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拍品專文
A solitary, singular taciturn figure stands in slight contrapposto against the immense, horizonless space of the white-walled gallery. Lone and independent, Untitled (Cowboy) is the first fully figurative sculpture to emerge out of Richard Prince’s celebrated practice, standing alone in the midst of Prince’s renowned body of work as the most complete version of the cowboy figures which pervade the artist’s oeuvre and have profoundly influenced our society’s view of itself. Presenting as the culmination of a certain American mythology, deeply integrated into Prince’s previous practice, Untitled (Cowboy) reverberates with multi-latitudinal referents, articulating one of the most recognizable symbols of American mythology while simultaneously traversing a classicizing art historical tradition originating in the bronze Kouros statues of Greek antiquity and running through to Renaissance notions of individuality and republican liberty. Most profoundly, Untitled (Cowboy) is an autobiographical self-portrait, a deeply personal metamorphosis turning the artist into a manifestation of his own most important symbol.
The story of Untitled (Cowboy)’s origin has a quasi-mythological tenor which matches the work’s sublime import. On the occasion of his sixty-second birthday, Noel Grunwaldt, Prince’s partner, gifted the artist a toy mannequin of a boy costumed in the guise of a cowboy. “It surprised me at first, made me physically move when I first walked in on it,” Prince described of his first encounter with the gift (R. Prince, quoted in H. M. Sheets and R. Kennedy, “A Different Cowboy for Richard Prince,” New York Times, 25 September 2015, p. C22). The iconic symbolism deeply affected the artist, who spent the next two years making slight alterations to the mannequin. Slightly adjusting the boy’s posture and position, reshaping the placement of his arms, and replacing the little cowboy’s effects—a new hat, shining new boots, and a double holster with two guns—Prince slowly reworked this gift like Ovid’s Pygmalion into his ideal image.
Growing so attached to his new Galatea, Prince cast the mannequin in bronze in an edition of three with two artists proofs. Each of these five sculptures has a unique colorway expressed through the cowboy’s shirt – the present work being orange and the others blue, green, gray and red, the last of which one resides in Glenstone’s collection. Prince’s final intervention was the innovative construction of the work’s base. Prince first explored the possibilities of plywood in constructing the work’s pedestal. “Plywood was the ticket,” Prince explains. “It took another second to think about casting the plywood and painting the cast to look like plywood. Bronze plywood. That did it” (R. Prince, quoted in ibid.). This final metamorphosis—of wood into bronze appropriating the image of wood—evokes the aesthetic of the Hollywood Western, appealing to the plywood set constructions built to render the desolate outposts of the Wild West. In the pedestal’s mimesis, appearing to be what it is not, the work even more fully ascribes to the conceptual conceit of a stage set as an appropriated vision of an ideal.
While radically innovative in conceptual terms, Untitled (Cowboy) simultaneously evokes and emerges from the classical tradition of free-standing male sculptures. Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini revived the tradition of the heroic solitary male nude as a protective symbol of republican liberty. Untitled (Cowboy) stands at the precipice of action, immortally poised between potentiality and action as his left hand grazes the grip of his revolver while staring off with a determined yet detached look at whatever threat lies in his path. In this pose, the work recalls Michelangelo’s David, who is similarly engaged between action and inaction, his sling still slung over his shoulder. David, the patron saint of Florence and the symbol of its republican liberty, stands ready to protect that which he embodies. So too does Untitled (Cowboy) appear. “Clad in the iconography of individualism, his claim to future adulthood is holstered but ready for the draw. He is America” (ibid.).
While he is America embodied, Untitled (Cowboy) is also Richard Prince. The cowboy was Prince’s earliest muse and first motif, encapsulating everything which his creative practice would come to achieve. Labeled by Time Magazine as one of the top 100 most influential images of all time, Prince’s cowboy represented an idealized figure of American masculinity, appropriated from the classic Marlboro Man advertisements. With this image, Nancy Spector writes, “Prince mapped his own desires and fears, forcing a confrontation with himself, however mutable and difficult to pin down that self may be” (N. Spector, “Nowhere Man,” in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 52). Prince’s return to this motif in three-dimensional form as a mature artist reenacts his initial self-exploration, rendering in bronze a portrait of both himself and American society.
When the legendary gallerist Barbara Gladstone first laid eyes on Untitled (Cowboy), she was transfixed. “I thought it was so magic—so improbable and yet logical” (B. Gladstone, quoted in H. M. Sheets and R. Kennedy, op. cit., p. C22). She honored the work with a one-work exhibition at her gallery in 2015. The sculpture has become an integral fixture of Richard Prince in the public imagination, tying together in a compelling denouement all the strands of his previous practice to present a ravishing self-portrait which simultaneously reflects its American context. “Not just a person, he’s an impersonation: a meta-person or reverberation in which the harmonics of figurative and abstract strike a near-perfect cord” (N. Wakefield, op. cit., n.p.).
The story of Untitled (Cowboy)’s origin has a quasi-mythological tenor which matches the work’s sublime import. On the occasion of his sixty-second birthday, Noel Grunwaldt, Prince’s partner, gifted the artist a toy mannequin of a boy costumed in the guise of a cowboy. “It surprised me at first, made me physically move when I first walked in on it,” Prince described of his first encounter with the gift (R. Prince, quoted in H. M. Sheets and R. Kennedy, “A Different Cowboy for Richard Prince,” New York Times, 25 September 2015, p. C22). The iconic symbolism deeply affected the artist, who spent the next two years making slight alterations to the mannequin. Slightly adjusting the boy’s posture and position, reshaping the placement of his arms, and replacing the little cowboy’s effects—a new hat, shining new boots, and a double holster with two guns—Prince slowly reworked this gift like Ovid’s Pygmalion into his ideal image.
Growing so attached to his new Galatea, Prince cast the mannequin in bronze in an edition of three with two artists proofs. Each of these five sculptures has a unique colorway expressed through the cowboy’s shirt – the present work being orange and the others blue, green, gray and red, the last of which one resides in Glenstone’s collection. Prince’s final intervention was the innovative construction of the work’s base. Prince first explored the possibilities of plywood in constructing the work’s pedestal. “Plywood was the ticket,” Prince explains. “It took another second to think about casting the plywood and painting the cast to look like plywood. Bronze plywood. That did it” (R. Prince, quoted in ibid.). This final metamorphosis—of wood into bronze appropriating the image of wood—evokes the aesthetic of the Hollywood Western, appealing to the plywood set constructions built to render the desolate outposts of the Wild West. In the pedestal’s mimesis, appearing to be what it is not, the work even more fully ascribes to the conceptual conceit of a stage set as an appropriated vision of an ideal.
While radically innovative in conceptual terms, Untitled (Cowboy) simultaneously evokes and emerges from the classical tradition of free-standing male sculptures. Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini revived the tradition of the heroic solitary male nude as a protective symbol of republican liberty. Untitled (Cowboy) stands at the precipice of action, immortally poised between potentiality and action as his left hand grazes the grip of his revolver while staring off with a determined yet detached look at whatever threat lies in his path. In this pose, the work recalls Michelangelo’s David, who is similarly engaged between action and inaction, his sling still slung over his shoulder. David, the patron saint of Florence and the symbol of its republican liberty, stands ready to protect that which he embodies. So too does Untitled (Cowboy) appear. “Clad in the iconography of individualism, his claim to future adulthood is holstered but ready for the draw. He is America” (ibid.).
While he is America embodied, Untitled (Cowboy) is also Richard Prince. The cowboy was Prince’s earliest muse and first motif, encapsulating everything which his creative practice would come to achieve. Labeled by Time Magazine as one of the top 100 most influential images of all time, Prince’s cowboy represented an idealized figure of American masculinity, appropriated from the classic Marlboro Man advertisements. With this image, Nancy Spector writes, “Prince mapped his own desires and fears, forcing a confrontation with himself, however mutable and difficult to pin down that self may be” (N. Spector, “Nowhere Man,” in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 52). Prince’s return to this motif in three-dimensional form as a mature artist reenacts his initial self-exploration, rendering in bronze a portrait of both himself and American society.
When the legendary gallerist Barbara Gladstone first laid eyes on Untitled (Cowboy), she was transfixed. “I thought it was so magic—so improbable and yet logical” (B. Gladstone, quoted in H. M. Sheets and R. Kennedy, op. cit., p. C22). She honored the work with a one-work exhibition at her gallery in 2015. The sculpture has become an integral fixture of Richard Prince in the public imagination, tying together in a compelling denouement all the strands of his previous practice to present a ravishing self-portrait which simultaneously reflects its American context. “Not just a person, he’s an impersonation: a meta-person or reverberation in which the harmonics of figurative and abstract strike a near-perfect cord” (N. Wakefield, op. cit., n.p.).