measuring 30 by 22 inches. Each features, in large block letters, the name of a fast-food chain ("TACO BELL," "DOMINOS," "WENDEYS"), with text and other elements scribbled around it [fig. 6]. In the center of each work is collaged a smaller sheet that contains a drawing of a male head and bust. Certain details in the rendering of these heads -- parallel hatching, careful tonal gradations -- relate them to the pictorial techniques evident in the works I've already discussed. The identification of these inset drawings as examples of Prince's early pictorial approach is borne out by the dates inscribed on them, which assign them to 1974 or 1975.
It is in the dates inscribed on these works that we may begin to gauge the complexity of Prince's approach to his own (and his work's) history. In a catalogue in which three of these collage works are reproduced, a checklist assigns them to 1995.[7] Yet, curiously, each has a different date inscribed in its lower righthand corner: the successive years 1993, 1994, and 1995. We might ascribe this to a simple mistake in the compilation of the catalogue entries, but there is further cause for doubting the accuracy of the dating of these works. As noted, in at least two cases the inset collaged sheets (with their pictorial renderings of heads) are inscribed with dates from the mid-1970s. In both cases these dates are preceded by the artist's signature. Yet that signature looks different than the signatures that appear on other works by the artist from those years. In fact, it looks much more like Prince's latter-day signature (that is, in works from the 1990s): less controlled, more of a scrawl. Could it be that, at the time he made the larger works in the mid-1990s, Prince backdated these inset sheets, inscribing them with dates from two decades prior? This type of historical ambiguity -- and revision -- is found elsewhere in the artist's practice, as in a drawing that is signed and dated (multiple times, in fact) to both 1967 and 1990.[8]
Works that are dated to both 1974 and 1994, or to 1967 and 1990: we are clearly dealing with an artist who is interested in playing with history, in toying with our expectations. This is in keeping with Prince's broader tendency to challenge any easy pinning down of subjectivity and authorship in his work. Yet in spite of his disavowal of his work prior to appropriation, it is Prince himself who leads us back, in these very works, to that earlier moment in his project. Particularly in the works that incorporate those head studies from the mid-1970s, we see how Prince, in about 1973 and 1974, was working in a rather conventional pictorial manner and employing fairly traditional mediums like drawing and painting. Other surviving evidence of the artist's practice from this period -- including exhibition announcements and installation photographs -- shows figurative works featuring tonal rendering that, in a number of acrylic works on paper, looks to have been achieved by a sfumato-like technique.[9] Some works from this period feature close-ups of rifle mechanisms; others depict floating, UFO-like forms that at times visit human figures, as in Rockport, Le Baigneur (1973) [fig. 7].[10] These forms testify to the time in which the works were made, as 1973 was a watershed year for UFO sightings in the United States.
These early works (none of which are included in the present exhibition) show Prince as a young artist inventing his own idiosyncratic language of visual forms. But perhaps most significantly for our understanding of his longer career, they speak to an early engagement with the technical skills traditionally associated with pictorial art, such as drawing, painting, and printmaking. This is significant because Prince has long been identified with a generation of artists who, it is generally held, rejected such handicraft in their work. Prince and other members of the Pictures generation (including Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Jack Goldstein) are said to have turned away from a traditional, modernist notion of medium in favor of post-Conceptual strategies through which they manipulated and recast already existing images.[11] This is not to say that Prince's earlier investment in the technical skills of pictorial art would preclude the wholesale rejection of them later on. Yet a consideration of his early engagement with studio practices might help us to productively reexamine his approach in his later career. Even his earliest photographic appropriations involved a degree of manipulation that is often ignored in the drive to make claims for the conceptual status of his project. Moreover, even a cursory look at his longer career -- the car hoods, the Nurse Paintings, etc. -- suggest that making is a substantial component of his approach. In fact, one might even say that, taking his early work into account, the rejection of craft embodied by the act of rephotography was actually a rather short-lived episode in Prince's career.
Several works Prince produced in 1974 and 1975 -- Matches (Like Most Everybody Else. . .) [fig. 8], Matches (There's No Dessert/Really There's No Dessert), and Maine Course -- demonstrate his experience with printmaking techniques. The image in Maine Course, which combines etching and aquatint, is built up with a series of fine hatched lines. Both Matches (There's No Dessert/Really There's No Dessert) and Matches (Like Most Everybody Else. . .) contain thin, spidery lines that not only are used to build up the image and create shading, but also depart from the strictly pictorial, giving the image an anxious energy. In all three of these works image and text are combined, although the texts are not separate elements but rather are incorporated into the pictorial schema (printed on a matchbook cover or emblazoned across a dinner plate, for example). It is in this basic pictorialism that we can distinguish these prints from works, executed in 1975, that form what seems to be one of the most extensive bodies of work in Prince's early career. There are at least twenty-one extant works from this group that, from the text emblazoned across the top of each sheet, we can identify as the Sitings series.[12] The Sitings pieces relate to the aforementioned works (Maine Course, Matches (There's No Dessert/Really There's No Dessert), and Matches (Like Most Everybody Else. . .)) in that they, too, are intaglio prints that contain elements of both etching and aquatint. Yet it is in the uses to which the printmaking process is put -- and in the shift from picture-making to a quite different practice -- that we can identify a different approach on offer here.
The Sitings works are all variations on the same basic format [fig. 9]. They are works on paper, each featuring the impression of a plate on a larger sheet (approximately 26 by 20 inches). Each has the title legend above (the word "SITINGS" in an oval border, with "1975" emblazoned above it), and directly below it a large, bordered rectangular field. Below this field are two smaller rectangles: at center, one containing a series of horizontal lines, and at right, a vertically oriented rectangle with a border around it. Each corner of this rectangle is punctuated by a small right triangle, a format which evokes photographs held in place in traditional photo albums. The plate, finally, contains two additional elements: a lightly-inscribed circular form at lower left, and at bottom center several lines that are inscribed with what look like illegible signatures. These last two features further underscore the sense that the general format of the Sitings works is meant to mimic the appearance of official documents. The pseudo-signatures are placed where such documents -- diplomas, wills, etc.-- are typically signed. Further, there is that lightly-inscribed circle in the lower left. Although in most of the works Prince left this area blank or obscured it in some way, in several instances he placed an actual embossed seal over the printed circle.[13]
The feel of documentation in these works locates them at a distance from the aforementioned etchings by the artist. In those earlier works, the tools of printmaking were used to make a picture -- of a matchbook, for instance, or a table. In contrast, in the Sitings series both the pictorial emphasis and the technical skills traditionally associated with printmaking have been quite literally pushed to the background. In the Sitings works the printed elements are not used to create a picture or demonstrate the artist's technical skill; rather, they create a support upon which various types of information and imagery are deposited. For instance, the uppermost rectangular field often functions as a frame for an applied image, whether a photograph or a painted motif. Similarly, Prince often inscribes text on the lines in the box at lower center. This aspect of the Sitings works is perhaps most exemplified by those faux photo corners at lower right. These almost call out for a photograph to be applied within their borders-which, frequently, Prince has done.
We're seeing a shift here in the use of printmaking techniques in the artist's practice, one that coincided with a broader shift in artmaking in that period. The art historian and critic Leo Steinberg described something very similar in an essay that appeared just a few years before Prince made the works we've been examining. Attacking the formalist orthodoxies identified most strongly with the criticism of Clement Greenberg, Steinberg sought other criteria for evaluating the art of the time; he wanted alternatives to the pictorial flatness and "opticality" that Greenberg saw as the key values of modernist painting. According to Steinberg, 1960s art was characterized by a radically new orientation to the picture. Earlier art had maintained a "conception of the picture as representing a world, some sort of worldspace which reads on the picture plane in correspondence with the erect human posture. The top of the picture corresponds to where we hold our heads aloft; while its lower edge gravitates to where we place our feet." Even the Abstract Expressionist painting of the postwar period, Steinberg argued, evinced this kind of latent pictorialism, no matter how far it had moved from traditional illusionistic depiction. But, he continued,
Steinberg used the term "flatbed picture plane" to signal a significant, radically new feature of art. He borrowed his term from the lexicon of printing (in particular, the flatbed picture press, which he defines from Webster's dictionary as "a horizontal bed on which a horizontal printing surface rests").[15] It is through his description of a receptor surface "on which information may be received, printed, impressed" that we can better understand the shift we've been looking at in Prince's work. The Sitings pieces function precisely as such surfaces, onto which any number of elements (images, texts, photographs, labels, embossed seals) have been applied, inscribed, or impressed. Many of the elements in the Sitings works were literally run through the printing press. (Prince likely used a variation on a printmaking technique called chine collé, in which flat elements are affixed to the surface of the print.) Moreover, these works frequently refuse the singular, vertical orientation Steinberg cites as a feature of earlier art. In a single piece Prince often juxtaposes elements in various orientations: photographs, maps, and even text may run both horizontally and vertically.[16]
There was abundant precedent for this approach to artmaking when Prince produced these works. By the early 1970s a wide swath of artists had adopted various formats for presenting images and texts arrayed on a flat surface. These works served as documents of such new approaches as Earthworks, Conceptual art, and Body art. While the Sitings pieces do resemble a great deal of contemporary photodocumentation, they are also in some ways different. Unlike much photodocumentation of the time, which often consisted of photographs and texts merely pasted on board, the Sitings works still utilize the medium of printmaking. In this way one can envision them as transitional works by a young artist, one who was maintaining his investment in traditional technical skills at the same time that he was exploring other possibilities opened up by the art of the time.[17] Further, most contemporary photodocumentation adopted an anti-aesthetic approach, which usually meant a rather stark, stripped-down presentation of information. The Sitings pieces, in contrast, bespeak a significant amount of intervention on the artist's part, and oftentimes an aesthetic sensibility as well. Many contain carefully painted elements (which would have been added after the print was run through the press), some of which are composed of primarily abstract, geometric forms. In these works it seems the young artist was combining (or balancing between) a de-skilled Conceptualist approach to the work as document and a continuing interest in a more conventional aesthetic strategy that offered evidence of the artist's hand. One motif that emerged in his work at this time embodied the tension between these two competing impulses: in various instances a printed (or photographed) text is juxtaposed with the artist's own handwriting. In such works as Untitled (Shelter for a fugitive westcoasting artist) and Untitled (levitating through the third eye. . .) [fig. 10], printed texts are repeated in handwritten (cursive) texts that run directly above them. This not only suggests an interest in the poetics of repetition (there are occasional slight variations between printed and handwritten texts), but also juxtaposes the work of the hand with that of the machine.[18]
A number of themes and motifs predominate in the Sitings works. As the title of the series indicates, many of these works are concerned with place: they identify such locations as Warner, New Hampshire; North Berwick, Maine; New York City; Southern California; and even "a small Kansas town." These textual allusions to named geographic locations are often paired with indicational arrows that point to places or objects in photographs and on maps. As such, there is a touristic feel to many of the Sitings works, as if they record (or at the very least imagine) visits to various destinations. A good number of them include typically deadpan references to the types of historical markers tourists are often wont to visit, although in selecting these Prince steered clear of the conventional and favored instead the outré and bizarre. For instance, there is the monument erected to mark the "July 14 1816 site of slaying of elephant exhibited by Hallalah Baily and George Brown Company of Sommers New York." One also gets the sense that, in a play on the series title, these works not only document places visited but also sightings of various sorts. In addition to historical markers, these include a drive-in movie theatre, a group of four laughing men, and a figure dressed in Western outlaw garb.
This list points to the presence, in the Sitings works, of themes and motifs that recur throughout Prince's broader oeuvre. For example, the various elements in Untitled (Drive In Theatre) underscore the artist's longstanding interest in celebrity and mass media, particularly the cinema. A black-and-white photograph of a drive-in movie theatre is accompanied, at lower right, by a vertical strip likely cut from the bottom of a photographic film still. The film in question, as listed on the strip, is The Amazing Colossal Man -- a 1950s cult film in which the title character grows to gargantuan proportions after being exposed to the blast from a plutonium bomb. A concern with the mass media underlies much of Prince's project, from the Entertainers of the 1980s to the later Publicity works, which are largely composed of signed celebrity photographs. Moreover, the references here --1950s B movies, film stills, the drive-in movie as a cultural phenomenon-call to mind the concerns that would soon preoccupy Prince's contemporaries in the Pictures generation, most notably in Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-80). This is reinforced by the lines of text at bottom center in Untitled (Drive In Theatre), and not only in their reference to a Saturday visit to the drive-in. According to curator Lisa Phillips, the artist based the text on a series of quotes "lifted from the back of Elvis Presley bubble gum cards."[19] As such, the text not only provides an early example of his use of an appropriative technique, but also reflects on the cultural status of the celebrity.
Four Men Laughing, another of the Sitings works, offers insight into Prince's savvy take on gender and repetition [fig. 11]. There is a sense of nostalgia on offer here -- not for the 1950s but for an even earlier moment, as evidenced by the vintage one-piece swimming trunks in the photograph. The short descriptive text recalls the deadpan use of language by such first-generation Conceptualists as Joseph Kosuth. However, the use of a particular found image -- and its repetition -- places the work at a remove from the pared-down approach that was most often employed by Kosuth and his contemporaries. There is the picture's implication of narrative: What are the men laughing at, or about? Is there any meaning in the sartorial differences between the paired figures? Although Prince's signature studies of advertising typologies were still several years away at this point, the grouping nonetheless predicts the figural repetitions of such photographic appropriations as Untitled (three men looking in the same direction) (1978) and Untitled (mixed couples) (1977-78). As in much of the artist's work, repetition is expressed here on several levels at once. For one, there is the doubling implied by each pair of figures, the two on the left in shirts and ties, the two on the right in matching bathing trunks. That doubling is underscored by the mirroring of the two pairs, each turned in, facing the other. Finally, the image is itself repeated, which not only is another instance of doubling but also underscores the inaccuracy of the accompanying text as caption: there are not four male figures here, but eight.
The issue of masculinity -- and more specifically, that of a particular masculine archetype -- is raised in another of the Sitings pieces, Untitled (Shelter for a fugitive westcoasting artist) [fig. 12]. The reference here is not to a historical marker but rather to a shelter of some sort. The roughly cubic form at the center of the work may very well be meant as an abstracted rendition of just such a structure.[20] There is a play between the handpainted geometric elements above and the information (text, photograph) below. Of particular interest in its resonance with the artist's later practice is the photograph at lower right. This black-and-white image of a bearded man in outlaw garb -- Western shirt, cowboy hat, and mask, with a revolver cradled in his left hand -- seems to be a self-portrait of the artist.[21] This identification is reinforced by the text at left, which identifies the figure as an artist -- and a fugitive one at that.
The image of the cowboy has become thoroughly identified with Prince's mature work (through his Untitled (cowboy) photographs begun in the early 1980s, which were appropriated from Marlboro cigarette advertisements). Untitled (Shelter for a fugitive westcoasting artist) puts a decidedly self-referential spin on his use of this particular motif.[22] His interest has not been limited to the cowboy, but has extended to the myriad references it conjures -- to the outlaw, the fugitive, and the attendant myths of mobility and escape in the American landscape. These have long been the subjects of Prince's art, from the biker chicks and motorcycles of his Untitled (girlfriend) photographs to the automotive forms of the Car Hoods series (1987-2002). In addition, the photograph speaks to an interest in playacting or masquerade; the masked outlaw is, of course, someone who's trying to hide his identity. The construction of persona -- whether of celebrity or artist -- is an abiding concern in Prince's work. Perhaps it's just a matter of historical coincidence, but it is interesting to consider that Prince photographed himself in costume at just about the same time Sherman was beginning to formulate her own artistic practice around the activity of self-masquerade.[23]
Prince's photographic self-portrait as gun-toting cowboy also raises the issue of politics -- something that's not often considered a significant component of his art. In a 1993 interview with Brian Wallis he raised this issue in relation to his later photographic images of cowboys: "It gets me angry, some of these representations, the way that media manipulates and doesn't tell the whole story. Cowboys don't tell the whole story at all, so it was sort of perfect. I'm sounding a little bit political right now."[24] One has to consider that Prince began to make his Untitled (cowboy) photographs during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was well known for using the mythic image of the cowboy in his own project of self-fashioning. (A good number of photographs in the series are assigned the date 1980-84, as if their making coincided with the span of Reagan's first term.)
Reagan's political persona was not really at issue when Prince made Untitled (Shelter for a fugitive westcoasting artist) in 1975; the political content of the work can be located, rather, in the work's reference to a shelter. Certain of the Sitings works are direct in their references to a specific type of structure, namely a bomb shelter. These works are replete with such allusions: captions that read "bomb dream" and "shelta fallout"; photographs of a cylindrical object on a sandy beach; and a text that reads, "I dreamed I was in my backyard dodging a nuclear attack. a bomb landed beside me but did not explode." This concern with the nuclear threat of the Cold War even extends to the aforementioned Untitled (Drive In Theatre), with its reference to the B movie The Amazing Colossal Man. That film was part of a veritable genre of 1950s science-fiction films in which exposure to nuclear radiation caused alarming physical transformations. Considering that these works were made in 1975, references to the Cold War and the 1950s take on something of a nostalgic or at least retrospective cast-not surprising considering that Prince, like other members of the Pictures crowd, is a member of the baby-boomer generation (he was born in 1949).
Considering the date of the Sitings works, the references to military conflict and bombing are not necessarily limited to allusions to postwar nuclear anxieties. As Prince had turned twenty-six in the year they were made, one imagines that the Vietnam War had been equally on his mind in the preceding years. There is a somewhat oblique reference to the politics of the period in one of the Sitings works that contains lyrics -- in both English and Spanish -- to a folk song entitled "Que La Tortilla Se Vuelva." It is likely that Prince knew this song of class struggle from a 1968 album by the Chilean folk group Quilapayun-an album entitled Por Vietnam.[25] Moreover, the references to war are not only to the present or to the recent past but point back even further in time. Untitled (Apolinère Enameled), one of the Sitings works that references a "bomb dream," contains a painted map of the United States turned on its side, with an arrow above pointing to the coast of Maine [fig. 13]. Yet the adjacent text cites (another homophonic play, we should add, on the title of the series) an earlier European conflict. It lists a series of well-known European modernist artists (including André Derain, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, and Giorgio de Chirico) and describes their activities during World War I: "Derain is in a motorcycle unit in the north/Braque is a second lieutenant/Léger is at the front with the supply corps. . ." The text ends on a contemplative note: "G. de Chirico is waiting philosophically for the end of the war."
It is in part the presence of this text that marks Untitled (Apolinère Enameled) as a notable work in the Sitings series. It is significant that Prince, who came of age during the Vietnam War, chose to cite the experiences of earlier artists who had lived through a time of war and attendant social turmoil.[26] The text itself is excerpted from writings by the critic Guillaume Apollinaire.[27] This links the text to the image at lower right, which is borrowed from Marcel Duchamp, one of the key avant-garde figures of the twentieth century. The Duchamp work, known as Apolinère Enameled (1916-17), is what is often termed an assisted or rectified readymade. Duchamp made it by painting out elements of and adding text to an advertising sign for Sapolin Enamel paint. For his part, Prince reiterated Duchamp's appropriative gesture; he cropped a reproduction of Apolinère Enameled, and using white pigment painted out the elements surrounding the bed frame -- including the text at lower left that contained Duchamp's name and the date of the work. This gesture is significant on a number of levels. For one, Prince pays homage to the artist who was most responsible for developing appropriative strategies as key tools of twentieth-century avant-garde art. Yet it's a curious form of homage, inasmuch as much of the image -- including, most notably, Duchamp's name -- has been effaced. In the process Prince also effectively erased the girl at center-a figure, we might note, who had been shown in the act of painting.[28] This is telling, as it was precisely in this period, as we have seen, that he was moving away from an engagement with more conventional artistic mediums (painting, printmaking) and closer to the "post-medium" orientation that had been taken up by many artists since the later 1960s.[29] Moreover, one notes that the particular Duchampian readymade that Prince borrowed resonates with his later practice, as it itself consisted of an appropriated and altered advertisement.
There is additional evidence of the importance of Untitled (Apolinère Enameled) to Prince. In spite of the fact that he has generally avoided describing his early work in specific terms, in a piece published in 1988 in Art in America he described the text (as it appeared in another context) at length:
This account by Prince tells us that he used this text more than once -- not only in the Sitings work, but also in the photocopied booklet he describes here. And that was not all; he also used it as the basis for an artist's book (likely a variant of the photocopied booklet) and in a 1976 work entitled Bomb Dream Enameled [fig. 14]. In both of these the text is paired with two photographs (each had been used in a separate Sitings piece) of a cylindrical object on a sandy beach. (In one of the photographs, which shows the object closer up with a circle drawn around it in the sand, Prince altered the image to make the cylinder more missilelike.) This reuse of specific motifs is something of a defining feature of the artist's early career, in which a single element appears in varied works and formats over the span of several years. One of the best examples of this is Prince's use of a quotationlike paragraph beginning with the words, "Like most everybody else." Variations on that model appear in a number of formats: in an undated letter to the art dealer Angus Whyte (under the heading "Form letter no. 4, flavored language series"); in a 1974 etching, with the text appearing on the inside cover of a matchbook; in the Sitings piece Untitled (Drive In Theatre); and in a 1976 photo-text work entitled Art Into Activity Equals Art Onto Artist.[31] He also published a series of eleven such texts in a 1976 issue of the artist's journal Tracks.[32]
One gets the sense, in examining Prince's work from this period, of an artist who would take a singular motif and put it through its paces, working it into various forms. Nevertheless, if images and motifs from the Sitings series found their way into subsequent works, that does not mean that the artist's formal approach remained the same. In fact, we can identify significant shifts in Prince's work at this time, that is to say in about 1976. He continued working in mixed media (primarily photographs, texts, and printed images) on paper. The Sitings pieces all share the same vertical format, but the bulk of Prince's work after that point takes three basic forms. The first of these is a bifold or diptych format, on card stock hinged or folded into halves (each half measuring approximately 11 by 8 1/2 inches). Text and images on each side of the diptych are often positioned as if facing off against one another. Prince also used a long horizontal format (roughly 21 by 34 inches) with four successive areas, each of which contains an image (or, in one case, several images) or text. Finally, he also produced a number of artist's books utilizing some of the same themes and images. In a number of cases Prince executed a single motif in more than one format (that is, as both a bifold and as a horizontal sheet).[33]
In formal terms the works that postdate the Sitings series evince a pared-down approach. There are virtually none of the decorative touches that appear in various Sitings works. In short, by 1976 evidence of aesthetic intervention on the artist's part, signs of the making or crafting of the work, had been minimized. This is particularly evident in the aforementioned horizontal-format photo-and-text works. Although these are in fact prints (they were run through a printing press), engagement with printmaking as a technical medium is reduced to a bare minimum. Two of these were included in a 1976 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum; a description from the catalogue of that show helps us better understand this aspect of Prince's practice of the time:
This textual description -- which was likely based on information provided by the artist -- again underscores the tension in Prince's work between an engagement with a technical medium (in this case, printmaking) on one hand, and a Conceptualism-derived interest in documentation on the other. The former is made evident by the focus on details of technical process ("four zinc plates etched and aquatinted with line") and the final note that the artist himself did the printing. Nevertheless, the resulting works make little use of the technical effects of printmaking, which, in contrast, are fully in evidence in earlier prints such as Matches (Like Most Everybody Else. . .) and Maine Course. Moreover, note how the catalogue text describes how a key element -- "information" -- is incorporated into Prince's approach. This is reiterated in the accompanying description of another work, which reads, "The print is a system for the delivery of information."[35] As I've already noted, such an emphasis on information and documentation was a key feature of art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so much so that one of the watershed exhibitions of the period, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, was titled simply Information.
Again, what we have been tracking in Prince's early career -- from the earliest paintings, drawings, and prints through the Sitings pieces to the works currently under discussion -- is a move away from an engagement with traditional artistic mediums to a practice that treated the work of art more as a matrix for information. In this respect it is significant that one of the works he exhibited in the 1976 Brooklyn Museum exhibition was entitled Post Studio Artist.[36] This tells us that Prince was familiar with the artistic and critical discourse of the day, as "post-studio" was a term used to describe a shift away from studio-based activities to that varied range of practices -- Conceptualism, Earthworks, Body art, and performance art -- that had become available by that time.[37] As noted, the look of Prince's work is very much in keeping with the distinctive format (deadpan amateur photographs combined with texts) that had been widely adopted to document these new practices. Prince was, in fact, trying out a variety of these approaches. For instance, several works from this period document Earthwork-type structures (Cloud Seed/Rain Squeeze, Water Walk) constructed, ostensibly by the artist himself, in the natural landscape. Others describe performance-based activities that highlighted feats of athleticism (a table-tennis match, an attempt "to become the first mile a minute man").[38]
If a categorization of these works demonstrates a continuity between Prince's work and the broader field of contemporary artistic practices in the mid-1970s, a closer look at individual pieces helps illuminate specific concerns and themes in the artist's project. For example, in his debt to both Conceptualism and Pop art before it, Prince often concerned himself with photomechanical reproduction, as both the means and the subject of his work. In particular works from this period, this concern with duplication is extended to issues of identity, as he correlates the duplication of artworks with types of repetition that define the self. This is evident, for instance, in Twins (1976) [fig. 15]. On the lefthand side of the diptych, a color reproduction of the Mona Lisa is juxtaposed with a small black-and-white photograph of a young man seen from the chest up. Facing these on the right is a similar grouping: below, an unskilled painted copy (a debased simulacrum) of Leonardo's renowned portrait; above, a young man who looks similar -- although not quite identical -- to the one in the photo at left. Perhaps it's the same person, his appearance slightly altered by a haircut and a change of clothes. Or perhaps, as indicated by the inscription below, these are twins-two separate people who are genetic copies of one another.[39]
Curiously, there are a number of references in works from this period to advances in human reproductive technologies and genetic engineering. Photographs of test tubes appear in a number of images, including one in which each tube has been printed with a term referring to reproductive technology, including "fertilized packets," "frozen embryos," "surrogate mothers," and "rent a womb."[40] Another work, Gene Bank Enamled, which looks to have been in the bifold format, develops these themes further. (Any description of this piece must remain somewhat conjectural, since it is likely that it is no longer extant and our only access to it is in reproduction.) On the right is an image we've seen before in Prince's oeuvre: an altered reproduction of Duchamp's Apolinère Enameled. Above it an actual test tube, with "gene bank enamled" printed on its side, has been affixed to the work: the earlier reference, in the Sitings piece, to a "bomb dream" has been replaced by this allusion to the relatively new field of genetic science [fig. 16]. At the time Prince was making this work there was widespread public discussion of recent developments in genetic engineering and reproductive technology. This was evident not only in the field of science but also in popular culture; one critic reviewing a spate of recent literary offerings declared that "1976 may be shaping up as the Year of the Clone in pop fiction."[41] In light of this, an early photographic appropriation by Prince like Untitled (three women looking in the same direction) (1980), while certainly a typological study of advertising motifs, also looks uncannily like an attack of the clones.[42]
The duplication referenced in Gene Bank Enamled is not limited to the genetic variety. The grouping of elements (test tube, appropriated and altered image) on the right is juxtaposed with a Xerox copy of those same elements at left. We might productively compare this work with Twins, since both conflate or correlate three different types of duplication: artistic (the painted copy of the Mona Lisa, Duchamp's rectified readymade); mechanical (the printed reproductions included in Twins, the photocopy in Gene Bank Enamled); and biological or genetic. This extended artistic reflection on various types of duplication provides an important backdrop for the appropriative strategies that would become the cornerstone of Prince's practice within about a year. His thinking about these issues is also evident in a roughly contemporaneous work, Untitled (Christina's World) of 1976 [fig. 17]. On the righthand side of the work Prince pasted a reproduction of an iconic image of twentieth-century American art -- Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World of 1948. Below it is a photograph -- likely taken by the artist himself -- of a house remarkably similar to the one in the painting. A young woman is visible lying on the ground in the photograph's right foreground. The text that faces these two images explains their juxtaposition; it describes the artist driving a 1953 Roadmaster Buick along dirt roads in "Eastern Northern Maine," his girlfriend with him in the front seat:
There is a great deal here that resonates with what we've already seen in Prince's work. There is the reference to traveling, specifically travel by automobile. Moreover, the automobile in question -- "a '53 two tone green 50th anniversary year roadmaster buick"-- looks back to the 1950s, the postwar decade of the artist's childhood. The frequent misspellings in the text are themselves a consistent trope in the artist's practice. And there is the invocation of artistic appropriation, not only in the reference to Duchamp (who produced his infamous L.H.O.O.Q. in 1919 by drawing a mustache and goatee on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa), but also in the photographed restaging of Wyeth's iconic work. As in Twins, the artist here suggests a correspondence between artistic copying and real-world instances of repetition -- whether that embodied by biological twins or by the impulse to performatively restage a preexisting picture. Moreover, the work prompts us to recognize that in certain instances the image may precede or provide a model for real-world experience ("I'm in a painting"). Untitled (Christina's World) suggests our tendency, in an image-saturated culture, to model our behavior and appearance on received imagery (a tendency that Sherman was also beginning to explore). At the same time it suggests the reverence with which certain pictures are treated; the ironic potential in the too-literal repetition of such an image; and the possible punishment that may be visited on one who exploits the ironic or parodic potential of repetition.
Untitled (Christina's World) shows Prince, in the year prior to his move to direct photographic appropriation, considering the power of the reproduced image. Nevertheless, there is a component of the work that he would effectively jettison in his move to appropriation, namely the inclusion of first-person narration ("I'm in Eastern Northern Maine"). Prince's work from this period is replete with just such first-person narratives, with texts that describe everything from feats of athletic prowess to personal interactions with art collectors to the building of Earthwork-type structures. In this, Prince's work resonated with certain currents in artmaking in New York at the time. A number of artists -- many of whom showed at the John Gibson Gallery -- focused on narrative or storytelling, an approach that was commonly referred to as Narrative art or Story art. One critic at the time described this as "a sub-set of Conceptual art whose subject matter -- or material -- is narrative."[44] In a later discussion of his move to photography in about 1977, Prince himself described some of the central artists working in this fashion:
Prince offers us a concise account of this impulse in the art of the time, with a mention of the group of artists -- and the gallery -- most identified with this type of work. Although the categorization of these artists as a distinct group was relatively short-lived, this offshoot of Conceptual art did not go unnoticed in the art criticism of the time.[46] Note that Prince acknowledges his debt to these artists in his treatment of the photograph as an object. By suggesting that they influenced him through photography, he effectively elides their influence on the narrative sensibility of his pre-appropriationist work. His art contained not only narrative, but also repeated references to his own experience -- what we might call allusions to an authorial "I." This, too, was part of a broader tendency in art; at this time the critic Peter Frank coined the term "auto-art" to describe a widespread approach that was "consonant with the self-involved, confessional, even narcissistic-but rarely contented-spirit of the age."[47]
One suspects that it was this presence of an authorial "I" that was in part responsible for Prince's later turn away from this early work. Yet if his work of this period contained such references, he was also experimenting with strategies that called the verifiability of that first-person narration (which conventionally would be taken as the "true," authentic voice of the artist) into question. For instance, at times he utilized texts that suggested the presence of two different voices or personas. One of the bifold works includes a photograph of a bridge or overpass onto which is graffitied the phrase "MARY SHIMINSKI I Love You." The photograph is joined by two texts: the one on the left takes the form of a letter to Mary Shiminski, in which the writer claims, "I wrote a message on the railroad bridge. . . ." It is signed, "Sincerely Richard." Yet in the text above the photograph, which takes the form of a memo, Prince adopts a pseudonym. The text is composed of three short lines: "FROM: billy/TO: mary shiminski/SUBJ: mary shiminski i love you."[48]
Prince's complication of authorial voice is most evident in a group of nine offset printed sheets that were likely produced in 1977 (the works themselves are undated). Each sheet contains a block (or blocks) of text, much of it crossed out by lines of repeating diagonal strokes [fig. 18]. Selected words and phrases, simultaneously allusive and elusive, are left visible: "He worked as a painter (house)"; "his publications include half"; "black and blank"; "But this is picayunish." Each of these sheets (save one) contains a title (for example, The Author, Preface, About the Author, and Epilogue) that marks the series' relatedness to authorship and the book. Here Prince, a longtime bibliophile, explores the artistic possibilities of appropriation -- not of imagery, but of text. No doubt the series relates to work Prince exhibited in late 1977 or early 1978 in a group show at the Kathryn Markel Gallery in New York. A contemporary review of the show helps us visualize Prince's contribution:
This review is notable because it appears to be the only published documentation of an important gesture by the artist -- one that was executed at about the same time he is supposed to have been undertaking his first experiments with photographic appropriation. In this light, the critic's discussion of Prince's interest in the standardized formatting of texts (title pages, introductions, dedications, etc.) is significant. This typological investigation of textual matter corresponded to the typologies of pose he was constructing from borrowed advertising images. Moreover, the concern in these works with authorship -- and the use of borrowed texts -- is remarkably prescient, in that they predict the currency one particular critical text -- Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" -- would have in the fields of art history, criticism, and literary theory in the coming years. They resonate with the ideas proposed in Barthes' essay (which was disseminated to an English-speaking audience in 1977), particularly the critic's pronouncement that a text is "a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."[50]]
By borrowing texts from others Prince was effectively challenging the tendency to ascribe the voice articulated in an artwork to the artist himself or herself. This too was an effect with which he had experimented earlier. As noted above, for several years he had been using in his work a series of found texts that began "Like most everybody else. . ." According to Lisa Phillips, these texts
As Phillips points out, these texts offer up yet another "inauthentic voice" that calls into question the "I" that appears in them. This effect is heightened by their oftentimes nonsensical tone, which seems to have been achieved by inserting non sequiturs into found sentences (such as, "I'd feel funny backgrounding Friday nite poker with message and medium, but on the other hand, I'd feel silly if I visited minimal friends and brought along my baseball cards for trade").[52] Moreover, Prince's stated method for creating these texts -- whether or not this account is indeed accurate -- is significant.[53] There is the invocation of celebrity and fame in the person of Elvis. Note that Phillips' account puts emphasis not merely on Presley's celebrity, but perhaps more so on its packaging -- the ways in which the star is produced on a veritable assembly line so that his putative voice is not even his own. This recognition is much like that contained in Andy Warhol's silkscreen paintings of celebrities such as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, who are reduced, through formal flattening and repetition, to ciphers. In Warhol's paintings any humanity contained within the actual physical body of the star is drained out, leaving a flat, iconlike and repeatable mask-an empty sign equivalent to the label or product logo on a manufactured consumer good (like those in Warhol's Campbell's Soup and Coca-Cola paintings). A significant portion of Prince's career has been devoted to extending the Warholian investigation of celebrity's troubling of subjectivity and voice, from such early-1980s works as Entertainers and Spiritual America through to the Untitled (publicity) works of 1999-2000.
An undated text piece -- clearly related to these other altered text works -- brings together these issues of appropriation and voice through direct reference to Warhol. The piece consists of a magazine page that has been largely blacked out, probably with magic marker. Certain words have been left visible, creating a kind of prose-poem if read from left to right across the columns, moving down the page:
One is tempted to take Untitled (objects are nothing. . .) as a conventional artist's statement. As such, the sentiment expressed here resonates with the time in which it was made, in which many artists adopted more ephemeral practices (as opposed to working in traditional, saleable mediums like painting and sculpture) in order to challenge the commodity status of the work of art. At first blush, the message here seems to be that the idea behind the work is more important than the object, which is subject to the market, to economics. This was a familiar refrain in Conceptual art. Yet any such reading of this as a conventional artist's statement is troubled -- if not made impossible -- by the fact that the piece is based on a found text. The words are not the artist's, or at the very least not his alone: they are secondhand, borrowed. We cannot, in the end, claim that it is Prince who is speaking here. From whom, then, were these words borrowed? The identity of the text's author is signaled by an image, just visible under the black field in the center of the right-hand column. It is a photograph of Andy Warhol.
Prince has been quoted as saying, "Warhol and I have two things in common. We have the same birthday and the same dentist."[55] Obviously the connection is more significant than that. In March 1975, New York magazine printed excerpts from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol in advance of the book's publication later that year. Prince used the last page from this article-which included a photograph of Warhol reading a newspaper -- to make his untitled text piece.[56] By using a text authored by Warhol, Prince only heightened the challenge to authorship posed by his use of a borrowed text, since the Pop artist himself was deeply invested in troubling conventional notions of authorship. Just as with his silkscreen paintings, which were made with the help of assistants, it was unclear exactly how much of Warhol's "writings" (such as The Philosophy) were the product of his own labor, and how much that of others.[57]
This text work by Prince relates most closely to his other altered text pieces (the c. 1977 series including The Author, Preface, and Epilogue), but it also bears affinities to other works by him, specifically those into which he had incorporated images of Duchamp's Apolinère Enameled. In each case, Prince borrowed a motif (an image or text) from another artist and altered it to make it his own. In borrowing from Duchamp and Warhol, Prince referenced the two artists most identified with strategies of artistic appropriation in the twentieth century. Yet, remember that he didn't just borrow material from these artists. By altering the preexisting material as well -- that is, by painting or blotting out large portions of the existing image or text -- he was able to have it both ways. He paid homage at the same time as he effectively effaced his artistic predecessors. In this light I am inclined to view Untitled (objects are nothing. . .) as akin to a well-known piece by Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing. In 1953 Rauschenberg got hold of a drawing by the Abstract Expressionist artist Willem de Kooning and proceeded to erase the more established artist's work. He matted and framed the resulting sheet with a printed label that gives the work its title. In his text piece, Prince, much like Rauschenberg, acknowledges the influence of an earlier artist at the same time as he obscures him (remember that while some of the text on the sheet remains visible, the photograph of Warhol is completely blacked out). Both pieces also call into question the conventional designation of the maker of the work. It is hard to square Rauschenberg's act of erasure with the creative act of making ordinarily expected from the artist. Likewise, as I've noted it's difficult to take Untitled (objects are nothing. . .) as a statement by Prince, since the words are all borrowed -- just as one hesitates to take the original text as some unmediated expression by Warhol. By borrowing the words of an artist whose voice was itself so compromised, Prince sets up a sort of cascade effect in which any assigning of indisputable authorship is insistently deferred.
Prince's various experiments with found and altered texts, then, represent an alternative to the first-person narration found in a good number of the photo-and-text works that he was making primarily in 1976 and 1977. Moreover, note how Untitled (objects are nothing. . .) began as a page ripped from a magazine (much like those 120 or so altered book pages that he showed at the Kathryn Markel Gallery). Significantly, it is in this very concern for challenging authorship, combined with the act of tearing pages from magazines, that Prince has located the origins of his appropriative practice:
Our understanding of Prince's altered text pieces helps illuminate this move in his work, in that they show how he was experimenting with various forms of appropriation. His mention of "authorless pictures" certainly resonates with his focus on the status of the author in these text works as well. Yet if his account seems to offer up the final word on his move to appropriation -- his decision, that is, to re-present found photographs much as he had done with found texts -- there's more to it than that. For even his move to the practice of appropriation was not as sudden as this account would have it.
We've already seen that Prince used collage extensively in his early career. There is a small body of extant works that show him, in about 1977, collaging the types of images that would make up some of his earliest appropriations. For instance, Untitled (four single men with interchangeable backgrounds looking to the right) depicts four men in suits -- male models -- in poses of the type featured in some of Prince's early photographic appropriations [fig. 19]. Yet the reuse of these images is mediated here by the medium of collage: Prince cut out the figures from their backgrounds and reshuffled them, offering the impression of pieces inserted into the wrong spots in a jigsaw puzzle. This sense of dislocation draws our attention to a little-noted feature of the photographic appropriations themselves, namely the focus on locale -- the sense they give of a single gesture repeated not only by different figures but also in different locations.[59] This sense of tourism or travel (and more generally of movement and mobility) is on offer as well in Untitled (couple), a work dated to 1976.[60] On the right, a man and a woman, her hand clutching his arm, stand in front of Big Ben and other recognizable buildings from the London streetscape. A rectangular section has been collaged on top of the photograph, reduplicating the image but in slightly different tones. In other words, Prince rephotographed the image and then collaged a portion of the rephotograph on top of it, thereby calling attention to the shift in tones and grain attendant to such duplication. To the left, a field of collaged elements reduplicates the image at right, although much of this is not visible, as it has been overpainted with white pigment. In this field various elements have been cut out and rearranged, again offering a sense of a jigsaw puzzle with pieces out of place.
These works show Prince toying with the imagery he would eventually use in his appropriated photographs -- and even beginning to experiment with rephotography itself. They demonstrate -- perhaps even more clearly than in the direct photographic appropriations -- the effects the artist would introduce in the process of rephotography: shooting from an angle, achieving shifts in color and tone, emphasizing the graininess of the image. They also utilize various methods -- collage techniques, overpainting, the combining of image and text -- that had been an essential component of Prince's early career, yet that would be jettisoned as he began to embrace photographic appropriation as the dominant model for his work (although he would return to these, it should be noted, in later years). As we can now see, those first appropriations did not emerge fully formed out of thin air. Rather, they came out of a long process of trial and error, in fits and starts, with certain possibilities embraced and others discarded along the way.
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.
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