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Lot Essay
In the early 1980’s, Richard Prince embarked on a landmark series of photographs that called into question fundamental American values and conventional notions of the role of the artist. Captivated by the torrent of surreal advertising images with which he came into contact on a daily basis as a function of his job working in the tear sheets department of Times magazine, Prince had determined a new mode of expression that all but effaced his artistic involvement. By surreptitiously re-photographing carefully cropped sections of the ads that appealed to a seductive, illusory and distinctly American fiction, Prince isolated the all but invisible psychological undercurrents of coercion at play and amplified the impact to disquieting effect. His work from this period embodies the sometimes sardonic eye of the Pictures Generation, made up of fellow iconoclasts, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, among others. These young artists favored photography, performance and video over painting—or what was referred to in the criticism of the time as “new media”—casting a cold, trenchant gaze towards consumer culture. Prince’s early photographs constitute a seminal moment in postmodernism and are justly considered masterworks of the Pictures Generation.
Prince’s Cowboy pictures take as their subject the disgraced icon of the Marlboro Man, an almost tragicomic symbol of romanticized masculinity and the American spirit of independence. Until the mid-1950s, Philip Morris had marketed Marlboro exclusively to women. When the first reports linking lung cancer to smoking emerged, the company quickly masculinized its product with the help of the ad agency, Leo Burnett. After testing an array of masculine cyphers on audiences, the agency determined that the cowboy appealed most widely to male American audiences. By the 1960’s, Marlboro ads needed no longer even make direct reference to smoking in order to sell their cigarettes; they simply deployed the intimately familiar image of the cowboy, superimposed with text beckoning their audience to escape to “Marlboro Country.” However, when smoking-related illness began to claim even the lives of Marlboro’s cowboys, public backlash ensued, and finally the Marlboro Man was banished from the frontlines of visual culture. Prince found in the Marlboro Man a potent metaphor for the sinister perversion of values and ridiculous propaganda that proliferated 1980s America. The motif of the cowboy as hijacked and treacherous symbol was an especially fitting analogy for the country’s political climate. It is no mere coincidence that former Hollywood star, Ronald Reagan’s consecutive terms as president began in 1981. Not only did Reagan portray cowboys in his former career, he was frequently photographed wearing cowboy garb on the campaign trail.
From Frederic Remington to John Wayne, the mythic figure of the cowboy has long been associated with the fundamentally American ideals of independence and fortitude. However, the origins of this hugely romantic figure are humble in the extreme, and can hardly be said to belong to America. We can trace the bloodline of the cowboy back to the 19th century vaquero traditions of northern Mexico, or even further back in time and across the Atlantic to medieval Spain. The American cattle ranching industry, mostly operating out of Texas, recruited cowboys from the lowest social structures of the period. The pay was poor, and both the physical and emotional demands of life on the range were high. As a result, the cowboys developed a rigorous code of conduct, a blend of frontier and Victorian values that would lay the foundation for their romantic symbolization. Heralded in songs and poetry for their individualism, honesty and perseverance—and later immortalized in film as selfless defenders of righteousness—the cowboy finally became the ultimate American insignia of patriotism and free will. And yet, by the 1920s the image of the cowboy had already begun to destabilize, deriving a negative association to gun-slinging hotheads or gambling drunkards. This richly tragic trajectory is crucial to understanding the myriad ways in which Prince’s images of the Marlboro Man subtly subvert American values.
Prince’s Cowboy pictures take as their subject the disgraced icon of the Marlboro Man, an almost tragicomic symbol of romanticized masculinity and the American spirit of independence. Until the mid-1950s, Philip Morris had marketed Marlboro exclusively to women. When the first reports linking lung cancer to smoking emerged, the company quickly masculinized its product with the help of the ad agency, Leo Burnett. After testing an array of masculine cyphers on audiences, the agency determined that the cowboy appealed most widely to male American audiences. By the 1960’s, Marlboro ads needed no longer even make direct reference to smoking in order to sell their cigarettes; they simply deployed the intimately familiar image of the cowboy, superimposed with text beckoning their audience to escape to “Marlboro Country.” However, when smoking-related illness began to claim even the lives of Marlboro’s cowboys, public backlash ensued, and finally the Marlboro Man was banished from the frontlines of visual culture. Prince found in the Marlboro Man a potent metaphor for the sinister perversion of values and ridiculous propaganda that proliferated 1980s America. The motif of the cowboy as hijacked and treacherous symbol was an especially fitting analogy for the country’s political climate. It is no mere coincidence that former Hollywood star, Ronald Reagan’s consecutive terms as president began in 1981. Not only did Reagan portray cowboys in his former career, he was frequently photographed wearing cowboy garb on the campaign trail.
From Frederic Remington to John Wayne, the mythic figure of the cowboy has long been associated with the fundamentally American ideals of independence and fortitude. However, the origins of this hugely romantic figure are humble in the extreme, and can hardly be said to belong to America. We can trace the bloodline of the cowboy back to the 19th century vaquero traditions of northern Mexico, or even further back in time and across the Atlantic to medieval Spain. The American cattle ranching industry, mostly operating out of Texas, recruited cowboys from the lowest social structures of the period. The pay was poor, and both the physical and emotional demands of life on the range were high. As a result, the cowboys developed a rigorous code of conduct, a blend of frontier and Victorian values that would lay the foundation for their romantic symbolization. Heralded in songs and poetry for their individualism, honesty and perseverance—and later immortalized in film as selfless defenders of righteousness—the cowboy finally became the ultimate American insignia of patriotism and free will. And yet, by the 1920s the image of the cowboy had already begun to destabilize, deriving a negative association to gun-slinging hotheads or gambling drunkards. This richly tragic trajectory is crucial to understanding the myriad ways in which Prince’s images of the Marlboro Man subtly subvert American values.