RICHARD PRINCE | Untitled

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2004

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and the illustration fails to convey the iridescent quality of the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some faint handling marks in isolated places, most notably towards the top corners and a few small nicks on the left overturn edge. There are a few minute accretions, two in the top left quadrant and one to the right of the central crease, approximately 30 centimetres from the top edge. Further close inspection reveals a few minute drip marks to the towards the top right and lower right corners and a short scuff toward the centre of the lower edge. Inspection under ultra violet light reveals a few spots in places towards the edges that fluoresce lighter under UV. These are not noticeable in natural light.
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Richard Prince’s pivotal series of Hood sculptures performs a similar rhetorical function to his Cowboy photographs. Both dissect and analyse the performative masculinity of American culture, manipulating the associations of rugged virility and individual liberty that have made both cowboys and cars quintessential symbols of America. Immortalised in literature, music and most importantly film, the instant association of the muscle car with an ever expanding horizon, roaring through the landscape of the American Dream, is unavoidable. Prince, already a consummate cultural commentator, came of age in the 1960s in the wake of the high-octane literature of the Beat Generation and at the height of Hollywood’s fetishization of the hard-swearing, car-driving maverick criminal/cop. As a result, none of the inherent associations of the muscle car would have been lost on him, and indeed, he freely admits to sharing a passion for the escape, speed and pure romance of automobiles in America, obsessively collecting first editions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and reproducing a still from the movie Bullitt as the only advert for his pivotal 1989 survey exhibition: Spiritual America. The series began following Prince’s move from New York to Los Angeles. Soon after arriving the artist came across nostalgic adverts in the back of hot-rod magazines that offered punters the opportunity to buy fibreglass imitations of the classic high-performance muscle cars of the 1960s. Prince began to place mail orders for these pre-painted replicas, sending them on to body shops to apply finish and varnish to the surfaces.  This distancing mechanism notwithstanding, in many ways the car hood was a perfect appropriative object, not least because in repainting it he simply echoed the car’s natural lifecycle. As he explained: “Great things that actually got painted on out there… I didn’t have to make this shit up. It was there… It got ‘teen-aged.’ Primed. Flaked. Strippped. Bondo-ed. Lacquered. Nine Coats. Sprayed. Numbered. Advertised on. Raced. Fucking Steve McQueened” (Richard Prince cited in: Jeff Rian, ‘In the Picture: Jeff Rian in Conversation  with Richard Prince’ in: Rosetta Brooks, Jeffrey Rian, and Luc Sante, Eds., Richard Prince, London 2003, p. 23). It was perhaps for this reason that Prince stopped sending the hoods out to be painted, and began to introduce his own hand, painting the surfaces himself. In doing so he shifted the frame of reference away from Donald Judd-inspired minimalism and Duchampian irreverence towards the bruised macho egotism of the American Abstract Expressionist. Atmospheric and subtly majestic in their matt monochrome, these works are more Mark Rothko than John Chamberlain, Barnett Newman as opposed to John McCracken.

To an extent however, as Nancy Spector pointed out in her introduction to Prince’s career defining retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2007, all of these iterations of manliness, be it in the form of artistic reference or symbolic appropriation, are something of a masquerade. As she observed, Prince’s self-presentation has routinely switched “between the decidedly androgynous and the classically macho,” and he has always seen “a correlation between his purloined subjects and his own being” (Nancy Spector, ‘Nowhere Man’, in: Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, 2007, p. 52). For every Hood, Cowboy or De Kooning painting there is also a Nurse, a Girlfriend or a Fashion Photo. Like Robert Gober or Laurie Simmons, Prince questions the determining role of his own gender in his work, and like Mike Kelley, much of his oeuvre can be read as “an attempt to come to terms with his own maleness, however emboldened or diminished it may be” (Ibid., p. 53).

However, for all that Prince’s art is in part a process of self-discovery, its outward face, like much of Prince’s work, pertains to the ways in which America presents itself and presents the fantasy of American life. In a similar fashion to the Instagram paintings that the artist has executed in recent years, the Hoods reference a fantastical self-presentation, a dictated aspiration that is located in a symbol, be it a motorbike, a girl, a car or a ‘look’. The muscle car is a status symbol. It not only represents rebellion and freedom, but is a symbol of wealth. The present work, which sees the hood painted in a matte gold, highlights that added layer of significance. This is a trapping of wealth, couched in a symbol of youthful, carefree rebellion. As J Mays, the former CCO of Ford Motor Company observed, “Everyone wants what they can’t have, clearly. Reality ain’t much of an aphrodisiac… Your house reflects who you probably actually are. But your car is a reflection of how you want to be seen – how you project yourself” (J Mays in conversation with Glenn O’Brien in: Ibid., p. 302). The present work epitomises this sentiment. Pirouetting elegantly between lofty art historical reference and pop-cultural banality, Untitled is a superb example of this pivotal series, simultaneously lampooning and lionising one of the most iconic symbols of the American culture and psyche.