Richard Prince
These are aerial landscapes with a mid-century feel, riven by the Word. Prince's new paintings offer yet another spin on his well-known On the Road iconography. From his early photo-appropriations of Marlboro Men on horses to his late 80s painted car hoods, Prince's art has been about movement through and across the land, or the mind-state he referred to in a 1989 book as Spiritual America. In this, Prince is the unlikely heir to Robert Smithson: in these new paintings, the sense of a humourless nature, pummelled by culture in the form of jokes, bears a distant relation to Smithson's aggregates of found minerals in fabricated metal boxes. Prince's use of additional predella panels below the new canvases also gives them a mock-devotional twist, a sensation first experienced in his 80s Neo-Minimalist paintings of jokes floating disembodied on lush colour fields.
Ever one to try out a new persona on the contemporary art world, the artist still known as Prince proposes a reconsideration of curdled, agrarian poetry in these paintings. The show's announcement somewhat inexplicably offered a grainy black-and-white photo appropriated from a fashion magazine of Harlequin (a joke on David Salle's clown imagery?) with the scrawled verbal tag: 'I just heard from Bill Baily. He's not coming home'. The presence of such deliberately stale and misspelled jokes in the paintings, both printed and handwritten, in the brushed and silkscreened fields, lends to these landscape visions an elegiac, sad/funny, Bortsch-Belt air. A recurrent high, sloping horizon line, dividing green and orange 'earth' from cream-coloured 'sky', informs us that the world is round. Cell-like patches of abstract drawing and painting suggest Atomic Modern aeroplane views of well-tended farmlands. It's as if Virgil's Eclogues (a well-known source for Constable's landscapes) were being intoned by Henny Youngman impersonating a 50s flight attendant.
The accretion of painterly 'cells', some brushed by hand and others silkscreen-printed from computer drawings and fabric swatches, offers a parable of grotesque, fast-forwarded growth. The paintings' fat, boxy brushstrokes, sickening colours and belated, Twomblyesque graphic whorls summon up second-generation Abstract Expressionism, particularly such recently resuscitated figures as Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan and Jan Müller. All these artists blended abstract marks with figurative incidents in their self-consciously humanistic late 50s history paintings - that transitional moment now known as Hand-Painted Pop. From Prince, who is always archaeological in his enthusiasms (his 1988 bibliomaniacal article on collecting pulp novels, 'Bringing It All Back Home' in Art in America, converted me to his cause), the attitude towards these sources remains ambiguous. Is he using the last gasps of High Modernism as if they were pure trash (which they are), or is he effectively trying to expose the Beat subtext of later Abstract Expressionism?
In New York last Autumn, at a moment when the contemporary art world failed to coalesce into an enthusiasm for anything much at all, no one seemed to be quite sure how well Prince had succeeded in his latest exploits. Strange as it may now seem even to me, I went through a phase of equating Prince's obviously ironic and post-modernist use of 'sincere' brushstrokes with the Lucullan form of travel painting practised by Howard Hodgkin, whose retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a high point in a void.
For the past four years, it has seemed that Prince was on his way to becoming a real, old-fashioned gestural painter, one who has all but left his earlier photo-appropriation works behind in the dust. (This of course is not, strictly speaking, the case, since Prince exhibited large photographs of nude biker chicks at Gladstone in 1993.) This impression of a sudden, increasing painterliness was borne out by his 1992 retrospective at the Whitney. That show climaxed with a last gallery in which lush word-and-image abstractions, evocative of early Rauschenberg (and perhaps presaging Prince's more recent Twombly appropriations) suddenly made their appearance and seemed to mark a break, or at least a new phase, in the artist's career.
These landscapes suggest a vision of proto-dysfunctionalism, with their jokes about race, sex and family values, and with black and white maelstroms facing off against one another on the horizon. In many ways, the thwarted nostalgia of these triste and beautiful paintings expresses something of America in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial. Possibly the most pessimistic joke reads: 'WHITE MAN: I don't know what to do. My house is burned down. My wife died. My car's been stolen. And the doctor says I've got to have a serious operation. BLACK MAN: What you kickin' about, you white, ain't you?' Many of the verbal tags are about things not happening or issues of betrayed trust: 'I said to my mother-in-law "My house is your house". Last week she sold it'. The literary voices in the paintings, as visualised in the placement and style of handwriting and printing, are often stuttering and inchoate -
I often wondered if Prince was trying to illuminate learning-impaired, or even criminally insane, alter egos. Phrases repeat themselves and wrap around organic forms in a way that suggests willed regressions. Like Twombly, or Rimbaud for that matter, Prince finds a touching infantilism and piquant desperation in found graffiti. In recent art, we have had a plethora of appropriated suicide notes (Erika Rothenberg, Tracy Tynan) and children's homework pages (Lutz Bacher, Donald Baechler). Prince's stolen doodles somehow manage to remain uniquely violent and skewed. He aspires to the grand manner of post-war utterance and very nearly attains it.
