Richard Prince Same Man
Richard Prince Same Man
One of the most influential US artists from the 1980s onwards and a central figure of American ‘The Pictures Generation’, Richard Prince (b. 1949) often uses banal images from our entertainment and consumption culture, which he twists and transforms in a way where the ordinary is "uplifted" into something both strange and seductive.
In art historical terms Prince belongs to the Pictures Generation, known for appropriating – that is, ‘stealing’ – existing images. In so doing, Prince undermines the idea that an artist will always have something recognisable about them, a style that binds their different groups of works together. Prince is an ambiguous figure and his style is subject to variation. In isolation this sometimes aids the impression that his works are inaccessible – that they float around without a creator. Nevertheless, all of Prince’s work revolves around identity, thus turning his visual world into a portrait of the late twentieth-century.
“I wanted to make something, that hadn’t been made. I wanted to see something, that hadn’t been seen.”
Richard Prince
Central to Prince's practice is a persistent interrogation of authorship and authenticity, one that resists easy resolution. Works such as his ‘Cowboys’ series, made by rephotographing Marlboro advertisements with their logos and text cropped away, turn a commercial image into myth, evoking freedom, masculinity and the American West, while at the same time exposing the cracks in that same myth. Elsewhere, his combines of multiple appropriated sources within a single frame demonstrate how photography can shape reality as much as record it, so that meaning shifts depending on what an image is placed beside.
Prince's work ultimately withholds a fixed position, oscillating between affirmation and critique, seduction and analysis, leaving the viewer to sit with the question at its core: if the copy can stand in for the original, what, then, does that make the original?
Artists Arthur Jafa, Ed Ruscha, Taryn Simon, Collier Schorr, and Joachim Koester, speak about their fascination with Richard Prince.