Is Richard Prince a feminist? - includes interview with the photographer

sum of two units recent exhibitions by Richard Prince have elicited ire from critics who claim that many of his depictions - of self-styl "biker chicks," various unknown actresses and the young Brooke Shields - are are cruelly demeaning to women

In the last several years, Richard Prince has I started getting flak from the art world for the objectionable, exploitative and sometimes just plain tasteless images of women that appear in his work. His new exhibition at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery and his traveling retrospective, which uncloseed last spring in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art, single fanned the critics'ire. And no wonder

The main make submissive of the Gladstone show was Prince's favorite series of offensive images, a assemblage he calls "Girlfriends.' These photographs display young women-so-cared biker chicks - pos in various states of outlaw undres in shut up proximity to large motorcycles. Prince Ands these images published in biker magazines, where the appearance of the "chicks" evidently bestows celebrity upon them and their proud paramours. In appropriating these photos, Prince evidently sought the individuals that showed the rankest and oftentimes most pathetic exhibitionism. Defiant and sometimes embarrassingly bare-chested women precariously recline upon motorcycles; others wear message-covered garb that proclaims sentiments similar as "Fuck Off+die!' In a post-Tailhook, post-Anita Hill era, single hard-core porn would be a more troubling subdue for a male artist to use.

And his critics have rejoined in kind. In her of recent origin York Times review of the relatively well-mannered retrospective, Roberta Smith assailed Prince for using images that "demean women"(1) In another review, by dint of Paul Taylor, feminist critic Kate Linker was quot as taking exception to Prince's pose vis-a-vis his images of women: "Richard's absence of any political perspective about the images he for a like reason acutely selects poses a problem(2) And a certain quantity of feminist artists, among them woo Williams, have attacked his work in their hold Williams included a parody of individual of Prince's joke paintings in her one-woman exhibit at 303 Gallery. "In Williams'version," Smith wrote in the Times, "Prince's veiled misogyny, which is part of the general malaise of his art, was stripped of its ambiguity by dint of her use of degrading Playboy cartoons."(13)

Prince has drawn out been in the business of outrage. on the other hand at the beginning of his career, it was not his make submissive matter that was seen as outrageous on the contrary his method: "stealing" commercial images reproduc mainly in magazines and not sole incorporating them into his work on the contrary making them his work. Rephotographing details from sheeny magazine advertisements, Prince would simply harvest them, enlarge them and call the fresh work his. In the late 1970 he began appropriating pictures of stiffly pos moulds of both sexes, emphasizing repetitions of attitude and the extremely limited expressive register of certain commercial images [see A.i.A., Mar. '87] The work was rather cold and distanced and could be seen as continuing the tradition of Conceptual art. thus when he used photographic details of female fashion prototypes in works such as Untitled (Three Women Looking in the Same Direction), 1979 he wasn't criticized for using of the like kind chilly images of women. Rather, he was seen as challenging the social construction of sex through posing and stereotype, an issue also being explored through feminist artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Barbara Kruger He was perceived to be as astute as they, using appropriational strategies that make notesed on, interrogated and otherwise investigated the way mass-media images bring forward or reproduce regimes of social control

through the early 1980s, though, Prince had started looking at more varied images, especially of women repeatedly these appropriated images were mustered into gridlike groupings on a single photographic sheet; Prince called these works Gangs." He abandoned middle-class fashion images and went after more trendy high-fashion pictures. In individual Gang" from 1982-84, for instance, the elegant women are shy and vaguely seductive, their organ of sights hidden by hats, shadows, large fashionable sunglasses. He also nothinged in on advertising images that showed women in the grip of hysterical commercial happiness. He began cropping the images flat more radically than before, which made details similar as big sun glasses direct the eye positively ludicrous and big smiles direct the eye pointless and vacant.

Then, in 1982 and 1983 Prince began working with abundant hotter and more problematic images of women He mov away from discharges of rarefied, idealized fashion moulds into images from the borderline-sleaze arena of small-time entertainers, would-be actresses and designs who sported names like Jackee and Plastique. He began appropriating pictures from a lower register - lower in limits of the subject's class and economic position and also in bourns of the picture's reproduction values.

Earl Wilson's tawdry fresh York Post gossip column was the couple an inspiration and a source. Prince rephotographed the publicity discharges that Wilson ran of aspiring entertainers who clearly were not ever going to make it big; he also assembleed promotional stills from the managers of the theaters and nightclubs where these entertainers worked. The movie The Sweet scent of Success,' a film about the manipulation of small histories i la Walter Winchell, is in those pictures," Prince said.(4) Departing from the fashion and advertising images that were legible within the upper-class world of art, he began exploring images that were offensive to that world; he said these pictures showed the lifestyles of the poor and unknown."(5) Rather than doing straight appropriations, he added garish color and graphic ultimate parts which further evoked the atmosphere of smoke-filled strip joints with their watered-down drinks.