New exhibit at the Guggenheim
From September 28 to January 9, the Guggenheim Museum is showing an exhibit called Richard Prince Spiritual America. I went to see this exhibit over the Columbus Day weekend and found this artist’s work very interesting. Richard Prince’s career began when he moved to New York as a young man in 1977 and it has flourished ever since. Prince could be considered one of the post modern artists who have transformed the art world in the past 30 years by transforming what it is that the audience believes to be art. The style that is shown is provocative and thought provoking. The quality that made this exhibit at the Guggenheim unique was Prince’s style of appropriation in portraying everyday images and the jokes that he used as art in the exhibit.
The style that Richard Prince pioneered is called appropriation. This process involved taking material that already existed and making it a work of art that could be presented to an audience. What Prince began doing was cutting out pictures from magazines, then taking a photograph of them, enlarging them significantly and presenting them as a work of art. This style can be considered distinctly post-modern and could even be seen in some people’s eyes as stealing. What I found most interesting about this work was the topics that were used. Most of Prince’s early work was based on images taken from popular culture making them all the more powerful since we could better relate to his message. In other pieces Prince tried to convey a message of what was wrong with American culture and a general sense of rebellion since Prince himself was a child of the sixties. He made two large collections called Cowboys and Girlfriends in which he tried to show the hypocrisy behind the gender roles that society forces upon us.
One section that I found really odd upon first examination was the joke and cartoons section. This section basically was short jokes or just cartoons with an accompanying joke, enlarged and placed on a large background of a single color. The topics of these jokes were often crude like sex or booze. As it turns out Prince began to make these cartoons by hand-copying cartoons from the New York Times and Playboy magazine. In a different context these jokes would have been found disturbing but here they mean to serve as entertainment. Through these provocative and sometimes radical jokes, Prince pushed political correctness to the side in trying to portray the society that we live in today.
Whenever I was previously exposed to modern art, what I usually saw was a jumbled up picture with many different colors that had some meaning when examined more closely. In this sense this exhibit in the Guggenheim was very different. Prince took objects that already existed in the real world and made them art. None of the pieces had titles, since the simplicity of the things he portrayed made that not necessary. The audio player provided by the museum was very helpful because instead of telling us what was in the picture (this we could see on our own) it explained to us the rational that went into the artist’s mind when he composed a certain piece. The whole experience proved to be quick, only 1.5 hours, and well worth the train ride. I would recommend this exhibit at the Guggenheim to all art lovers including especially those who as of yet don’t understand modern art.