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Prince himself has led a double life at times, disseminating spurious interviews, fudging his biography, even exhibiting curtains of Budweiser cans under the name John Dogg. Other biographical snippets are revealed in the recent "Check Paintings," such as the 12-foot-wide My Life Story, which features the artist's own bank checks behind huge block letters spelling out gags, including "I collect rare photographs. I got one where Norman Rockwell is beating up a child." These works dovetail with Prince's collecting mania: He's a serious bibliophile, and he also acquires the signed, cancelled checks and other celebrity memorabilia found in his "Publicity" collages. In one, he juxtaposes a banal shot of Woodstock against a drumhead signed by the Velvet Underground (a band that wouldn't have been caught dead at any hippie lovefest); his witty wrongheadedness chimes a sweet minor chord amid our cultural cacophony.
But in the large "White Paintings," some of which mix bland line drawings with boxing photos in warmed-over Rauschenberg-like layers, or in his flabby de Kooning knockoffs—which feature beaver shots grafted onto the master's flourishes of flesh—it becomes evident that Prince is at his best when performing Pop-cult surgery rather than stitching together high-art Frankensteins. Or, looked at another way, Prince is only as good as his swipe file (those clippings of figurative poses, facial expressions, props, and vehicles that illustrators stockpile for inspiration). In his muscle-car sculptures, for instance, he zeroes in on the smoothly erupting hood scoops and sleekly indented curves, caressing them with body filler and minimalist gradations of color to achieve a tactile, high-octane sensuality. But despite the catalog's breathless assertion that he's making "outlaw art" because of his image "piracy," there aren't any startling transgressions here.
Still, if you want Prince to be a hood, fair enough. So was Fonzie.
eyeball tree house
shtick frame
via jz