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PICTURE SHOW
This page: Richard Prince. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. Photograph by Gordon M. Grant/The New York Times/Redux. Opposite: Richard Prince, Untitled (portrait), 2015, ink jet on canvas, 65.75 x 48.75 in. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s and The Karpidas Collection.
The Karpidas Collection investigates the enfant terrible of appropriation in an unprecedented show.
BY EVE HILL-AGNUS
Acowboy in a white hat on a horse fords a stream, reins in hand, cloaked in a rugged masculine mystique, stepping out of his Marlboro ad context, treading not so much through water as through the mythos of the American West. A grid of vintage publicity photos shows women preening, looking coyly over their shoulders out of the grid and toward us. An Instagram influencer’s portrait is reproduced and enlarged, her purple unicorn tresses wild, unruly, and tousled, with “likes” tallied and comments scrolling—including one by richardprince1234 (making an off-color, non-sequitur quip about Christ).
Such is the work of Richard Prince, enfant terrible of appropriation, who reminds us that all is images, but also that we are all vulnerable, exposed.
As a figure, Prince has loomed large in 20th-century art and has, over the course of his career, immortalized not so much himself or his subjects but cultural moments, by framing and invading a seductively private/public space.
In witty and incisive series ranging from the 1970s to today, his oeuvre creates uneasy, provocative slippages without mirrors or reckonings but instead purloined visual artifacts that force us to question What is real? What does it mean to borrow? And Where, in our constituted world, do we live in our myths?
The exhibition Richard Prince: Selections from The Karpidas Collection, which runs October 21 to January 29, 2023, at the Karpidas family’s private art space, highlights and gathers the works described above. What is most striking about the show is its completeness, spanning decades and most of the artist’s major bodies of work (more than 40 works in all), a sampling the likes of which is hard to imagine outside of what constitutes one of the largest and most comprehensive collections, private or public, of the artist’s work. It is also the first major solo show in Texas of Prince’s work.
A long-standing collector-artist relationship exists between Pauline Karpidas and Prince, who is one of the most deeply collected artists in the Karpidas holdings. The summer workshops that Karpidas held on the Greek island of Hydra, in collaboration with prominent London gallerist Sadie Coles, were the locus for the exhibition of Prince’s Publicity series in 2003 (which will also feature in Dallas). To see so much of his work together—including pieces that have never been shown in public—is a rare, precious glut.
“Prince forever changed what it means to make an original work of art,” says Sara Hignite, who manages The Karpidas Collection and organized the exhibition.
He was not alone. Born in 1949, Prince belonged to the loosely knit group of artists working primarily in New York’s East Village that became known as the Pictures Generation—rebellious, paradigm-smashing artists like Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman, whom Karpidas also collected. Fed by the wellsprings of postmodernism’s ironic stance toward originality and objective reality and influenced by the tenets of Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author, they mocked notions of universal truth, pioneered new methods of art making, and put forth
This page: Richard Prince, Untitled (watch and eyelashes), 1982, Ektacolor, 30 x 40 in. Photograph by Kevin Todora. Image courtesy of The Karpidas Collection. Opposite: Richard Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 1980–1984, Ektacolor photograph, ed. 1/2 + 1 AP, 60 x 40 in. Photograph by Kevin Todora. Image courtesy of The Karpidas Collection.
Above: Richard Prince, Washington Nurse, 2002, inkjet print and acrylic on canvas, 73 x 45 in. Photograph by Kevin Todora. Image courtesy of The Karpidas Collection. Left: Richard Prince, Good News, Bad News, 1988, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 75 x 58 in. Photograph by Kevin Todora. Image courtesy of The Karpidas Collection.
Richard Prince, Girlfriends, 1984–1985. Ektacolor photograph, ed. 2/2. 86 x 47 in. Photograph by Kevin Todora. Image courtesy of The Karpidas Collection. Cover of forthcoming exhibition catalogue, Richard Prince: Selections from The Karpidas Collection, edited by Sara Hignite and designed by Travis LaMothe. Image courtesy of The Karpidas Collection.
a radical, critical assessment of popular culture.
A particular mythology surrounds Prince’s own path. For a decade—a time he describes as akin to a J.G. Ballard dystopian novella—he worked in the tear-sheet department of Time Life. What was left after he had snipped articles from magazines for staff writers were the gleaming, glossy ads, which he isolated and captured again on film. He called them rephotographs. Laying bare artifice, they exposed the grid of our longings and aspirations, recontextualized by us, the viewer. Their filmy veils of luxury were both surface and abyss.
In an interview surrounding his solo 2007–08 exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York (Richard Prince: Spiritual America), Prince remarked that “making art is nothing more than a continuation.” He knew that in his rephotographs lived, arguably, no aesthetic risk. There was none of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.” And yet, that, to him, was new. Like Andy Warhol’s soup cans or Dada’s readymade urinals or bicycle wheels, he offered these artifacts that teetered on the brink of reality and artifice, blurring fact and fiction (and authorship) in a new hyperreality.
Since then, Prince has plumbed the cache of clichéd American tropes—pulp fiction, muscle cars—such that the exhibition is a froth: It erupts from his major series. And so there is the Marlboro cowboy, fording a stream, plucked out of our collective unconscious of nostalgic virility. In a painting from the Nurse series, a nurse in a surgical mask is held against the sinister, engulfing backdrop of a cheap pulp fiction cover. In a vast array of joke and cartoon paintings, Prince plunders the text of schlocky one-liners, leaving us both squirming and drawn in with false intimacy. Or there is also the extraordinary work, such as an extremely rare collaboration with fellow artist Christopher Wool (titled My Name, one of two pieces in 1988)—stark, stenciled words on metal which rumble with wry, sardonic irony.
We realize with a frisson we are staring at the Rolodex of our desires and fears. Or is this a Rorschach test of the American psyche?
Prince’s borrowings place him in the role of capturer or collector or curator more than original creator, an uneasy position that has drawn controversy. There have been lawsuits around authorship, and censure. Critics ask pointed questions. Is the work facile? Is it exploitative, stripping subjects of their agency? Is he not, in loading the pyre for the bonfire of the vanities, engaging in voyeurism?
But that blithe thieving and re-producing or reframing of (often uncomfortably) existing imagery, in a gallery context, Hignite sees as exactly how Prince is “able to make us think about American culture and societal issues without overtly critiquing or moralizing or being pedantic about it. In the same way, I don’t want to overexplain the works in the exhibition.” Prince’s genius, she says, is that “he trusts us to finish the job.”
Our collective banal, cliché tropes exist. The prince of appropriation makes us confront their likenesses, and we can either question or recoil. Drawing on its lush holdings, the Karpidas Collection has the luxury of—like Prince—stepping away and letting the chips fall where they may. We can look, or we can turn away. P
