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拍品专文
“It was the perfect thing to paint... Primed. Flaked. Stripped. Bondo-ed. Lacquered. Nine coats. Sprayed. Numbered. Advertised on. Raced. Fucking Steve McQueened.
- Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s American Dream is a superb example of the artist’s exploration of the automobile in American culture and a striking continuation of his work as a member of the Pictures Generation. Emerging in the 1970s and 1980s with other artists including Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, the Pictures Generation worked with the margins of American sub-culture and visual debris, often directly appropriating images from advertisements, entertainment, and consumer culture in order to critique ideas of authenticity, ownership, and identity. Prince’s work has continually referenced quintessentially American culture through the distinct iconography of cowboys, bikes, lowbrow American humor and cars – asking viewers to reflect upon the visualization of American identity proliferated through the media. While his work involves direct appropriation from a variety of sources, Prince has found a way to make each piece uniquely his own, adding his aura to each work of art.
American Dream stems from the artist’s Hood series, a project he began in the late 1980s after his famous Cowboy series. For Cowboy, the artist re-photographed and painted over images of cowboys originally created for Marlboro advertisements. Deceptively simple in process, the final images invoke and interrogate the idealized vision of the American West that the glorified images in the advertisements proliferated. The Hood series continues this earlier practice of appropriating materials while allowing Prince to venture into three-dimensionality. For this sculptural exploration, Prince ordered fiberglass car hoods from hot-rod magazines and transformed them into the echelon of high art. He painted directly onto the car parts that arrived to his studio, treating them as three-dimensional canvases and using both typical painterly materials as well as industrial materials like Bondo, which gave the hoods a glossy shine. The hoods, as well as the icon of the automobile in American culture, have continued to fascinate Prince and he has expanded upon the series for decades. 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). They have become a central aspect of his oeuvre and notably, many works from the Hood series were included in the artist’s comprehensive retrospective at the Guggenheim museum in 2007.
Like all of the Prince’s work, American Dream pays homage to Duchamp, yet the work embeds references to other artists and movements as well. The use of a pre-fabricated part, rehabilitated and embellished by Prince recalls other assisted readymades including Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed. However, unlike the gestural and expressive paint splattered on Bed, Prince’s treatment of American Dream with simple colors and straight lines recalls the hard-edge Minimalist paintings of Ellsworth Kelly or Barnett Newman. Through this, Prince has inserted his hood into the history of art, further emphasizing the transformation of the object from car part to fine art.
Unquestionably, the hood retains and recalls its relationship to Americana, particularly drawing on the country’s love affair with the automobile, nostalgia for 1960s muscle cars, and the desire for speed and escape. The title of the example presented here, further suggests the ways in which the automobile has been engrained into the idea of the American dream, tied to the idea of mobility and cruising down a wide open road with unobstructed, sweeping vistas. Prince’s brilliant appropriation of a physical car hood, a visual surrogate for the power of the engine that would lie beneath it, evokes romance, death, speed, youth and glamour – all that the symbol stands for in American popular culture. Prince has created a final object that asks viewers to reexamine and question not only what can be considered a work of art, but also the complex role of the automobile has played in the construction of American identity.
- Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s American Dream is a superb example of the artist’s exploration of the automobile in American culture and a striking continuation of his work as a member of the Pictures Generation. Emerging in the 1970s and 1980s with other artists including Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, the Pictures Generation worked with the margins of American sub-culture and visual debris, often directly appropriating images from advertisements, entertainment, and consumer culture in order to critique ideas of authenticity, ownership, and identity. Prince’s work has continually referenced quintessentially American culture through the distinct iconography of cowboys, bikes, lowbrow American humor and cars – asking viewers to reflect upon the visualization of American identity proliferated through the media. While his work involves direct appropriation from a variety of sources, Prince has found a way to make each piece uniquely his own, adding his aura to each work of art.
American Dream stems from the artist’s Hood series, a project he began in the late 1980s after his famous Cowboy series. For Cowboy, the artist re-photographed and painted over images of cowboys originally created for Marlboro advertisements. Deceptively simple in process, the final images invoke and interrogate the idealized vision of the American West that the glorified images in the advertisements proliferated. The Hood series continues this earlier practice of appropriating materials while allowing Prince to venture into three-dimensionality. For this sculptural exploration, Prince ordered fiberglass car hoods from hot-rod magazines and transformed them into the echelon of high art. He painted directly onto the car parts that arrived to his studio, treating them as three-dimensional canvases and using both typical painterly materials as well as industrial materials like Bondo, which gave the hoods a glossy shine. The hoods, as well as the icon of the automobile in American culture, have continued to fascinate Prince and he has expanded upon the series for decades. 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). They have become a central aspect of his oeuvre and notably, many works from the Hood series were included in the artist’s comprehensive retrospective at the Guggenheim museum in 2007.
Like all of the Prince’s work, American Dream pays homage to Duchamp, yet the work embeds references to other artists and movements as well. The use of a pre-fabricated part, rehabilitated and embellished by Prince recalls other assisted readymades including Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed. However, unlike the gestural and expressive paint splattered on Bed, Prince’s treatment of American Dream with simple colors and straight lines recalls the hard-edge Minimalist paintings of Ellsworth Kelly or Barnett Newman. Through this, Prince has inserted his hood into the history of art, further emphasizing the transformation of the object from car part to fine art.
Unquestionably, the hood retains and recalls its relationship to Americana, particularly drawing on the country’s love affair with the automobile, nostalgia for 1960s muscle cars, and the desire for speed and escape. The title of the example presented here, further suggests the ways in which the automobile has been engrained into the idea of the American dream, tied to the idea of mobility and cruising down a wide open road with unobstructed, sweeping vistas. Prince’s brilliant appropriation of a physical car hood, a visual surrogate for the power of the engine that would lie beneath it, evokes romance, death, speed, youth and glamour – all that the symbol stands for in American popular culture. Prince has created a final object that asks viewers to reexamine and question not only what can be considered a work of art, but also the complex role of the automobile has played in the construction of American identity.