Untitled (Cowboy) is part of Richard Prince’s iconic Cowboy series, shot from the 1980s through the 1990s and is known as the artist’s most influential and conceptually attuned body of work. Executed in 1988, the present work depicts a procession of cowboys riding on horseback through a canyon, with golden amber light flowing between the cliffs and delineating stiff shadows and silhouette of the procession. One of the later iterations of the iconic series, Untitled (Cowboy) is notable for portraying its subject from a distance, rather than up-close, revelling in otherworldliness in an otherwise dim, arid landscape. The enigmatic depiction of cowboys—America’s quintessential ancestral figure, once associated with endurance, independence and chivalry—is achieved through the practice of re-photographing the images of the iconic and controversial Marlboro cigarettes advertisement campaign. Highlighting the entanglement of cowboy mythology with the promotion of deathly cigarette addiction, as well as with the machismo of Hollywood representations of the cowboy as the all-American male, Prince expresses an ambiguous Warholian fascination with Pop-culture, simultaneously critiquing its perverse inauthenticity and co-opting of the sacred. Similar to many of his contemporaries, such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman, Prince appropriates the visual debris of American culture, in order to insert a moment of self-awareness into the American collective imagination in its attachment to secular consumerism.

The inspiration behind the present image has its roots in Prince’s career at the tear-sheets department of Time-Life magazine, where he first became enthralled by fictitious and romantic images of mass culture in the 1970s. The clippings of idealistic images that, for Prince, represented Americans’ “wishful thinking,” were signifiers floating in cultural space separated from what they signified, plucked out from the stream of life and from the flow of consumption. Intrigued by the strangeness of isolated images trapped in spatio-temporal limbo, the artist sought to make them even stranger by producing perfect facsimiles of the original advertising images, further loosening their relations to reality by cropping out slogans and logos and removing them further from their context and authorial vantage point. As Nancy Spector explains, “Prince’s appropriations of existing photographs are never merely copies of the already available. Instead, they extract a kind of photographic unconscious from the image, bringing to the fore suppressed truths about its meaning and its making.” (Nancy Spector cited in: “Nowhere Man” in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, 2007, p. 26)

Cinematic in composition and scale, Prince’s photographic style is imbued with a timeless Hollywood opulence that draws from America’s rich history of film-making in order to address notions of mythmaking, machismo and nostalgia that operate at the deepest level of our consumer-driven and image-saturated contemporary world. Drawing from the tradition of artists such as Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Prince engages with advertising, appropriating its most recognisable images in order to question how the media dictates, displays and distorts the representation of reality for use as a seditious marketing tool. In the Cowboy series, Prince explores one of the great emblems of American culture – the cowboy – enlarging his readymade image to the status of high art. By removing the commercial slogans and logos from the Marlboro advertisements, Prince at once celebrates the artistry and slick production values of these images whilst simultaneously underlining the visual force of consumer culture and the constructed nature of cultural mores. In so doing, he exposes the figure of the cowboy as a Hollywood trope, dramatised, glamorised and romanticised in order to entice public consumption: “the bland normality of his Cowboy series,” writes Rosetta Brooks, “is like an outrageous celebration of the universal mythology of the Wild West” (Rosetta Brooks, “Spiritual America: No Holds Barred” in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Richard Prince, 1992, p. 95).

The daring subversiveness of Prince’s oeuvre lies in the extraction of images from parallel worlds – the world of advertising, among others – resulting in his own idiosyncratic, instantly recognisable non-reality. Splendidly manifested in Untitled (Cowboy), Prince’s mystification of the familiar visual world of mass culture shatters the mechanisms that administer its proliferation of myth through fetishisation and pretence. The result of this critical re-photographing practice is a conceptually innovative, breath-taking, enigmatic image.