Is Richard Prince a feminist? - includes interview with the photographer

Art in America, Nov, 1993 by Carol Squiers, Brian Wallis

Those unknowns' are the same people who appear throughout Prince's fiction writing, some of which was reprinted in the Whitney catalogue. They are the progeny of an ersatz underworld populated by bottle blondes and fast-talking tough guys who usually end up in cheap hotel rooms, or dead, or both. Vaguely imitative of B-movies from the 1940s and '50s, this stylized context is one that Prince and his generation relished in TV reruns and that Cindy Sherman tapped for her early "Film Stills." Intoxicating and highly artificial, that construct generated the baby boomer's idea of sex and danger as primarily voyeuristic, visually appealing but best viewed at a safe distance. Oddly, Prince seemed to desire a more intimate relationship to this world where women consciously participate in their own exploitation.

Exploitation and sleaze were magnified a hundredfold in Prince's work in 1983, when he debuted what is still his most controversial and disturbing work: Spiritual America, a rephotographed image of actress Brooke Shields at the age of 10, in the nude, originally taken by a commercial photographer named Garry Gross. Prince found the picture in a small booklet published by the Playboy Press, in which Gross reproduced images of Shields in various guises, as innocent girl-child on the one hand and seductive woman-child on the other. Prince first exhibited his version in a storefront gallery he had opened for the purpose, which was also caned Spiritual America.(6)

Shortly after Prince discovered the Brooke Shields image he learned that the photographer was in the process of selling it to a company that manufactured posters. The company's plan was to market it in a limited edition of 1,000 posters that would sell for $1,000 apiece. Prince decided to make his appropriated Brooke Shields in an edition of 1,000 and sell it for $999. It would be considered an "original" work of art and would sell for one dollar less than the poster. When the owners of the poster company got wind of Prince's scheme, they showed up at Spiritual America with their lawyer, threatening legal action.

Just what occurred after that is unclear, although Brooke Shields and her manager/mother Teri also got into the act at some point, trying to suppress Gross's pictures completely. After years in court, the Shieldses lost their case when Gross produced a model release for the photo session with Brooke that was signed by her mother, thus rendering legal his use of the pictures. Because Shields was a minor, the model release stipulated that a responsible adult had given her consent for Shields to pose for the photographs, and that the photographer could use the pictures in certain prescribed ways, which included publishing them.(7)

The title of Prince's new work and his name for the gallery were as appropriated as the image itself. Spiritual America is the title of a 1923 image by Alfred Stieglitz; the Stieglitz photograph shows the midsection and castrated genitals of a carriage horse. That his title should have been borrowed by Prince for this cheesecake photo and money-making scheme would have outraged Stieglitz. He believed in the importance and purity of high culture and struggled to position photography alongside painting and sculpture as an equally elevated art form. Spiritual America was one of Stieglitz's most self-consciously political statements, a protest from a champion of virile, modernist, European-based culture against the small-minded chauvinism and cultural paucity of backwater America. For Stieglitz, the gelded horse's sexual lack symbolized America's cultural impotence.(8)