Man

A provocative look at America

American artist Richard Prince (*1949) recycles found materials from American popular culture, most often images from advertisement and magazine photography which he re-photographs, silkscreens, overpaints, frames, enlarges, or arranges in collages, playing with their somehow empty meaning. Citation, détournement, appropriation: any possible treatment of these clichés is explored and played with.

Among his works the bare-breasted biker chicks posing provocatively on motorcycles with the cowboys of the Marlboro advertisement, incarnations of male fantasies and self-parodying icons of virility. The first of these were the subject of “Women,” the latter make up the core of this book, “Man.”

Conceived by the artist, this book gathers unpublished manuscripts, well-known as well as unshown works from his personal collection, erotic cartoons, fan’s photographs, photographs of “white trash” suburbs, and studio shots. Using gender differentiation as an ironic organization principle for a “self-organized retrospective,” the project comments as much on the perception of his own work, as on the popular material appropriated through it. Brilliantly laid-out and composed, the book is full of wit, humor, and surprising encounters.

Published on the occasion of Prince’s exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.