Richard Prince
Canal de Panama (Panama), 1949

Prince is one of the artists who employs “rephotographs” (photographs of photographs) to elicit, on art’s own terms, a reflection on reality, on reproducibility and fiction, utilizing imagery taken from the world of advertising and television for his own work. During the late seventies, he began to produce series of colour photographs of luxury items, extracted from advertisements, watches, jewellery or ballpoint pens, and thus initiating a discourse -which he was to maintain throughout his career- based on the need to employ artistic reproduction in the mass media, as in the series of images retrieved from newspapers, Three men looking in the same direction (1978) and Three women looking in the same direction (1980), an ironic vision of the archetypical models in contemporary society, which were followed by a search for doses of reality, as in the photographs Sunset (1981) or Gangs (1984). Nevertheless, it is in the series Cowboy (1980-1986) where he most fittingly expressed his concern with the image as part of artistic reproducibility. In this series, he reflected on current mythic heroes and, specifically, masculine ideals in American society; again juxtaposing the concept of masculine identity with fiction and reality, since the existing image signifies an unattainable concept, which for Prince is true of advertising in general. Concurrent with this work, he produced another, one of his most noted series, Girlfriends, which exempliies the epitome of implicit misogyny, and is succeeded by the series Cowboys and Girlfriends (1987). Through his work, Richard Prince provides us with an analysis of the commonplace, based on the elements we observe in the mass-media and advertising, hence the observation of advertising codes and images of the characters appearing in them, such as the photographs Untitled (Entertainers) (1984) or Portraits (1984-85). In 1986, he abandoned the use of the rephotograph and turned to the use of images appropriated from comics, through drawing and silk-screen processes, where he inserted easy popular jokes such as that in the series Jokes (1986-1993), with which he offered a vision of the average American male. He also inserted ironic commentaries, most of which addressed sexual topics and questions of gender. The use of drawings resembling this popular format once again called to question the subliminal undertones directed at the collective conscience. During the mid-nineties, he produced enormous expressionist-like canvases in which, behind the thick layers of colour, there are hidden phrases that again play on vulgar jokes, once again commenting ironically on the very society we live in. One of his latest series of paintings is Nurses (2003), produced in large-scale format and where the main theme is the figure of the nurse, a female symbol he relates to the covers of some romantic novels that resort to the symbolic strength of this figure. His constant concern in Richard Prince’s work with codes of simulation gives rise to a vision of post-modern life that leads to literary structures by way of text. He conveys a complex vision of the world without failing to address the History of Art itself. Prince’s irony and his subversive messages have made him one of the basic referents of contemporary art. T. P.

Cowboys & Girlfriends, 1992

Richard Prince, an artist known above all for belonging to the appropriationist movement of the eighties along with photographers such as Sherrie Levine, characteristically photographs advertising images from which he omits the slogans and brand names. He uses newspaper cuttings, wherein he alters the contents, adding simple popular jokes, thereby reflecting on reproductions and authorship in our day. He is concerned with the mass media, television and advertising, and has become something of a collector as he has compiled -through his work- images of nurses, people from the film and television world, cowboys, motorcycles chicks, etc.
The degree of fiction existing in his photographs is especially apparent in his way of classifying them thematically, and unifying their formats. In this series, titled Cowboys and Girlfriends (1992), where he builds photographic images that tease us with their familiarity, for they are recognizable yet decontextualized images that serve as building blocks for a parameter of contemporary society itself, as well as its myths. In this case, the figure of the cowboy from the Marlborough brand cigarette ad was appropriated. Hence, on the one hand, he chose a stereotypical image and, on the other, the image of the contemporary myth: a strong man, a loner, actually a kind of hero facing the elements. Prince did not hesitate to use the image of the ad, for he removed the text that accompanied the horseback rider. The use of humour and a certain degree of irony is one of the constants in Prince’s work, as he presents us with a vision of post-modern life through his photographic compositions, while also refraining from demonstrating the perfect world of advertising and instead portraying an imperfect reality, since he altered certain details so that the images would not simply be mere copies. Parallel to the photographs of the cowboys, he produced the series Girlfriends, in which he portrayed young women atop motorcycles, thus commenting with a bit of cynical humour on the popular American dream, for through these images, we observe the girls looking candid up on the bikes, presented and “packaged” to serve the masculine psyche. The series is a revision of the canons of our society, and even of the aggressive images so popular in America, where there exists an inherent duality since seduction is so powerfully manifest, and, in turn, they unfold as a complex commentary of popular myths. It seems as though one image were to devaluate the other, for the cowboy figure conveys the Western myth of masculinity, freedom and adventure, which is countered with the world of bikers and their girlfriends, the latter used as mere instrumental adornments; both are considered qualities of current cultural identity.
The images from Cowboys and Girlfriends exemplify what is traditionally envisioned as the ideal gender roles: the solitary, heroic man and the weak woman, demonstrated as a trophy, yet latent in both images, which are seemingly simple, there is also a deep reflection on our own contemporary myths. T. P.

Serie details' Cowboys & Girlfriends, 1992