It is hard not to be attracted to a work by Richard Prince but explaining why can prove more difficult. Fundamentally, the immediate attraction is about seeing something easily recognizable whether it’s an old ad for liquor or furniture, cigarette pushing cowboys, or other people’s girlfriends they are all images we can decipher, but few are ones that have any recognizable emotion invested in them. They are fundamentally mundane.
Like Duchamp and Warhol before him Prince is often playing a game in which the artist is able to take that which is not “art” and make it so simply by changing the intention. Prince makes an ordinary ad into an artwork by photographing it and re-contextualizing it, subverting its original intention for his own purpose. He carries on a continual taunting dialogue with an empty, consumer driven society by taking images from advertising, low brow special interest magazines, or disposable romance novels and recasting them as his own. Through this action we are made to confront the meaningless of our own production; as though he is saying “we cannot even make things that are our own, everything can be reproduced as another’s’ and become theirs” or even at an extreme “authorship is dead.”
Alongside this dialogue is the other important element to Prince’s work, underlying teenage boy prurience. So much of his work is imbued with this particular sexuality, one that seems adolescent in nature, not necessarily connected with sex acts but with the wink-wink-nudge-nudge of looking at a stolen dirty magazine, where the excitement is that the possibility exists or the inference of the possibility. It is not hard core porn or detailed sex acts; it is a “dirty” joke that alludes to sex or a cartoonish biker babe mooning at a rally.
In works that can be considered Nurses or more broadly grouped as works dealing with “nurses” that underlying sexiness is everywhere. The pretty nurses are always partly obscured, by uniforms, hats, masks or blood, while the titles are straight from book covers that are meant to get a housewife to make a quick supermarket decision to buy Nurse in Love or in this case Celebrity Suite Nurse (what could be more commercial? Celebrity—we all want to be one or sleep with one, Suite—fancy private clinic, Nurse—she has it all). Yet they are not overt enough to be embarrassing, again the sexiness is obscured and who knows how racy the stories are inside. Certainly the imagery implies that this nurse is doing more for her patients and doctors than setting out cups of aspirin.
Richard Prince conscripts us over and over because he plays with language and images that are so basic and straightforward that we cannot help but get the message. He then plays with that message and it takes on another meaning or multiple meanings and becomes other. We become part of his discourse, we are engaged with deciphering a deeper meaning within the simplicity, within the mundane, we cannot help it we are engaged.