Answered Prayers
Richard Prince's Retrospective
"Spiritual America" at the Guggenheim Museum
As
magnificent as it is controversial-the Richard Prince show at the New York
Guggenheim Museum, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, is the most comprehensive
presentation of the master of Appropriation Art to date. Are the works
subversive commentaries on the obsessions of American society, or are they
mere slick crowd pleasers? Oliver Koerner von Gustorf had a look at
the image pirate's exhibition.
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Richard Prince, Courtney Love, from
the series all the best, 2000
Deutsche
Bank Collection
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"Sexy" is the catchword, by now passé, that young creative and
media people use to refer to something that's desirable, innovative, and
in some way profitable: even if no one wants to be told anymore that
designer sofas, advertising campaigns, coffee machines, or works of art
are supposed to be "sexy," this adjective perfectly describes the large Richard
Prince retrospective at the Guggenheim
Museum in New York. From the very beginning, Spiritual America
aims right into the heartland of capitalist eroticism.
Richard
Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 1989
©
Richard Prince
Visitors to the show encounter American Prayer on the ground
floor of the museum, a new sculpture that Prince made from the sanded-down
body of a Dodge Charger.
The Charger, built in 1969, is a classical muscle
car, one of those souped-up middle-class cars used for races in the
late sixties and early seventies, at the time a true teen status symbol.
Prince had the salvaged car immersed in a cement block to create a fetish
that is both a retro collector's dream and an abstract minimalist work of
art: a cross between Donald Judd
and Hot Wheels. This
already has a certain sex appeal. But every yang needs its ying, and so,
as though Prince and Guggenheim head curator Nancy
Spector wanted to balance this phallic white trash fantasy with a
feminine counterpart, next to it is the gigantic cast of a tire
planter - a flower pot made from wheel rims and cut-open tires of the
kind that adorns millions of gardens in the American South.
Richard
Prince, Point Courage, 1989
©
Richard Prince
This crude and extremely funny act of creation forms the
overture to one of the most magnificent and probably most controversial
American exhibitions of the year. Richard Prince was already honored in
1992 with a major show at the Whitney
Museum, but his works have never before been shown on this scale.
Arranged in loose chronological order, the show marks the stations in a
more than 30-year career; its title Spiritual
America also refers to one of Richard Prince's most famous works.
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Richard Prince, Untitled (labels), 1977
(detail)
© Richard Prince
In an art world where everything is allowed, you can find
yourself longing for a true scandal-like in 1983, when Prince exhibited
the photograph
of a ten-year-old Brooke Shields
in a New York gallery. The naked, made-up girl is staring unflinchingly
into the camera; she is standing in a bathroom mist with her skin oiled.
Is it the paedophilic dream of an artist, or a case for the youth welfare
office? No, it's actually a recycled commission. The photograph was taken
by Gary Gross back in 1976 for Shields' mother, who wanted to see her
daughter immortalized as a precocious sex symbol, two years before she
became world-famous for her role as a child prostitute in Louis
Malle's film Pretty
Baby. Richard Prince's stroke of genius was simply to photograph
the photograph and call it Spiritual America after Alfred
Stieglitz' legendary 1923 photograph
of a castrated horse. The fact that Prince exhibited the "stolen" motif as
a work of art unleashed a long battle over copyright; it also contributed
to making the Appropriation
Art movement much better known.
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Richard Prince, Untitled (fashion),
1982-84
© Richard Prince
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Ever since the advent of Modernism, generations of artists have
been appropriating found material-one need only think of the Dadaists, the
bottle racks and urinals Duchamp
turned into Readymades, or of Warhol's
silkscreens. And since the late '70s, artists such as Elaine
Sturtevant and Sherrie
Levine have been questioning ideas of authorship, originality,
creativity, and intellectual property with their copies of art historical
masterpieces both painted and photographed. In the early '80s,
"Appropriation Art" was also the name of a new scene in which women played
a dominant role for the first time-including Cindy
Sherman, Richard Prince's girlfriend at the time. Between 1977 and
1980, Sherman created her famous series Untitled
Film Stills: 69 black and white photographs in which she
personified various female stereotypes: secretary, laborer, country girl,
seductress, murder victim in a film noir, librarian, housewife.
Sherman's models were taken from magazines, films, and television. Her
figures were all objects of male desire, trapped in their role and defined
by their poses, their make-up, their clothing. Just as her work addressed
sex and gender, identity, and difference while questioning the notion of
the "original" work of art, Prince also scratched away at the bigoted
surfaces of American pop culture.
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Richard Prince, Untitled (fashion),
1982-84
© Richard Prince
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For almost a decade, he'd worked cropping images for Time
Life, archiving articles and amassing his own collection of mass media
images from the leftovers. In the act of rephotographing, Prince found the
appropriate instrument for revealing the hidden longings and fears of the
American psyche. Thus, as he writes in his text I Second That Emotion
(1977-78), "by generating what appears to be a 'double' (or ghost), it
might be possible to represent what the original photograph or picture
imagined."
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