“I don’t see any difference between what I collect and what I make.”
—Richard Prince
Best known for his appropriated imagery, Richard Prince’s Untitled (0114), 2010, is no exception. A testament to his practice of collecting images and remaking them as his own, Untitled (0114) features a nude woman sitting upon a bike, facing away from the viewer. Black and white scribbles are juxtaposed atop this racy imagery, both intentionally obfuscating elements of the image such as the woman’s face, while revealing other elements such as her arms and back.
Prince was a key member of the Pictures Generation, a group of American artists who came of age in the early 1970s and who were known for their critical analysis of media culture and appropriation of images. This deconstruction of mass consumerism is particularly evident in Untitled (0114), which relates to Prince’s Cartoon series, begun in 1984, in which the artist repurposed illustrations from The New Yorker and Playboy Magazine, combining pre-existing images with his own graffiti-like overlaid drawings. It also contains visual similarities to Prince’s Cowboys and Girlfriends series, which featured an array of rephotographed vernacular snapshots from motorcycle culture magazines; specifically, the series depicted biker chicks and their boyfriends drinking, undressing, and suggestively posing on motorcycles. Untitled (0114) is thus a striking combination of Prince’s propensity for superimposed drawing with his reusage of commonplace imagery – specifically representations of women in mass media.
“His specialty is a carefully constructed hybrid that is also some kind of joke, charged by conflicting notions of high, low and lower,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith explains.i “His work disturbs, amuses and then splinters in the mind. It unsettles assumptions about art, originality and value, class and sexual difference and creativity.” In constructing hybrid images such as Untitled (0114), Prince continues to interrogate notions of originality, allowing him to remain one of the most innovative artists of the past 30 years.