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Lot Essay
Richard Prince has spent much of his career exploring the nature of American masculinity through the appropriation of images found in popular culture. From his interpretations of the cowboy heroes of the American West to the suggestively-sexual images of the nurse heroines found in pulp fiction novels, his view of the American male is built up from a variety of rich cultural sources. In Graduation he continues this examination by focusing his attention on one of the last great bastions of the American male-the automobile.
Inspired by a trip to Los Angeles in 1987, Prince takes the molds of cars he has always admired--Mustangs, Challengers, Chargers,--all masculine über American models--and paints them, celebrating the simultaneous engineering of American machines and his own sculptural prowess. The chauvinism, power, and blatant machismo of the car and what it represented appealed to Prince's evident excitement in partaking of lived culture and also defined his sense of what art should be about, "It was the perfect thing to paint. Great size. Great subtext. Great reality. Great thing that actually got painted out there, out there in real life. I mean I didn't have to make this shit up. It was there. Teenagers knew it. It got 'teen-aged;' Primed. Flaked. Stripped. Bondo-ed. Lacquered. Nine coats. Sprayed. Numbered. Advertised on. Raced. Fucking Steve McQueened" (R. Prince, quoted in "In the Picture: Jeff Rian in conversation with Richard Prince," R. Brooks, J. Rian and L. Sante (eds.), Richard Prince, London, 2003, p. 23).
By hanging these pieces on the wall like the canvases in a museum, Prince critiques the merging of popular culture with high art in the minds of the American public. His Untitled (Cowboy) series from the early 1980s took the ubiquitous image of the Marlboro Man that appeared in countless magazines and billboards and turned it into high art and in the process questioned the construct that is the "American male." His car hoods reinterpret a similar theme, yet by separating the car hood from the rest of the vehicle and hanging it solemnly on the wall like a trophy, its virility is emasculated as its symbolic significance as a sign of contemporary consumerism is enhanced--a twinned critique that ultimately takes aim the spectacle of museum display.
Inspired by a trip to Los Angeles in 1987, Prince takes the molds of cars he has always admired--Mustangs, Challengers, Chargers,--all masculine über American models--and paints them, celebrating the simultaneous engineering of American machines and his own sculptural prowess. The chauvinism, power, and blatant machismo of the car and what it represented appealed to Prince's evident excitement in partaking of lived culture and also defined his sense of what art should be about, "It was the perfect thing to paint. Great size. Great subtext. Great reality. Great thing that actually got painted out there, out there in real life. I mean I didn't have to make this shit up. It was there. Teenagers knew it. It got 'teen-aged;' Primed. Flaked. Stripped. Bondo-ed. Lacquered. Nine coats. Sprayed. Numbered. Advertised on. Raced. Fucking Steve McQueened" (R. Prince, quoted in "In the Picture: Jeff Rian in conversation with Richard Prince," R. Brooks, J. Rian and L. Sante (eds.), Richard Prince, London, 2003, p. 23).
By hanging these pieces on the wall like the canvases in a museum, Prince critiques the merging of popular culture with high art in the minds of the American public. His Untitled (Cowboy) series from the early 1980s took the ubiquitous image of the Marlboro Man that appeared in countless magazines and billboards and turned it into high art and in the process questioned the construct that is the "American male." His car hoods reinterpret a similar theme, yet by separating the car hood from the rest of the vehicle and hanging it solemnly on the wall like a trophy, its virility is emasculated as its symbolic significance as a sign of contemporary consumerism is enhanced--a twinned critique that ultimately takes aim the spectacle of museum display.