Richard Prince Stalks the Image World Like a Vampire

Richard Prince has always seemed like an unknown quantity, and the sum of his work often diverts efforts to form a coherent image of the artist. Despite his proficient writing, he endures in a tight-lipped gloom somewhere in the vicinity of New York. What is known about his early years reads like gonzo fiction: he was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone to an arms dealer father who meddled in Cuba. At age 18, he was allegedly told by the author J.G. Ballard that he was ‘living inside an enormous novel’. Later, in mid-1970s New York, he clipped pictures for Time and Life magazines, where he hit on the idea of rephotographing advertisements and reprinting them as his own work. Ever since, he has stalked the image world like a vampire – the wooden stakes of several copyright lawsuits having so far failed to stop his heart. At Gagosian, ‘Early Photographic Work 1977–87’ revisits this first, ambitious period. 

The show opens with an untitled series of large black and white photographs (1982–84) of women either consuming or exhibiting products – soda, sunglasses, make-up. Their beauty is pressing, yet, like all great Prince photos, their pitch to consumers (reimagined now as viewers) is ambiguous. An adjacent room holds his famous ‘Cowboy’ series (1980–86) – all derived from Marlboro cigarette ads – as well as other rephotographed, cropped and repurposed images from magazines. Most brand names and signifiers are expunged, except when they appear on the product themselves (the Anne Klein watches and Lambert & Butler cigarettes, both 1978–79) or a well-known cartoon rears its head (the Kool-Aid Man or Trix Rabbit, both 1983).

These early rephotographs of models sipping soda and American cowboys trotting out West borrow the allure of a life enchanted by commercial products while insisting in their contextual omissions that such enchantment is beyond your reach. You can buy the picture, not the product – yet, it is the cigarette that pampers you with cowboy feelings. What’s left? A more serious magic? The rump ad turns to art much like an ordinary splinter becomes a relic of the true cross, with a little finesse. 

‘What [the ads] promised was something impossible but also something that I could believe in,’ Prince told The Art Newspaper last year. It is a version of a line he has used since his debut at Artists Space in 1980. Here, you can detect in him a quasi-religious reverence – a yearning for eternal life? Grimmer. Remember Prince’s forerunner, Andy Warhol, who famously said he didn’t believe people ever died; they just went shopping? More of that.

There is something deathly and exultant in early Prince, just as in Warhol. Only Prince instils in his appropriations a nightmarish quality Warhol averred: suburban undeath. Taken together, the 47 works on display at Gagosian exude an eerie atmosphere: you almost expect to hear the creak of the coffin lid in Dracula’s castle, from room to room. (It’s an impression he partly cultivated; in a glass box toward the front of the gallery, a 2003 catalogue – Publicities – is displayed, with a suave self-portrait from 1980 in the style of Bela Lugosi on its cover.) In Prince’s haunted manor, you can find unoccupied rooms of a cramped taste (Untitled (Living Rooms), 1977), a handsome, well-dressed couple smiling inanely at something out of the frame (Untitled (Couple), 1977), and many other atmospheric examples in which the human model has been converted – or, rather, immortalized – as human decor. There are products for no one, plenty of bloodless people from nowhere. All the living have gone shopping while the dead are here with Prince.

Richard Prince's ‘Early Photographic Work 1977–87’ is on view at Gagosian, London until 22 December

_{Main image: Richard Prince, Untitled (Make Up), 1982–84, ektacolor photograph, 50.8 × 61 cm. Courtesy: © Richard Prince and Gagosian, London; photograph: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd}