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Lot Essay
Richard Prince’s American Place is a striking example of the artist’s Hood series that explores the car motif in American popular culture. Prince emerged in the 1980s as part of a generation of New York-based artists who worked with the margins of American sub-culture and visual debris. As a founding member of the Pictures Generation, Prince lifted images directly from parallel worlds of pop culture, such as biker gangs, celebrity and advertising. For his notorious Cowboy series, Prince re-photographed and painted over the cowboy images from Marlboro ads. Since, Prince has explored appropriation as an accomplished painter through his Hood series. American Place, a paramount Hood, is a mail-order muscle-car hood, which Prince used as a three-dimensional canvas. Like the Cowboys, Prince’s Hoods represent Americana, but particularly draws on country’s love affair with the automobile, nostalgia for 1960s muscle cars, desire for speed and escape, as well as the lure of the open road. Prince transforms this ordinary car part, a distinctly American symbol, into the echelons of high art to investigate popular culture.
The Hood series, which Prince first began in the late 1980s, continues the artist’s earlier practice of repurposing pre-existing objects as he ventures into three-dimensionality. In his original series of cowboys, pulp-fiction covers, and celebrity headshots, Prince crops and photographs images from mass media, representing them as his own. Prince brilliantly fits Hoods into this appropriation strategy. The hoods are from muscle-cars, which are archetypal symbols of 1960s Americana, akin to the cowboy motif. Prince employed the car hood as a visual surrogate for the strength and torque contained in the engine beneath it. While the cowboy is an American symbol of the past, the car became an icon of America’s industrial strength and power in post-war culture, representing the zeitgeist of the generation. Many other appropriation artists focused on postmodern theories of authenticity and originality; however, Prince’s work reflects American culture through the distinct iconography of cowboys, bikes, lowbrow American humor and cars – giving the viewer a glimpse of the American dream.
After completing the Cowboy series in the early 1980s, Prince returned to Los Angeles in 1987 and began Hoods. For American Place, Prince ordered the car-hood from a magazine and painted its surface. The work is simultaneously a hard-edged Minimalist painting and a sculpture; it investigates the space between them as an assisted readymade, in the lineage of Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg's Bed. Prince painted contrasting fields of black and white monochrome, resembling Ellsworth Kelly’s masterful colored monochrome compositions, as well as Ad Reinhart’s and Brice Marden’s Minimalist paintings.
Three vertical black lines interrupt the polished darkness where the hood is raised, reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. While the Minimalist artists’ work looks handmade, Prince’s flat, banal and pristine Hoods resemble mass-produced commercial objects. Yet, American Place is also a sculpture and Prince celebrates the vehicle’s sculptural qualities. The three-dimensional angles cast shadows across the monochrome’s flatness, becoming an inherent part of the composition. Prince alters this large-scale icon of masculinity into an object of aesthetic sophistication.
Prince paints on actual muscle-car hoods, using them as three-dimensional canvases, wall-mounting them as painted reliefs and freestanding sculptures. The muscle-cars were advertised in hot-rod magazines, and in the back of the issues, the hoods were available by mail-order. The original hood models were made of steel, but were offered in fiberglass reproductions that resembled 1960s design. Prince fit these ready-made car hoods into his appropriation tactics, once remarking, “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: N. Spector, Richard Prince, New York, 2007, p. 43).
When Prince first began the series, he sent the hoods to automobile body shops to be finished with bonding, sanding and spray-painting with commercial slick auto colors. As he developed Hoods, Prince personalized the process by painting the catalogue-ready car parts by hand. When he mounted the works onto walls, the car part became a hand-painted abstract and allusive artwork. Rather than use the commercial finish on American Place, Prince applied layers of paint to create atmospheric effects that resembles a bright luminous moon rising up into a night sky. He mastered this effect using Bondo, a synthetic resin, as an aesthetic element to produce a shiny finish. Prince’s final work captivatingly reveals the artist’s hand and process in how it was made.
As a leading artist of the Pictures Generation, Prince examined codes of communication. He investigates how mass media and advertising images are not self-contained entities, but rather links in a chain of meaning. These meanings mediate our desires and experiences, as they reverberate culturally, socially and politically. American Place challenges us to look at the car hood not only as sculpture and painting, but what it actually is. The car associations push the viewer to recall vast landscapes unfolding toward an ever-elusive horizon line. Prince’s brilliant appropriation of a physical car part evokes romance, death, speed, youth and glamour - all that the symbol stood for in 1980s American popular culture.
The Hood series, which Prince first began in the late 1980s, continues the artist’s earlier practice of repurposing pre-existing objects as he ventures into three-dimensionality. In his original series of cowboys, pulp-fiction covers, and celebrity headshots, Prince crops and photographs images from mass media, representing them as his own. Prince brilliantly fits Hoods into this appropriation strategy. The hoods are from muscle-cars, which are archetypal symbols of 1960s Americana, akin to the cowboy motif. Prince employed the car hood as a visual surrogate for the strength and torque contained in the engine beneath it. While the cowboy is an American symbol of the past, the car became an icon of America’s industrial strength and power in post-war culture, representing the zeitgeist of the generation. Many other appropriation artists focused on postmodern theories of authenticity and originality; however, Prince’s work reflects American culture through the distinct iconography of cowboys, bikes, lowbrow American humor and cars – giving the viewer a glimpse of the American dream.
After completing the Cowboy series in the early 1980s, Prince returned to Los Angeles in 1987 and began Hoods. For American Place, Prince ordered the car-hood from a magazine and painted its surface. The work is simultaneously a hard-edged Minimalist painting and a sculpture; it investigates the space between them as an assisted readymade, in the lineage of Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg's Bed. Prince painted contrasting fields of black and white monochrome, resembling Ellsworth Kelly’s masterful colored monochrome compositions, as well as Ad Reinhart’s and Brice Marden’s Minimalist paintings.
Three vertical black lines interrupt the polished darkness where the hood is raised, reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. While the Minimalist artists’ work looks handmade, Prince’s flat, banal and pristine Hoods resemble mass-produced commercial objects. Yet, American Place is also a sculpture and Prince celebrates the vehicle’s sculptural qualities. The three-dimensional angles cast shadows across the monochrome’s flatness, becoming an inherent part of the composition. Prince alters this large-scale icon of masculinity into an object of aesthetic sophistication.
Prince paints on actual muscle-car hoods, using them as three-dimensional canvases, wall-mounting them as painted reliefs and freestanding sculptures. The muscle-cars were advertised in hot-rod magazines, and in the back of the issues, the hoods were available by mail-order. The original hood models were made of steel, but were offered in fiberglass reproductions that resembled 1960s design. Prince fit these ready-made car hoods into his appropriation tactics, once remarking, “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: N. Spector, Richard Prince, New York, 2007, p. 43).
When Prince first began the series, he sent the hoods to automobile body shops to be finished with bonding, sanding and spray-painting with commercial slick auto colors. As he developed Hoods, Prince personalized the process by painting the catalogue-ready car parts by hand. When he mounted the works onto walls, the car part became a hand-painted abstract and allusive artwork. Rather than use the commercial finish on American Place, Prince applied layers of paint to create atmospheric effects that resembles a bright luminous moon rising up into a night sky. He mastered this effect using Bondo, a synthetic resin, as an aesthetic element to produce a shiny finish. Prince’s final work captivatingly reveals the artist’s hand and process in how it was made.
As a leading artist of the Pictures Generation, Prince examined codes of communication. He investigates how mass media and advertising images are not self-contained entities, but rather links in a chain of meaning. These meanings mediate our desires and experiences, as they reverberate culturally, socially and politically. American Place challenges us to look at the car hood not only as sculpture and painting, but what it actually is. The car associations push the viewer to recall vast landscapes unfolding toward an ever-elusive horizon line. Prince’s brilliant appropriation of a physical car part evokes romance, death, speed, youth and glamour - all that the symbol stood for in 1980s American popular culture.