RICHARD PRINCE
May 22 - June 4, 2000
 
 

 
 
With works by Franz West, John Baldessari and Dorit Margreiter the Secession started a project, that gathers artistic statements by Austrian as well as international artists commenting the political situation in Austria. (Open letter to the Austrian president by the board of the Secession). The project has now been on for three months, and is being continued with a work by Richard Prince.
 
From as early as 1975 onwards Richard Prince used photographs and texts which he combined in collages. Around this time, Prince also worked for the magazine Time-Life, collecting press clippings and grouping them according to focal topics for the magazine's editors. In 1977 he began photographing advertising visuals, or using 'texts from the public domain', the first one being "Eleven Conversations", a text he actually had published a year earlier: alleged quotes by Elvis Presley printed on the reverse of chewing-gum wrappers. With the use of 'public domain material', images and text, Prince introduced into his work a method he has largely maintained, albeit with variations. With the help of these 'ready-mades', he questions their genuineness and authenticity, and examines whether, being in public space, they might be perhaps part of a shared language we all understand. And he also questions the role of authorship: where and who is the author?
 


 
 
Prince called the way in which his art took the pictures/texts out of their original context and the fact that the pictures often repeat the same motif "social science-fiction": normal and uncanny, public and private, fact and fiction - the clear distinction ceases to exist in Richard Prince's works. Prince has used jokes since the mid-eighties, hand-written and with related drawings at first, jokes that are confronting us with themes such as sexual identity, class and race as well as social acceptance. In 1987 he started experimenting with silk-screen prints in this context, eventually arriving at large monochromatic canvases with a single joke in silk-screen print on it. In spite of further developments in terms of form, Prince continues to be obsessed with American humour, its style, its attitude towards sex, races and social classes. For the Secessionbillboard project Prince, who on the occasion of his exhibition at the MAK had visited Vienna recently, has chosen one of these jokes out of his repertoire specifically for this project in Austria. Like the advertising visuals, the jokes also represent a part of low culture, of which the lack of authorship, the anonymity of the inventor is specially characteristic. (Prince also calls himself as an artist "almost me".).
 
Each project will be on view on the right-hand wing of the front façade for two weeks, and will be documented and included in a final publication. This project is entirely funded by private individuals, and should run for half a year.  

Further artists et.al.: Monica Bonvicini, Louise Bourgeois, Marcus Geiger, Renée Green, Joseph Kosuth, Milica Tomic, Werner Reiterer, Heimo Zobernig.
 
 
For updated information please contact Matthias Herrmann, Sylvie Liska and Eleonora Louis at the Vienna Secession on +43- 1- 587 53 07.