US-artist STEPHEN PRINA was one of the first to change conceptual art to object art. By HANS-JÜRGEN HAFNER
When people talk about the artistic work of Stephen Prina they usually mention the enormous variety of his forms, or, more precisely, the various media and types of presentation he uses. In
addition, it is rare not to refer – sometimes with a sigh – to the overwhelming wealth of references, direct quotations or indirect hints: the appropriation of his own or others’ material. At this point differently structured preferences for matters of form or for the provision of content become very quickly visible. When fans of the latter, for example, insist just how broad Prina’s frame of reference is, with his quotations from art and literature, Broodthaers and Böll, or from high and low art when the artist draws on Glenn Gould’s Beethoven recordings no less readily than the musical works of Steely Dan or Sonic Youth; when, perhaps, the visual codes of Nouvelle Vague cinema are tested or pop music is evaluated on the basis of the charts, or the
representation policies of a gallery’s operations are examined; when there seems to be hardly any difference between institutional critique and friendly acts of homage.
On the other hand, people who are more concerned with matters of form concentrate on the media techniques, the acts of transfer between painting and performance (to mention only two extreme positions), or emphasise the patterns and the design-like aspects of Prina’s work as well as his forms of display and presentation. The fact that it is really impossible to approach this artistic oeuvre with a simple formula, under development since the late 1970s, and that a more formal point of view and one focusing primarily on content are equally inappropriate was demonstrated unequivocally last autumn by the two exhibitions, The Second Sentence Of Everything I Read Is You in the Kunsthalle at Baden-Baden and Monochrome Painting in the Berlin showroom of the Haubrok Collection. Particularly in the juxtaposition of the two exhibitions is it possible to locate Stephen Prina’s approach and processes historically and also to discuss them in relation to younger artists, for whom the interplay of form and reference has a decisive role to play.
»…I ain’t n-n-no conceptual artist«
Oh, sure! One is immediately tempted to contradict, when one sees the above text on the wall in the last room of the Baden-Baden exhibition. What better word is there to describe Prina’s
approach than »conceptual«? When one has gone around the exhibition there is almost no other choice than to see its »form« as conceptual. The route one takes has clearly been designed very precisely. It includes all the visual media from photography through painting and drawing to graffiti, video and wall texts as well as different objects ranging from sculptures to functional objects. In addition, Prina is working here with a wide range of display patterns, from traditional hanging to space related installations, and it is not only the eponymous The Second Sentence Of Everything I Read Is You, a kind of mobile multimedia lounge in two versions with the subtitles The Queen Mary, 1979–2006 (2006) and SOMA Electronic Music Studios (2008), that comes, you might say, double. Other works in the retrospective show also refer to each other. In these cases Prina intervenes in part by hanging in already existent series of pictures or by supplementing them with additional acts of painting, for example in the case of Push comes to love (1996–2008) where spray painted elements made on the spot are incorporated. That can be seen directly only in part. The only way to open up another level is to check the hanging and the title labels, which are effective partly due to the installation relating to the exhibition space and partly as indices. For example: for the L.U.S.T. Installation (2008) four pictures from an existing series are brought together to make a new work in the current situation. The connection with the series is marked by gaps between the hangings.
In the way the works gesture beyond themselves and, at the same time, interact with each other, a positively curatorial approach of the artist to his materials can be seen. This leads to a change of parameters; our attention is re-directed from the individual works to the relationships between them, a temporary situation achieved using the materials from thirty years of work development.
The markedly more focused Berlin show suggests a slightly different rhythm. At first sight, it is
also dominated by the air of strictness, which is all too readily associated with the odour of the
conceptual: fourteen monochrome pictures in various forms are carefully hung with attention to the space and covered thickly with metallic green car paint, a wall painted totally in green with a wall text informing us of the title of the work complex, along with an invitation card, also hung, an exhibition poster and a publication on the project laid out in the office. But the presentation of Monochrome Painting (1988–1989) immediately shifts the accent. In this case, in fact, we do not lose ourselves in the offensively staged self-reference of an exhibition arrangement. Rather, an almost opposite effect seems to establish itself. After reading the title labels or the catalogue we quickly grasp the pattern of references, which Prina has provided conceptually for the work complex, for each of the monochromes relates in its dimensions precisely to the a model, each of them in turn a »monochrome« by a so-called classic of abstract painting: Kasimir Malevich, Yves Klein Ad Reinhardt, but also, amusingly, Gerhard Richter. But in this case, the set-up, which is presented both conceptually and formally as an »exhibition of paintings«, permits one to look beyond the set framework. The reference resulting from the appropriation of models directs surprisingly to the traditionally self-referential genre of »monochrome painting« confronting us with a series of implications that lead to general matters of dispute far beyond what the exhibition offers us visually. As a result, the relationship of all the factors comes into focus, which permits a concept such as the monochrome to appear as a particularly consistent development in the teleologically perceived development of modern painting (according to which the content and purpose of an artwork is exactly coincident with its means and form, or actually make the corresponding pattern of reception possible.)
But painting as a special case of artistic media also came into view as a result of Prina’s specific
manner of appropriation – as he presents it in great detail as a procedure from the choice of format through the industrial means of production to the titles of the individual pictures and further translates it in terms of media into the form of the catalogue. This is an invitation to examine, in general, painting as the medium that is usually accorded a special degree of directness and authenticity and is granted a special degree of originality. And, last but not least, we can ask ourselves whether and when and, in this case, how the pictures of this exhibition are indeed actual pictures, what we are actually seeing, in this case, and under what conditions we do so. Dirty Conceptual Art The late 1970s, when Prina was studying at the California Institute of the Arts with such Ur-Conceptualists as Michael Asher and Daniel Buren, were perceived by him as an »epistemic moment«: »For some, the project of conceptual art was very clear. It was going to lead to an unraveling and a systematic dismantling of art as we know it and all productive activity that has been associated with art would seamlessly merge with society at large.«
But the developments of that time – for one thing the beginning of such retro-phenomena as Neo-Expressionism and, for another, the emergence of Neo-Conceptual and simultaneously image and object oriented work processes such as Appropriation Art – show that the successes of Concept Art, which was often called the last avant-garde, by no means lead to the model of the dissolution of art into life itself, as described by Peter Bürger in his Theorie der Avantgarde. Instead of an art that negated its status as object and commodity, artistic practices realised either in specific
Spike Art Quarterly - No. 19 / Spring 2009 - Portrait Stephen Prina 26.09.12 18:22
http://www.spikeart.at/en/a/back/back/Portrait_Stephen_Prina Seite 3 von 4 processes or pure information, art returned, of all things, in the form of the object. In parallel to that, an unashamedly market-dominated art industry established itself.
Against the background of this scenario, Stephen Prina’s work acquires precise contours. The
continuance of conceptual procedures can be seen, for one thing, in a situation-specific and
explicitly intermedial manner of working, by taking on various roles and functions (as artist,
critic, curator, performer etc.) and, for another, in its chosen themes such as the relationality or designability of cultural sign systems or the discursiveness of meaning. On the other hand, the way he deals subjectively with media, displays, references and presentation contexts and treats them in technical-formal terms distinguishes him from the historical project of Concept Art with its aim of dematerialisation. In his case a reversion occurs: the art of ideas is re-materialised. Even though he is working under conceptual conditions, Prina practically makes his hands dirty again.
It is obviously rewarding to examine Prina’s »technique« now under conditions that have already become historical. In recent years we have seen ourselves more intensely confronted again by works whose source of interest was that they could assert their effect in particular through aesthetics, usually using work-immanent criteria. The new »Formalism«, however, goes along with a tendency towards uninhibited referentiality. There is hardly a work – whether by Markus Amm, Carol Bove, Wade Guyton, Goshka Macuga, Gedi Sibony or Katja Strunz – that does not use the assertion of references to go beyond the capital of its form.
While this topical »referentialism« is used to create authority in the notorious recourse to things already meaningful, Prina’s project questions meaning itself with a freedom established by formally concise means. In doing so it shows meaning as a mutual agreement to be therefore negotiable. Whether we wish to be party to this agreement is, thank God, not a matter of faith.
Translated by Nelson Wattie
HANS-JÜRGEN HAFNER is an art critic and curator.
STEPHEN PRINA, born 1954 in Galesburg (IL), USA. Lives in Cambridge (MA) und Los
Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include The Second Sentence of Everything I Read is You,
Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Sammlung Haubrok, Berlin (2008); The Second Sentence of Everything I Read is You: Mourning Sex, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne (2007); The Second Sentence of Everything I Read is You: The Queen Mary, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York (2006). Exhibition participations include Whitney Biennale, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yokohama Triennale, Japan (2008).