Richard Prince

This leaflet was published on the occasion of the exhibition "Richard Prince: Blasting Mats" at Gladstone, New York in 2021.

 

Blasting mats are heavy-duty mats stitched together from pieces of car tire, devised to catch flyrock from controlled explosions. Fifteen years ago, Richard Prince started making work from disused blasting mats, suspending them from customized frames at his studio in Rensselaerville, New York. They hang, slumped and heavy, from metal I-beams, strung up like racks of meat. The blasting mats belong to a vocabulary of impoverished imagery, much like the abandoned cars, solitary basketball hoops, and makeshift tire planters found scattered across rural New York, which Prince started photographing when he relocated Upstate in 1996. They are precisely the kind of object for the taking—readymade, symbolic…fictional. Contained within them are the vestiges of consumerism and industry, and all their promises from the past. 

 

The artist’s further repurposing of auto parts conflates various junctures at which labor, lifestyle, and death are all, sometimes simultaneously, symbolized by the car. ‘The American dream has run out of gas,’ inferred J.G. Ballard, for whom the vehicle represented ‘the speed and violence of our age,’ back in the 1970s. The writer found the styling of the motor car—the American model in particular—to be the epitome of expectation at the time, offering a glimpse of the future, freedom, even an understanding of our very musculature. ‘These highly potent visual codes can be seen repeated in every aspect of the 20th Century landscape,’ he affirmed at a time when countercultural anti-heroes took to the road, and for whom speed meant freedom of the soul. Does such a vehicle of expression exist in the present age? 

 

Having trained his eye on discarded artifacts, or those that have become eviscerated from their own aspirational image, Prince’s blasting mats stand in as sculptural versions of the vanitas in still-life painting rendered in today’s vernacular—new symbols of inevitability culled from the American landscape. 

 

Published by Gladstone, 2021

 

Paperback (leaflet)
English
13.38 x 9 inches; 34 x 23 cm