His broadly based oeuvre of photographs, paintings, objects, drawings, and fictional writing is a repository of appropriation and reproduction devoted to the visual imagery and collective myths in circulation in the Western world, specifically the American world of popular culture.
The American artist Richard Prince, born
in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949, ranks
among the most influential practitioners in
the art world since the seventies. His
broadly based oeuvre of photographs,
paintings, objects, drawings, and fictional
writing is a repository of appropriation and
reproduction devoted to the visual
imagery and collective myths in
circulation in the Western world,
specifically the American world of popular
culture. Prince is best known for his
photographed adaptations of familiar
advertising images, as illustrated by his
"Cowboys" and pictures of "Girlfriends"
from motorcycle magazines.
In the mid-eighties, Richard Prince began
working on another typological
phenomenon of the social canon and
collective ideas of normality, the joke,
which has led to a prolific and significant
body of painted work. The exhibition at
the Kunsthalle Zürich presents the first
institutional survey of the artist's painted
oeuvre since 1985.
As an exemplary exponent of the first
generation to grow up with the
omnipresence of the mass media and
consumerism, Richard Prince has set
decisive standards in terms of our
relationship to authenticity and the
original, to collective and subjective
identity, and also regarding the collage of
the modern subject out of the untold
public images of seduction and desire,
fictions which are actually the facts of our
reality, according to Prince. The artist has
also set standards regarding the role of art
as a parallel pictorial archive, as another
"Social Science Fiction," which, in a kind
of double somersault, may possibly lure
facts into doing some thinking.
Richard Prince pulls the imagery for his
pop-culture photographs out of the
anonymous acreage of advertising and
magazines, while his "painting" draws on
the myths of high culture. Here, too, he
exploits existing materials, appropriating
jokes and cartoons largely created by
writers and cartoonists of cult status for
such cultivated playgrounds as the New
Yorker, their trenchant humor vented on
values which are in effect thereby
consolidated. The jokes Prince has
chosen are infected with a certain
fustiness of social convention. They deal
with the relations between the sexes and
feed on mutual, ingrained prejudices. They
ignore developments, on the march since
the 1960s, like the sexual revolution or the
emancipation of women and ethnic
minorities, and expose still active or
reactivated formulas of social reality in
the mood of the mythological "sell-by"
dimensions of Western culture.
Prince uses the same phrases from his
repertoire of "punny" jokes over and over
again in countless paintings, cunningly
nabbed by the history of painting since the
1950s and transported to an equally fusty
atmosphere. From the early, manually
drawn cartoons, which toy not only with
artistic authenticity but also with the
contradictions of pictorial and textual
information, the artist went on to make
monochrome, silkscreened jokes couched
in the visual vocabulary of abstract art;
Combine Paintings reminiscent of
Rauschenberg, with their seamless
collage of the most varied genres;
painterly expressive forms; Art Brut; and
the abstract expressionism and formats of
his most recent paintings. Barroom
palaver from reproductions, jokes,
headlines, yarns, and painting The joke,
as the signature of the painter Richard
Prince, signs the painting as joke.
Events:
Guided tours (German) Wednesdays at 6:30 pm
February 6 (Medea Hoch) / February 27 (Medea Hoch) / March 13 (Beatrix Ruf) / March 27 (Medea Hoch)
Catalogue:
The artist's exhibitions in Basel and
Zurich, followed by an exhibition in
Wolfsburg, will be accompanied with a
publication of some 350 pages in two
volumes with texts and an essay by Bruce
Hainley: Richard Prince, Paintings -
Richard Prince Photographs, Hatje-Cantz
Verlag, 2002.
Kunsthalle Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zurich
Hours:
Tuesday - Friday 12 to 6 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday 11 - 5 p.m.
Closed Mondays