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拍品專文
“Prince’s appropriations of existing photographs are never merely copies of the already available. Instead, they extract a kind of photographic unconscious from the image, bringing to the fore suppressed truths about its meaning and its making.” Nancy Spector (N. Spector, in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 26).
Richard Prince’s Silhouette Cowboy celebrates the tradition of a mythical American hero, while at the same time questioning its meaning in contemporary society. Part of the artist’s iconic Cowboys series, this large-scale image is based on a well-known series of tobacco advertisements, but under Prince’s insightful manipulation, removes all references to the commercial brand and questions its true meaning in the process. A key member of the group of artists who became known as the Pictures Generation, Prince—along with the likes of Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari—became known for his critical analysis of American media culture, and his interrogation of the cowboy image became his most celebrated series, with many examples being held in major museum collections.
One of his most striking images, Silhouette Cowboy depicts the intense light cast by the setting sun as it silhouettes two cowboys corralling a group of horses down the mountain. While the outlines of the two men and their charges are distinguishable between the trees, they are almost completely overshadowed by the majestic beauty of the setting. The soaring peaks of the mountain range, the river that snakes across the valley floor, and the setting sun itself all dominate the composition, with the titular cowboys almost becoming subsumed by the landscape itself.
In Silhouette Cowboy, Prince combines two views of America that have become ingrained in the nation’s conscious. In the nineteenth century, the painters of the Hudson River School such as Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Cole, produced epic landscapes that espoused the manifest destiny that propelled many early pioneers to expand across North America taking democracy, Christianity, and capitalism with them. By the twentieth century, the cowboy had become a mythical all-American hero, a symbol of masculinity, triumph over adversity, and bravery perpetuated in both Hollywood movies and popular ‘Boys Own’ comic books. In the 1950s, this in turn was embraced by the Marlboro tobacco company as the epitome of rugged, individualistic hero, images which Prince would then appropriate in the present work. In contrast to the advertisements however, paintings such as Frederic Edwin Church’s Twilight “Short Arbiter ‘twixt Day and Night" (Sunset) (1850, Newark Museum) intimate the human control over the land as the illuminated settlers cottage on the brow of the hill in the foreground. In Prince’s iteration of the American West, the only human presence is subsumed by the majesty and beauty of the natural landscape itself.
With a work such as this, Prince challenges the power of imagery in contemporary society. By appropriating a pre-existing image and then re-photographing it to produce his own image, the artist questions the notion of authenticity and authorship. Art critic Jim Lewis theorizes that Prince’s works aren’t merely duplications of the original image, but shows how “the fiction, once it’s caught, fixed at last, and represented, reappears as real” (J. Lewis, Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 65). In its iteration as an advertisement, the image was a false representation of a fantastical land led by implausibly healthy, virile cowboys who smoked, where the ‘promise’ being advertised was that of decadent, fashionable consumption without consequence in a perversion of the original concept. Without this context, the work rekindles the suppressed projections of desire towards the American West in its glorified beauty while demonstrating, without rancor or censure, the simulated reality of modern life, which is subjected to so much psychological manipulation driven by our image obsessed society. As the curator of the artist’s critically acclaimed 2008 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York Nancy Spector notes, “Prince’s appropriations of existing photographs are never merely copies of the already available. Instead, they extract a kind of photographic unconscious from the image, bringing to the fore suppressed truths about its meaning and its making” (N. Spector, in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 26).
Richard Prince’s Silhouette Cowboy celebrates the tradition of a mythical American hero, while at the same time questioning its meaning in contemporary society. Part of the artist’s iconic Cowboys series, this large-scale image is based on a well-known series of tobacco advertisements, but under Prince’s insightful manipulation, removes all references to the commercial brand and questions its true meaning in the process. A key member of the group of artists who became known as the Pictures Generation, Prince—along with the likes of Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari—became known for his critical analysis of American media culture, and his interrogation of the cowboy image became his most celebrated series, with many examples being held in major museum collections.
One of his most striking images, Silhouette Cowboy depicts the intense light cast by the setting sun as it silhouettes two cowboys corralling a group of horses down the mountain. While the outlines of the two men and their charges are distinguishable between the trees, they are almost completely overshadowed by the majestic beauty of the setting. The soaring peaks of the mountain range, the river that snakes across the valley floor, and the setting sun itself all dominate the composition, with the titular cowboys almost becoming subsumed by the landscape itself.
In Silhouette Cowboy, Prince combines two views of America that have become ingrained in the nation’s conscious. In the nineteenth century, the painters of the Hudson River School such as Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Cole, produced epic landscapes that espoused the manifest destiny that propelled many early pioneers to expand across North America taking democracy, Christianity, and capitalism with them. By the twentieth century, the cowboy had become a mythical all-American hero, a symbol of masculinity, triumph over adversity, and bravery perpetuated in both Hollywood movies and popular ‘Boys Own’ comic books. In the 1950s, this in turn was embraced by the Marlboro tobacco company as the epitome of rugged, individualistic hero, images which Prince would then appropriate in the present work. In contrast to the advertisements however, paintings such as Frederic Edwin Church’s Twilight “Short Arbiter ‘twixt Day and Night" (Sunset) (1850, Newark Museum) intimate the human control over the land as the illuminated settlers cottage on the brow of the hill in the foreground. In Prince’s iteration of the American West, the only human presence is subsumed by the majesty and beauty of the natural landscape itself.
With a work such as this, Prince challenges the power of imagery in contemporary society. By appropriating a pre-existing image and then re-photographing it to produce his own image, the artist questions the notion of authenticity and authorship. Art critic Jim Lewis theorizes that Prince’s works aren’t merely duplications of the original image, but shows how “the fiction, once it’s caught, fixed at last, and represented, reappears as real” (J. Lewis, Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 65). In its iteration as an advertisement, the image was a false representation of a fantastical land led by implausibly healthy, virile cowboys who smoked, where the ‘promise’ being advertised was that of decadent, fashionable consumption without consequence in a perversion of the original concept. Without this context, the work rekindles the suppressed projections of desire towards the American West in its glorified beauty while demonstrating, without rancor or censure, the simulated reality of modern life, which is subjected to so much psychological manipulation driven by our image obsessed society. As the curator of the artist’s critically acclaimed 2008 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York Nancy Spector notes, “Prince’s appropriations of existing photographs are never merely copies of the already available. Instead, they extract a kind of photographic unconscious from the image, bringing to the fore suppressed truths about its meaning and its making” (N. Spector, in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 26).