Richard Prince: the coolest artist alive

Richard Prince hijacked an American myth by re-photographing a Marlboro cigarette advertisement. Richard Dorment reviews his new show at the Serpentine.

Though it isn’t immediately obvious when you look at his work, the American artist Richard Prince has built up a hugely successful career by elaborating and refining ideas first explored by Andy Warhol. Take, for example, one of Prince’s best-known works, the 1989 Ektacolor photo of a cowboy galloping under blue skies across a wide open plain with a lariat in one hand, horse and rider caught in the split second before they thunder out of the camera’s range.

If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you’d take the picture to be a defining image of the spirit of the American West, with all that implies about tough-guy machismo, personal freedom, and God’s own country.

In fact, what Prince did was to “re-photograph” an advertisement for Marlboro Lights, but removed the picture of the cigarette pack, the advertising copy (“The spirit of Marlboro in a low tar cigarette”), and the Surgeon General’s health warning.

With a click of a button, then, Prince magically created an original artwork out of an existing photo taken by somebody else. By then blowing the photo up to gallery size, he makes us see both how carefully staged and how stunningly beautiful the original image was – something impossible to appreciate when flipping through the pages of a magazine.

This is more or less what Warhol had done when he paid tribute to the genius of the anonymous graphic designers responsible for the red, white and blue Brillo box by making a copy so exact that, if you were to put the real thing next to the imitation, you couldn’t see any difference. But in both the Warhol and the Prince, the apparent similarities between the original and the reproduction are deceptive. They are actually poles apart, because the viewer asks different questions about a work made by an artist than we do about one made by a commercial designer or photographer.

And so, Prince’s doctored photo isn’t about the West or even about selling you something: it is about how the advertising industry has hijacked an American myth (the cowboy legend created by the dime novel and Hollywood) to sell cigarettes.

It dispels the illusion that the original was intended to create, because anyone sophisticated enough to go to an art gallery to see it wouldn’t believe a single thing about it – that it shows a real scene, that it features a real cowboy, that the West is now, or ever was, really like that. In fact, nowadays the image would probably make us think of the original Marlboro men who died of lung cancer, or even of the film Brokeback Mountain. Prince’s point, I think, is that a photograph isn’t static; its meaning isn’t fixed but changes with time, the context in which it is seen, and the experience the viewer brings to it.

As a general rule, American art tends to be about America. Warhol affectionately paid tribute to aspects of American popular culture so familiar to Americans themselves that they’d become invisible, by painting the sort of advertisements found not in classy periodicals but on matchbook covers and in the back pages of pulp magazines such as True Detective.

Once again, this is exactly the kind of Americana Prince makes his own, in the paintings where he simply prints the words of unfunny jokes that only Borscht Belt comedians used to tell (“I told my mother-in-law my house is your house. Last week she sold it”). When he appropriates the covers of cheap paperback fiction, he picks medical romances featuring beautiful nurses – another American archetype, the female equivalent of the men in his cowboy series.

As with the Marlboro adverts, Prince simply buys the original from a commercial illustrator, then alters the composition by painting out extraneous figures and putting a white surgical mask over the nurse’s face.

Prince is the coolest artist alive, and he knows it, the art world’s own John Waters. His pictures are so detached, sophisticated and knowing, they all but wink at you. Whether he works with readymade material such as the photos of topless women he finds in the contact pages of biker magazines, or takes his own photographs of the post-industrial landscape where he lives in upstate New York, he does for white-trash and trailer-park culture exactly what Warhol did for the culture of celebrity.

Of course, all artists are influenced by their predecessors, and Warhol himself built on the work of the Ash Can School, Stuart Davis and Gerald Murphy. But Prince is so close a disciple of Warhol’s that when trying to assess his work the question arises of how much value we assign to originality. In fact, it’s a very Richard Prince question, since much of the work is about authenticity.

But I’m going to give a very un-Richard Prince answer.

I like his work a lot, but I think originality does matter. Beside a giant like Warhol, he’s a minor artist in the same way as salon Cubists can be wonderful on their own but look minor beside Picasso. And when Warhol’s influence isn’t there, as in the series of painted fibreglass car bonnets mounted on plywood supports, the work is much less interesting.