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Пишет Сергій Кабуд (![[info]](http://lj.rossia.org/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} xyu)@ 2004-04-06 12:35:00 |
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фотографія с ковбоем снятая с телевізора ушла тіпа за $300 тисяч. самий дорогой фотограф
Richard Prince came of age in New York in the late '70s, as part of a loosely knit group of artists, including Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Jack Goldstein, who used photography to re-contextualize art and media images, challenging received ideas about authorship and originality. (These artists, now known as the "Pictures" generation, are currently featured in the exhibition "The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960- 1982" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.) Prince started out as an aspiring painter with a day job in the basement of Time-Life, where he clipped articles from magazines to send to staff writers. At the end of the day, he was left with a pile of ads for products like watches, liquor, cigarettes, and cars, which he began to re- photograph, cropping and enlarging the images to reveal the mechanics of their subliminal seductions. One of his best early works brings together four images of female models taken from four different ads, all demurely gazing in the same direction. It makes no difference what products are being advertised: The models' airbrushed elegance and coy, sideways glances enact an economy of perpetually deferred desire—the very essence of consumerism.
Reworked Marlboro men
In 1983, he showed a group of photographs called "Cowboys," in which he re-photographed Marlboro cigarette ads, cropping out the text and blowing them up to nearly life-size. These heroic images of Madison Avenue cowboys perfectly embodied the screwy zeitgeist of the Reagan years: a B-movie cowboy for president and a pill-popping first lady whose political mantra was "Just Say No." The "Cowboy" pictures made his name; their appropriations were like projections from inside the vaults of the cultural unconscious.
Around this time, academic critics like Hal Foster championed Prince's work as part of a postmodern critique of commodity culture and as a definitive break with the fusty traditions of high modernism. Prince's deadpan, re-photographed pictures were seen as harbingers of "the death of painting"—or at least as a challenge to the cherished notions of authenticity that painting stood for. A few years later, some of these critics ate their words when they found that the strategy of appropriation had lost its critical teeth. Displayed in the homes of wealthy collectors, the pictures of cowboys that once advertised Marlboro cigarettes had now become high-end advertisements for a new brand-name in the cultural marketplace: Richard Prince.
Throughout the '80s, Prince continued to lift images from magazines, gravitating toward icons of blue-collar masculinity: heavy-metal rockers, biker chicks, race cars, monster trucks. At this point, his work seemed to get more personal; although the presentation of these images was wry and self-parodying, there was always a palpable sense of the collector's enthusiasm for his latest acquisitions. After a few years, he started making paintings that incorporated authorless, borscht-belt-style jokes, which he often stenciled onto his canvases. His favorite joke, which he has repeated in many different forms, is itself a barbed comment on the act of appropriation: "I went to see a psychiatrist. He said, 'Tell me everything.' I did, and now he's doing my act."
The pastiche can be unabashedly beautiful
Now, with his pictures of nurses, Prince has returned to painting, appropriating a retro subject and rendering it in a retro style—a drippy, brushy, self-consciously painterly version of Abstract Expressionism. Stylistically, the paintings are clever pastiches: The built-up layers and floating blocks of color are winking allusions to Mark Rothko, while the figures of the nurses, their white uniforms swiped and splattered with paint, mimic the gestural fury of Willem de Kooning's women. Their juicy colors and sensuously worked surfaces are unabashedly beautiful and irresistibly appealing. (The paintings in the show sold out before it even opened in New York.)
And here we find one of the primary pitfalls of ironic appropriation. Presumably, Prince is not really a macho, misogynist, gestural painter— he's just impersonating one. His is an art of cultural quotation: His cowboys are always "cowboys," his nurses are always "nurses," his paintings are always "paintings." But at a certain point, the beauty of the work itself overrides the artist's irony, beating the scare quotes into submission. Over the past 20 years, the expectations of the art world have changed and Prince's work has kept pace. In the early '80s, critics wanted art that poked holes in the status quo; today, art is judged by its capacity to make you swoon with delight. And above all, Prince's new paintings are about the pursuit of pleasure: pleasure in moving paint around, pleasure in looking at luscious, sexy surfaces.
Which brings us back to the nurses. By mining his own collections and probing his own libido, Prince readily acknowledges that the icons and desires he explores in his work are not just out there but in here as well. As his art has hovered closer to his own obsessions, it has become both less subversive and more seductive—a revelation of what happens when irony turns into its opposite.
Mia Fineman is a writer and curator in New York.
Photographs
http://slate.msn.com/id/2090475/#Contin
Richard Prince came of age in New York in the late '70s, as part of a loosely knit group of artists, including Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Jack Goldstein, who used photography to re-contextualize art and media images, challenging received ideas about authorship and originality. (These artists, now known as the "Pictures" generation, are currently featured in the exhibition "The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960- 1982" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.) Prince started out as an aspiring painter with a day job in the basement of Time-Life, where he clipped articles from magazines to send to staff writers. At the end of the day, he was left with a pile of ads for products like watches, liquor, cigarettes, and cars, which he began to re- photograph, cropping and enlarging the images to reveal the mechanics of their subliminal seductions. One of his best early works brings together four images of female models taken from four different ads, all demurely gazing in the same direction. It makes no difference what products are being advertised: The models' airbrushed elegance and coy, sideways glances enact an economy of perpetually deferred desire—the very essence of consumerism.
Reworked Marlboro men
In 1983, he showed a group of photographs called "Cowboys," in which he re-photographed Marlboro cigarette ads, cropping out the text and blowing them up to nearly life-size. These heroic images of Madison Avenue cowboys perfectly embodied the screwy zeitgeist of the Reagan years: a B-movie cowboy for president and a pill-popping first lady whose political mantra was "Just Say No." The "Cowboy" pictures made his name; their appropriations were like projections from inside the vaults of the cultural unconscious.
Around this time, academic critics like Hal Foster championed Prince's work as part of a postmodern critique of commodity culture and as a definitive break with the fusty traditions of high modernism. Prince's deadpan, re-photographed pictures were seen as harbingers of "the death of painting"—or at least as a challenge to the cherished notions of authenticity that painting stood for. A few years later, some of these critics ate their words when they found that the strategy of appropriation had lost its critical teeth. Displayed in the homes of wealthy collectors, the pictures of cowboys that once advertised Marlboro cigarettes had now become high-end advertisements for a new brand-name in the cultural marketplace: Richard Prince.
Throughout the '80s, Prince continued to lift images from magazines, gravitating toward icons of blue-collar masculinity: heavy-metal rockers, biker chicks, race cars, monster trucks. At this point, his work seemed to get more personal; although the presentation of these images was wry and self-parodying, there was always a palpable sense of the collector's enthusiasm for his latest acquisitions. After a few years, he started making paintings that incorporated authorless, borscht-belt-style jokes, which he often stenciled onto his canvases. His favorite joke, which he has repeated in many different forms, is itself a barbed comment on the act of appropriation: "I went to see a psychiatrist. He said, 'Tell me everything.' I did, and now he's doing my act."
The pastiche can be unabashedly beautiful
Now, with his pictures of nurses, Prince has returned to painting, appropriating a retro subject and rendering it in a retro style—a drippy, brushy, self-consciously painterly version of Abstract Expressionism. Stylistically, the paintings are clever pastiches: The built-up layers and floating blocks of color are winking allusions to Mark Rothko, while the figures of the nurses, their white uniforms swiped and splattered with paint, mimic the gestural fury of Willem de Kooning's women. Their juicy colors and sensuously worked surfaces are unabashedly beautiful and irresistibly appealing. (The paintings in the show sold out before it even opened in New York.)
And here we find one of the primary pitfalls of ironic appropriation. Presumably, Prince is not really a macho, misogynist, gestural painter— he's just impersonating one. His is an art of cultural quotation: His cowboys are always "cowboys," his nurses are always "nurses," his paintings are always "paintings." But at a certain point, the beauty of the work itself overrides the artist's irony, beating the scare quotes into submission. Over the past 20 years, the expectations of the art world have changed and Prince's work has kept pace. In the early '80s, critics wanted art that poked holes in the status quo; today, art is judged by its capacity to make you swoon with delight. And above all, Prince's new paintings are about the pursuit of pleasure: pleasure in moving paint around, pleasure in looking at luscious, sexy surfaces.
Which brings us back to the nurses. By mining his own collections and probing his own libido, Prince readily acknowledges that the icons and desires he explores in his work are not just out there but in here as well. As his art has hovered closer to his own obsessions, it has become both less subversive and more seductive—a revelation of what happens when irony turns into its opposite.
Mia Fineman is a writer and curator in New York.
Photographs
http://slate.msn.com/id/2090475/#Contin
