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Lot Essay
An early example of Richard Prince’s Cowboy Series, Untitled shows a cowboy riding valiantly through water, his face hidden by his Stetson. Instantly recognisable, the image of the Marlboro man represents an important icon in Prince’s oeuvre, one which has come to define his exploration of image and meaning within contemporary American society. When the piece was produced, Prince was pioneering his practice of ‘rephotography’. By recontextualising existing source images, Prince alters the image and elevates it into the realm of high art. Prince’s appropriation strategy reflects the artist’s interest in focusing the viewer’s gaze on the images contained within ubiquitous, everyday advertisements. A key exponent in the ‘Pictures’ generation of the 1980s which included Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine, Prince was among the first artists to employ photography as readymade to examine modes of representation. Here, he has achieved this by shifting the perspective on a classic and well-known American symbol: the cowboy.
The image of the cowboy is immediately recognisable as a symbol of the American west. The wide brimmed hats and spurs evoke a shared national memory of wide open planes that were the stage for grand battles against savagery to civilise the wild. ‘[Cowboys] represent the country’s most undeniable image of itself and as such pass through culture with no friction. They are dismissible generic signifiers, and at the point when Prince chose them, they had ceased even to be employed as ubiquitous ads for Marlboro cigarettes; they had been cut loose and were resting somewhere in the sediment of culture,’ (R. Brooks, Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 96).
As an iconic figure in American culture, Prince realised the potency of the cowboy image after encountering it over and over again through adverts during his time working at Time-Life magazine. Through this practice, he redefined the concepts of photography and art and exposed how, in the postmodern era, individuals interact with images, softening the previously understood binary oppositions of high/low, expression/analysis, margin/mainstream and revolution/tradition within artistic production and consumption. In playing with this image, Prince explored what this figure means to America in terms of masculinity, adventure and in particular, the notion of banality or normality. Indeed, at one point the figure became almost invisible through its ubiquity and its position within American culture was no longer questioned. However, by the time Prince began to engage with this imagery, Marlboro had already stopped using them, thus them to stand as cultural relics.
The image of the cowboy is immediately recognisable as a symbol of the American west. The wide brimmed hats and spurs evoke a shared national memory of wide open planes that were the stage for grand battles against savagery to civilise the wild. ‘[Cowboys] represent the country’s most undeniable image of itself and as such pass through culture with no friction. They are dismissible generic signifiers, and at the point when Prince chose them, they had ceased even to be employed as ubiquitous ads for Marlboro cigarettes; they had been cut loose and were resting somewhere in the sediment of culture,’ (R. Brooks, Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 96).
As an iconic figure in American culture, Prince realised the potency of the cowboy image after encountering it over and over again through adverts during his time working at Time-Life magazine. Through this practice, he redefined the concepts of photography and art and exposed how, in the postmodern era, individuals interact with images, softening the previously understood binary oppositions of high/low, expression/analysis, margin/mainstream and revolution/tradition within artistic production and consumption. In playing with this image, Prince explored what this figure means to America in terms of masculinity, adventure and in particular, the notion of banality or normality. Indeed, at one point the figure became almost invisible through its ubiquity and its position within American culture was no longer questioned. However, by the time Prince began to engage with this imagery, Marlboro had already stopped using them, thus them to stand as cultural relics.