Evoking the grandeur and theatricality of cinema, Richard Prince’s Cowboy from 2015 belongs to his Cowboy series, amongst the most well-known and conceptually attuned bodies of work in the artist’s storied oeuvre. Mid-gallop and amidst a fiery melee of golden amber fields, the present figure emerges as the ultimate embodiment of the American cowboy, stunning in its quixotic vision of the American west. Prince remarked on his eminent series in 1980 by re-photographing Marlboro cigarette advertisements, in doing so not only challenging the nature of photography and subverting conventional notions of authenticity, but also deconstructing and interrogating the romanticized images that shape American identity. In the present Cowboy, Prince takes this process a step further by tearing and then taping back together the photograph. Re-photographed and scrutinized by Prince’s incisive lens onto American culture, then subsequently torn and re-taped, the finely tuned construct of the cowboy as a nostalgic and rugged projection of American masculinity is dismantled, and yet remains extraordinarily powerful and utterly irresistible.
“The image of the cowboy is so familiar in American iconology that it has to become almost invisible through its normality. And yet the cowboy is also the most sacred and masklike of cultural figures. In both a geographical and cultural sense, a cowboy is an image of endurance itself, a stereotypical symbol of American cinema.”
As the quintessential American symbol and icon of masculinity, the cowboy is the ultimate example of an industry-fabricated cultural construct, mythologized and distanced from his true historical origin. At once synonymous with freedom, lonesome independence and chivalry, the cowboy was elevated from his original roots as a lowly ranch-hand by the imagination of Hollywood and hyped-up macho performances by Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. Mythologized, glamorized and proliferated by Hollywood films and advertising campaigns, the stereotype of ideal masculinity in the form of the strong and lonesome cowboy became a carefully marketed icon readily available for consumption in the American collective imagination. In the present work, the archetypal symbol of the all-American male – the cowboy – glides astride his horse into the terrain, the sole figure amongst three horses mid-gallop.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
Art © 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Prince’s fascination with advertising imagery began with a job as a nightshift worker in the tear-sheets department for Time-Life magazines in 1974. Tasked with clipping editorials for staff writers to use in their research, Prince ended up absorbed and enthralled by the detritus from his clippings. The artist re-photographed magazine ads featuring the Marlboro cowboy and stripped any particularizing elements that contextualized the image as an advertisement—logos, slogans, and cigarette packages were eliminated, leaving the image pure in its symbolic power. Re-envisioned by Prince, the cowboy is unveiled as both powerfully seductive and profoundly inauthentic. His relation to these image-readymades vacillates between Warholian fascination with pop-culture and criticism of the myths they propagate. As outlined by Nancy Spector, “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 in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, 2007, p. 26) A picture of John Wayne-esque masculinity, Prince’s re-framing of the Malboro campaign in this theatrical still is nothing short of cinematic. The sole cowboy amidst three galloping horses, the present ranger forges onward in an epic spectacle that both fetishizes the heroism of its protagonist while toppling the very mechanisms that proliferate the myth.
