Richard Prince

Presented here with the major retrospective Richard Prince: Spiritual America concurrently showing at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Untitled (self-portrait) is the candid and revealing portrayal of the iconic artist whose reputation has ironically been built on querying the very value of the artist's presence. Richard Prince's simple brilliance was initially expressed by categorically undermining the most fundamental preconceptions of authorship and ownership by unashamedly appropriating found imagery. With the concept of rephotography - re-capturing images from magazines, newpapers, and advertisements and cropping them to render their original purpose useless - Prince ushered in a highly advanced post-modern polemic that forced the viewer totally to deconstruct the layers of manufactured reality residing in everyday iconography.

Prince initiated his rephotography in 1977, the historic effect of which is deftly summarized by Lisa Phillips: "With a click of the shutter these images were his - stolen, scavenged, appropriated, ready-made. The implications of this act, simple as it may seem, were enormous. In one swift motion, Prince cast doubt on basic assumptions about the authority of photographic images, the ownership of public images, the nature of invention, and the fixed, identifiable location of the author" (Lisa Phillips in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Richard Prince, 1992, p. 23). Prince himself later clarified his motives: "Most of what's passing for information right now is total fiction. I try to turn the lie back on itself" (Richard Prince in Kristine McKenna, "On Photography: Looking for Truth Between the Lies," Los Angeles Times, 19^th May 1985, p. 91).

Prince has used the found image to live out his various fantasies - from model to cowboy to salesman - and to interrogate the authenticity of masculinity. He has enrolled transvestism, androgyny and homoeroticism to undermine traditional perceptions of maleness. In this self-portrait in addition to a suit and tie, he is wearing eye makeup and lipstick. Characteristically employing the third person, in 1984 he wrote about features of identity crisis - themes of alienation and uncertainty - which pervade his epic canon, and are so intimately captured in the present work:

"And some of us would like to exchange parts with other people, keeping what we already like and jettisoning the things that we can't stand. Some people would like to try to change places, just for a day, with maybe someone they admired or even envied, to see what it would be like, to see if it would be what they'd always heard it would be" (Richard Prince, "Cowboys: The Perfect Tense", in Why I Go to the Movies Alone, New York 1983, p. 3).