The Cowboy Prince

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In fall of 2015, Richard Prince exhibited a sculpture titled Cowboy at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea in New York City, which was both predictable and surprising. Prince's long preoccupation with the cowboy image started with the work he produced in the 1980s while working in the tearsheets department of Time magazine. There he became attracted to the images used in Marlboro ads, which employed variations on the mythic, ruggedly handsome character to sell cigarettes. Prince rephotographed the ads with the skills of an amateur, cropping out the logo and ad copy and having them reprinted. That simple action removing the brand identity--stripped the image back to the mythic cowboy-in-landscape by separating it from its intended function. Rephotographing the advertisements began to reverse engineer the process of motivating consumption, focusing on the raw associations triggered by the cowboy image itself. Thereafter (this work continued through the 1990s) Prince's practice became synonymous with the Duchampian tradition of selection, alteration, and critique of authorship. It also aligned with other emerging artists of the time (including Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Sherrie Levine) who were exchanging found objects for found images, repurposing and dissecting a visual culture that had been built up around them for over half a century. Prince later made paintings of cowboys--reworked cover illustrations from cheap Western novels. They served as another forum for Prince to work out his cowboy infatuation--variations on the overdrawn male hero thing itself. Though they demonstrated his willingness to approach the subject with a different medium, the artist's interest in isolating and recontextualizing an existing mythology of images continued. In that sense it was not at all surprising to walk into the Gladstone Gallery and notice Prince's Cowboy--not a photograph or a painting of one, but a sculpture. It appears as a department store mannequin of a young boy, five to seven years old, in spotless buckaroo garb, much like something from an old Sears, Roebuck & Go. catalog. The vintage elements immediately feel like a cheeky resurrection of that early-to-mid-century American cowboy image so romanticized today. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It seems obvious that the cowboy character is one that our culture wants to preserve, even as its authenticity dissolves in the impressions made upon us from the Western genre itself. It is an image connected to the National Rifle Association's rhetoric of the guy with a gun, which seems awfully derivative of American Western fiction but also tied to horribly mutated realities (such as the armed vigilante who recently threatened a Muslim community in rural New York, (1) or the state of Texas legalizing open carry of loaded pistols, (2) or the lone gunman claiming to be a pro-life warrior who killed three people while injuring four others at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado, (3) or, as I write this, the armed militia that has occupied a federally owned building at a wildlife refuge in Oregon. (4)) Other blissfully ignored practices, such as Cowboys and Indians facing off' under Friday night lights, perpetuate a symbolic feud in the field of play, while posing real problems in the field of cultural representation (cf. the Washington Redskins). (5) Of course, there are more noble pursuits of the cowboy experience, like the documentary film Unbranded (directed by Phillip Baribeau, 2015), in which four Texas A&M graduates join the effort to save wild mustangs and embark on an extraordinary journey from Mexico to Canada on horseback. Projects like this aim to highlight more civilized ideas like good stewardship of land, livestock, and wildlife--contrasting trigger-happy rugged individualism with environmental awareness and social contribution. After studying the plywood pedestal on which Prince's Cowboy is placed, I realize that the entire piece is cast in bronze--including the pedestal. …