Late last year, artist Richard Prince's rephotographed print of a Marlboro cigarette ad featuring the brand's iconic American cowboy became the first photo to break the million-dollar mark at auction. "Untitled (Cowboy)" from 1989, which exists in two Ektacolor prints plus an artist's proof, was pricetagged $1,248,000 at the hammer (including buyer's premium).
I read somewhere that the auction where "Untitled (Cowboy)" fetched this supersized price was unusually heavy on American bidders, nearly 80 percent. Given the combination of said artwork's subject matter, its record-setting price, and the tangled historical circumstances in the U.S. of A. concurrent with the photo's sale, "Untitled (Cowboy)" is not just a great artwork selling for fat bucks, it's also a doozy of a cultural bellwether.
Prince again and again has rephotographed advertising's depictions of square-jawed male virility and slutty female sexual availability. While these images have a surface attractiveness and are admittedly sort of reassuring, the physical groundedness and "when-the-men-was-mens-and-the-womens-was-womens" cetainties of these ads was being assailed from every direction when Prince began his rephotography project in the late 1970s.
By now the uncertainties behind images--advertising and artwork alike--are as taken for granted as the perfection and desirability of the models and products used to be by consumers who made the Marlboro Man one of America's most recognizable icons (eclipsing even Uncle Sam in some instances as the object of Ugly-American ridicule.) Perplexing as it may seem, Prince's rephoto-ed photo has become as certain, as American, as iconic, as the banished and formerly-iconic tobacco shill Prince managed to recapture, reinterpret, and eventually outlast.
In this light Richard Prince's rephotography of American icons might have created a "splint" to keep things upright during a sort of post-Vietnam phallic crisis. Prince's subject matter still frequently includes bikers, many of whom were Vietnam vets, and their "old ladies." These American "outlaws" and Western cowboys now look out from their photos of photos much as nineteenth century ghosts hovered in "spirit photos" over the shoulders of the bereaved living. It might not have been clear right away what Prince was up to back in the 70s and 80s, but man, does he look right now that the old hierarchies and gender cliches are nothing but faded photos of photos and senile referents for some of our more unimaginative political speechmakers.
Where America's (arguably) most famous Marlboro cowboy billboard stood for years and years looking out over the Sunset Strip here in Los Angeles (top), there is now an iPod ad featuring the shapely silhouette of a woman. Here at the collision of America's two broadest fantasy-thoroughfares, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, in place of the individual cowboy travelling the physically extroverted frontier is now a hot pink billboard with an inward-looking, technology-entranced woman raising her arms above her head in a 21st century benediction scored to the digital music of your choice. Cultural bellwether indeed. Call this chapter The Rest Of The West.
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