Neville Wakefield

Stand-up Comedy and The Horizontal Sublime by Neville Wakefield
The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the 20th Century Roth Horowitz, LLC / PPP Editions, 2001
ISBN: 978-0967077444

Adult Comedy Action Drama was published in 1995. And in ways not yet fully realized, Richard Prince’s contribution to photographic literacy may be the most significant of the past few decades. Just when photography seemed to be publishing itself into arcane senility or relegated to the snapshot orphanages of a fashionably dirty realism, along came a book of cadenced novelistic density that was all things—high art and pulp fiction, studio process and bound object—rolled into one. It changed the rules of photography as well as bookmaking.

Delivered without exegetical apology, Prince asserted the viability of his particular way of masterminding visual language and literary form. It established the textless, curated, photographic book as a virtual norm. In short, Adult Comedy Action Drama proved to be everything the title promised and more.

 Although Prince has instigated a reconsideration of photography, he uses it only in the most nominal sense; “practicing” as he puts it, “without a license.” As a result, rarely

is anything ever quite as it seems. When traditional genres of photography appear to surface within his oeuvre they do so in cartoon drag. Everything is subject to this double entendre that makes writing about Prince-the-photographer something like trying to explain a bad joke. Part of it is the way you tell it, but in the end the theater of recitation is just a sideshow to the lines—lines of separation segregating those in the know from those who are not.

Photography of this sort maintains its own vigil against the threat of interpretation—a vigil of complicity and knowingness born of work that flatters us with the idea that we too are cognoscenti and that what we know goes without saying. But in truth, these images are so quietly and carefully achieved that talk seems almost irrelevant. And even while Prince’s transformation of B-grade Pop iconography into serious photographs is subtle and seamless, it is only when assembled into grammatical form that each image becomes art inevitably and almost inadvertently.

Of course Prince takes his literature in the same way as his jokes—which is to say seriously. Amongst the prismatic fracture of cowboys, girlfriends, death bunnies, crotches, and paintings, books abound. Like the paintings that are seen tilted against studio walls, stacked on top of one another and recycled like redundant theatrical props, these apparently casual arrangements of books suggest a set of artistic leanings that play to the metaform of the drama in question. As picture books go, Prince’s may be the first alliterative novel of the twentieth century. Not only does it take its literature seriously, but it takes it literally, showing it as a succession of covers amidst other more alternative lifestyle arrangements.

After all, there can be few images more feral and glamorous, not to mention literate, than that of three different biographies of Albert Einstein parked in a chair overlooked by a can of Dirt-Fighter one-coat interior latex.

Words in their graphic and bound form are the underwriting of the action comedy that unfurls. But it’s precisely his attuned sense of the undercover that demands that we should judge the interior by the exterior, the book by its cover. With a flair for the twists and turns of reductive expansion worthy of Jorge Luis Borges, he forces us to consider the book as library, as a function of knowledge, whose ultimate meaning is born not of content but of proximity to like forms. In this world, modern love may be a stack of books bearing titles such as: Strange Thirsts; The Passions of Zane Hunter; Lesbian Ways; Mom, My Lover; Nurses and Anal Love; The Chick-A-Bang Swap; ‘Someone You May Know’; Male and Female: Five Lifestyles. Next to the panopoly of sexual esoterica is placed another lifestyle image: this one a Prince installation made in L.A. Here the literary digestion of sexual appetites moves seamlessly into the heartburn packaging of junk foods—Saltines, Cracker Jacks, Trisquits, Posh Corn, Cheeze-Its, etc.—pasted to cupboard doors either side of a brand-name cleansing appliance. 

Like his paintings, these are photographs to be read on the move. They function as road signs, which caption movement by providing directions to destinations other than their own. Adult Comedy Action Drama may be the first road book to traverse America in ways that go beyond the terrestrial asphalt-bound sociologies of Robert Frank or Danny Lyons. And the spiritual America it describes is one where possibility in motion has given way to the heartthrob longing of fetishized stasis.

Prince’s landscape inclinations follow the history of postwar American abstraction from the drama of Jackson Pollock’s expansive splatters through the evacuation of Barnett Newman’s liturgical sublime and on into the prosaic beyond. What is out there may just be the monochrome stillness of the car hoods. Presented as paintings, Prince’s hoods came replete with the mythology of the Last Action Painting Hero for whom the car wreck has become the American way of death par excellence. Equally, what is out there may be nothing more than a joke, albeit a painted joke that literally makes a joke of painting. Either way, the hood paintings as much as the joke paintings become templates for the kind of absence that fools and myths rush to fill. What we once looked over we are now asked to look at. The hoods that appear in the photographs of car shows and swap meets are also pictured as Prince’s own art— muscle horizons unburdened by limitations of body or chassis.

Propped against the studio wall their obdurate hoodlum machismo suggests a sculptural equivalence to the outlaws, gangs, and frontiersmen that populate other parts of the book. Hung on gallery walls the primers, Hemi oranges, and Petty blues slow the eye down forcing it to adjust to the general lack of incident and to focus on the possibility of a beyond. Raised above monochrome fields, the sight lines of dorsal ridges escort the eye into landscape, just as the raised snorkels of air-grabbers and shaker hoods suggest the inhalation of its breath. Vision is anchored to nothing more than the vestigial topography of speed, a topography that is literally Bondoed onto the surface stillness of postaction, postheroic American painting. Artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria may have taken Pollack’s “I am nature” edict out of the studio to write the same gestures on the canvas of the American West.

But another art action of the ‘70s was going on elsewhere under the cover of banality, in the studio garages and backyards where everyday gearheads tweaked and test drove assembly-line paintings.

Prince recognizes the performance in this kind of painting, acknowledging it through his attentiveness to racing stripes, which along with their leaner pin-striped cousins,

transformed the image of speed as they did painting. They are the fetish of movement: one- liners that lend their sense of action-comedy to banality and boredom. One dark image of a rain-drenched hood shows a bold white stripe as it deteriorates towards the condition dribble. What may have originated as Detroit’s unwitting homage to Newman’s modernist “zip” appears to have trickled down from the upper reaches of culture to flow back into the deltas of garage vernacular. Fluffed by notions of the transcendental sublime, Newman’s vertical passages of paint came to be read as firmaments connecting the shortcomings of secular existence to a greater being. Where that stripe is now headed is suggested by the paintings that form a large part of the textual content of the Adult Comedy Action Drama. Flipped in axis, the stairway to heaven is rewritten as the road to nowhere—a freeway of the subconscious streamed according to the mock-heroics of alcoholics, adulterers, and traveling salesmen.

Only this, the closed-caption humor of the jokes, relieves the tedium of the landscape genre. Like the title sequences of the classic road movies such as Antonioni’s Vanishing Point, Prince’s words might be drawn across the line between two moving cars. The movie opens with  a long tracking shot of a solitary white car ripping along endless horizons of land and sky. From the other side of this division a wailing cop car screams by in the opposite direction.

The two vehicles pass into freeze-frame, blurring the headlong rush into an attenuated space of near collision. Written across the abstracted space of this velocity are the title credits: the eponymous vanishing point of a hierarchical culture built according to the laws of verticality. Prince’s joke paintings carry with them the suggestion of a similar challenge.

Pulled between the comic forces of the outlaw trying to outrun himself and the superego of an established authority, the lanes of text become their own kind of pictorial content. They run through the book, advertising only themselves and pinning their vacancy signs on the promise of comic relief.

Somewhere along the way, the images attending these roadside captions have also lost their plot. The book’s invitation derives not from the decisive moments and auteurist longings of traditional photography but to the relentless repetition and constant recycling of mythological fiction. Like Kowalski in his white challenger, they run on empty through the beer-soaked party vistas and chromed machismo and on to the sobering desolation of the spaces in between. And more than the bravado of Prince’s latter-day outlaws and stand-up comic paintings it is those spaces that the book most poignantly describes. It’s the hi-lo country where the inaccessible has been made accessible, where fiction, documentary, appropriation, and authorship blend into a perfect photographic hand played face-up-down-and-dirty all at the same time. Prince has little time for the niceties of photographic decorum. Having shot the photography sheriff the practice becomes its own vehicle—a road trip taken in a driverless car aspiring to the condition of artless art.

In America Andy Warhol extolled the virtues of a soft drink democracy. “You can see a billboard for Tab” he wrote, and think: Nancy Reagan drinks Tab, Gloria Vanderbilt drinks Tab, Jackie Onassis drinks Tab, Katherine Hepburn drinks Tab, and just think you can drink Tab too. Tab is Tab and no matter how rich you are, you can’t get a better one than the one the homeless woman on the corner is drinking. All Tabs are just the same. And all Tabs are good. Nancy Reagan knows it, Gloria Vanderbilt knows it, Jackie Onassis knows it, Katherine Hepburn knows it, the bag lady knows it and you know it.

In many ways the same is true of photography, particularly the kind that interests Prince, the kind that packages product and lends mythic address to our desire for it. Photographs are the Tab’s of the new image republic: everyone takes them and everyone can take a good one precisely because they don’t have to take their own. By intermingling his own photography with the alien familiarity of images hijacked from books and magazines, Prince calls attention to the way in which his own images seem just as alluringly authorless as his appropriations.

The pedigree of these images is always in question, but, interestingly, nowhere more so than when they are posing as authentic photography. Even the kind of plein air documentary realism that takes us in and out of backyard scenes, where the promise of leisure comes entangled in nightmare greenery, seems as mannered in its psychotic banality as the biker mama exposing her tits to the camera or the priapic marvels of Captain America. In his refusal to separate his own work from the greater continent of imagery, Prince asserts himself as a kind of editor par excellence: asserting the paradox of a king in a popular republic.

Revoking the laws of photographic ascendancy Prince ghostwrites his way through a reported world, creating fictionalized landscapes that are both unutterably familiar and compellingly strange. After all, where else could Sid Vicious and the great rock and roll swindle meet Larry Clark’s Tulsa? Where else could the Lone Cyprus on the California coast—reputedly the most photographed tree in the world—come face to face with a small ad for Dick Landy’s 1970 Challenger—reputedly the personal property of the legendary Dodge drag-racing star? The answer is only between covers such as these, where the stories we tell ourselves in order to live have already been told and photographed many times before. Out of these indecisive moments we are asked only to alliterate our lives through adjacency, literally to take the spread and go with the flow. In the swap meet of Prince’s imagery what was first presented as intimacy and seduction must now be repossessed as idea; such that the fantasy of “the girl next door” and the photograph next door may truly be one and the same thing.

Taking the camera from the inside world of advertising into the great outdoors of the rural hinterlands, Prince continues to smudge the distinctions that once made his own appropriations seem so distinctly artificial. The pictures that he takes outside he often shoots on tungsten film as if nature itself needs the color correction of artificial light. “They had that sent- away-for look. The virtuoso real. The whiter shade of pale. Their fiction seemed to be terrifyingly beautiful,” Prince said of the advertising images.

Twenty years previously, Robert Smithson commented on the Ballardian irreality of the photographs that he was taking in the Jersey wastelands: “Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and river into an overexposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph.” And even when Prince invokes the specifics of place-Unfinished “House,” Rte 405 Selkirk NY—it appears at one remove, a nonsite. In the cold blue light of these photographs the makeshift architecture of storage facilities, above-ground pools, peeling backboards, dog kennels, tire planters, and tree houses seems as distant, untouchable and ultimately spiritualized as the prepubescent form of Brooke Shields rising from the Dante-esque oils of Pretty Baby.

Here in the economic backwaters, the promises of youth and perfection are already listing and hungover. Perched above garage doors or standing alone in the dereliction of overgrown yards, the solitary hoops have come full circle to target only the unattainability of their original goals.

From somewhere else in the country and in the book comes an image of a line drawing showing a man and a woman on a park bench, his arm drawn around hers. “I’ve never felt such an absence of pain” reads the caption. For these sophisticated urbanites, sandwiched amidst the body shops, dog kennels, and other flora and fauna of rural blight, Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy may be just that. It’s true that the psychoarchitecture of upstate is one of desperate yearning and heroic failure. Modernism with all its perfect circles and habitable squares may indeed have become the action comedy drama of subcontraction and do-it-your-selfers. In this, the spiritual America of the book, transcendence comes not of immaculate conception but of hubris—a production-line Challenger running with the Gods.

Prince’s editorial collage invokes social encounter. It uses the roadkill of high art forms to pass us through abstraction and back into common experience. One traverses its condensations and gestures to arrive on the other side, amid the outlaws and in-laws of a culture only he can define. In moving between these two poles—the natural and the mythic—Prince has become for some people the greatest abstract artist alive, and for others not an abstract artist at all. What may be taking place in Prince’s photographic essays is something akin to the functioning of another visual media. According to George W. S Trow: “The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it.” And so in Adult Comedy Action Drama we have a book that’s perfect in its imperfections that could have been made by anyone, yet couldn’t have been made by anyone else.