With the twilight of Bruce Nauman — who defined American conceptual rigor for nearly three decades — the mantle now falls to Richard Prince and Paul McCarthy. One on the East Coast, the other on the West, they are the reigning artists of our age.
Prince’s latest exhibition, Posters, arrives in Marfa at an odd moment in his career: months after his high-profile copyright controversies over his New Portraits series — in which he appropriated Instagram photographs without permission and faced legal consequences — and just shy of his 76th birthday. Now, with Posters, he appears in West Texas with a body of work that is a startling spectacle to say the least.
At Hetzler | Marfa, Prince reportedly exhibits large-scale canvases and works on paper sourced from the back pages of 1960s and ’70s counterculture magazines. Anti-war slogans, psychedelic pin-ups, surrealist erotica, and garage-sale graphics are taped off, blown up, and reframed as painting. A request for further clarification from the gallery went unanswered. In the end, this art critic was left staring at an image of an image, passed off as a painting, with no clarification offered — a strange task, reviewing an appropriation from a digital approximation of another apparent digital appropriation.
So here I am, writing about art I haven’t seen, which will be viewed by people looking at things equally unseen — but supposedly was actually seen by thousands at the time. Then Prince comes along, and well … The perfect Prince scenario, isn’t it? In fact, one of the images from the press release appears to show the scanner bed still at the bottom of the image. Prince DIY?
Untitled (2016), one of the more riotous works in the show, exemplifies Prince’s talent for re-examining throwaway imagery from the past and present. A blown-up facsimile of a mail-order poster titled She Comes in Colors (with a second, Come Together, advertised just below), the piece turns low-grade pulp erotica into a monumental object of … ummm … I’m not exactly certain. But the pixelated double-take does curdle if you look long and hard enough: What Prince is apparently repurposing is no longer 21 x 36 inches. It is no longer $1.98. She is no longer coming — she’s long gone. The couple are no longer together either — if they ever were the following day — and, as far as wood, well, the price of a piece of board is no longer a buck. “Things have changed,” as Bob Dylan says.
Prince has earned his place in the canon, not because he repeats himself endlessly like most of his peers, but because he has the rare ability to work with the age –– to grasp and go with the flow. What Prince and McCarthy also share is a refusal to retreat from difficulty. Moreover, like Picasso in his heyday, Prince and McCarthy are perhaps the greatest living contemporary art historians of our age. One would only wish that fixed-critics like Hal Foster could summon the same backbone. Watching them reflect upon art on YouTube should be mandatory for any aspirational artist or art enthusiast.
We all need to thank Prince too for his Twitter/X and Instagram accounts, which in their active times were a sight to behold. Indeed, Prince’s recent book, New Paintings, 2022 Fulton Ryder, is perhaps the most forward-thinking, candid and critically astute art or art history book of the 21st century. A must have! Wow now baby! Besides, it answers one of contemporary art’s most pressing and enduring questions of the past three or four decades — the one first posed by the Guerrilla Girls back in 1989: Do women have to be naked to exhibit in an art gallery? According to all the evidence provided by Prince’s beautiful book, the answer is right in plain sight: Sure, why not?
Heck, the art made by most of Prince’s gorgeous and vibrant alternative “art” influencers is just as good – in many cases much better – than the safe, stale, early-mid-late-career race and gender work currently being cycled through white-walled mausoleums by legacy dealers pretending it’s progress.
Richard Prince’s Posters runs May 17 through December 7 at Hetzler | Marfa, 1976 Antelope Hills Road. Hours are Thursday through Sunday noon to 6 p.m. and by appointment. An opening will be held on Saturday, May 17, from 5 to 7 p.m.
LG Williams is a Los Angeles–based artist who has held positions including Endowed University Instructor at the Academy of Art University, Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-in-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, California, and Emmy Hennings Distinguished Professor at D(D).DDDD University. Williams has exhibited his work in various national and international venues, including the Internet Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia. His art has been featured in prominent publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Japan Times, Los Angeles Times, La Stampa, Bookforum, Purple Diary, Mousse Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others.