Talking about others to talk about oneself is a well-known strategy in the art world. This is precisely what Jonathan Monk does, using the master Richard Prince, a group of young artists and, to round off the quote, Prince himself, the genius from Minnesota.
Jonathan Monk is an artist that is easy to classify. His work presents the most varied formats and the most diverse appearances (abstract paintings, documentary photographs, texts that set appointments for the near future, objects that reproduce parts of his own body as a unit of measurement, indicators with the opening hours of an art gallery or slide projections that “animate” minimalist proposals, among others), but his discourse is clear: he analyzes the referents of art from an ironic perspective anchored in the present. His objective is also clear: to demystify art and the creative process, to take it down from its pedestal and question the idea of artistic authority. His strategy: in a chameleon-like manner, he appropriates ideas and images, revises them and proposes their reinterpretation from irony.
Far from being an outsider in the art system, Jonathan Monk’s career is widely recognised, he is a regular on the lists of artists at international biennials, he is represented or collaborates with more than half a dozen international galleries (and, consequently, his diverse presence is sometimes excessive at international art fairs). And, of course, he also curates exhibitions.
“Richard Prince and the Revolution” is an exhibition curated by Jonathan Monk, in which he uses an intelligent strategy that consists of talking about others in order, in essence, to talk about oneself or to generate situations of meaning. Looking at other examples of artists who have acted in a similar way, we find Franz West. In 2007, West started the “Hammsterwheel” project with Urs Fischer, which brought together a series of works related to an idea of ”carnivalisation” of art, humour, low technology and a certain dirtiness, that is, some of the characteristics that define West’s own work. The exhibition that was shown at Le Primtemps de Setembre in Montpellier, the Santa Mònica Art Centre and the 52nd edition of the Venice Biennale, grew and adapted itself, including and refining works in a rhizomatic way, based on criteria of friendship, closeness or empathy between the artists.
Other cases: in November 2007, at the Palais de Tokyo, Ugo Rondinone curated an exhibition in which he included artists present in his collection. In September 2008, François Curlet brought together twenty artists in an exhibition entitled “Curiosität” in which the everyday was the “leitmotiv” of both the selected works and Curlet’s discursive interests. Antonio Ortega (also present at Curlet’s exhibition) had worked in the same direction in 2002 with “Antonio Ortega and the Contestants”, in which he transformed his solo exhibition at The Showroom in London into a collective show in which he invited five artists who had recently graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona to participate. With this proposal, he intended to highlight the dynamics of production in art, by mimicking the promotional strategies of other areas of pop culture, while exploring the notions of authorship and the hierarchical and competitive nature of the art world. And also, last but not least, he established himself as a reference for a younger generation of artists.
Another possibility is to talk about another in order to talk about oneself, but not looking to the future but rather looking for recognised references and as a strategy of legitimation. In October 2004, after receiving the Hugo Boss Prize in 2002, exhibiting at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and while consolidating his presence in the North American art scene, Pierre Huyghe wrote an article entitled “Garden party” in the magazine Artforum, in which he analysed Andy Warhol’s works and his ways of producing, in relation to capitalism and consumer society, but in which he mainly emphasised the idea of The Factory as a place of production of myths and relationships rather than objects. By defining The Factory as a relational place, Huyghe establishes a genealogy that links him directly to Andy Warhol, or in other words, he says: “Andy Warhol and I”.
In “Richard Prince and the Revolution”, Jonathan Monk does both Ortega and Huyghe. It is legitimised by an unquestionable reference, while incorporating younger artists (some of them his students) for whom he himself is a reference. And what is Monk’s reference? None other than the king of appropriation, Richard Prince, the artist who in 1975 began to work with collages of photographs and since then has not stopped making “rephotographs”, that is, photographing the work of others, taking advertising images from which he removes slogans and brands, as is the case of the Marlboro cowboys, or incorporating easy and popular jokes into his works, as a strategy to show the subconscious of the American collective conscience, while, from the irony and subversion of the messages, questioning the notions of authorship, authenticity and copyright.
It is not the first time that the names of Jonathan Monk and Richard Prince come together in the same project. In 2006, at the Mezzanin gallery in Vienna, the exhibition “Jonathan Monk, Richard Prince” established a dialogue between the works of both artists. A relationship that Monk does not hesitate to take up again now to emphasize the genealogy that links him directly to Richard Prince, an artist who is also highly valued (remember that “Untitled (Cowboy)” broke a record at an auction at Christie’s New York in 2005 when it was sold for a million dollars), a type of recognition that Monk does not turn his nose up at. But Monk also adds another link to the chain by incorporating Pierre Bismuth, an artist of almost the same generation as Monk (Bismuth was born in 1963 and Monk in 1969), with a long career and interested in analyzing and deconstructing models of perception and destabilizing reading codes. In the exhibition at ProjecteSD, Bismuth is well represented with a work in the purest Prince style, consisting of two women’s fashion magazines whose fragmented and transversal reading of the headlines gives the piece its name: “Don’t Date After Apartheid”.
Thus, in “Richard Prince and the Revolution”, Prince’s work is revisited or cited by a dozen artists who underline certain characteristic features of the North American artist. We highlight some of them: Anne Collier and Matthew Higgs refer to Prince’s passion for books when photographing the book “I Married An Artist”, the autobiography of a woman who married a renowned Canadian artist. The reference finds echoes in the personal life of Collier and Higgs, also a couple. Scott Myles focuses on the re-photography and re-creation of advertising images and presents a double self-portrait accompanied by a small reference photograph: two almost identical photographs in which a close-up of the artist appears hide a great difference in the “making of”, since while in one of them the artist poses in front of a fragment of a Marlboro billboard on which Monument Valley is identified, the other was taken in the original location. The small reference photograph shows the Marlboro billboard in Scotland. Isabell Heimerdingen revisits an old work, dated 1999, which alludes to Prince’s Cowboys works. Heimerdingen cut out Marlboro advertisements from magazines and removed, disguising them with paint, all those elements that were not part of the landscape, from cigarette packs to the cowboys themselves, thus returning the horses to their natural and wild environment. Dan Rees takes Prince’s “Girlfriends” works (erotic photographs of girls) and transforms them into “80 girlfriends in 2007”, in which he shows a series of images of the artist’s friends and acquaintances during 2007 in 80 slides. Rees’ reference in this case is not only Prince, but also Ed Ruscha and “Five 1955 Girlfriends” (1969), a work published in the catalogue of the exhibition “Konzeption-Conception” at the Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen in which Ruscha incorporated portraits of his friends at school in Oklahoma.
And, since books have always been a strong part of Prince’s career (an exhaustive selection is presented in ProjecteSD), Jonathan Monk’s contribution is completed with the publication of an artist’s book, “Studio Visit”, in which Monk opens up his studio to us, that is, a multitude of images that for one reason or another the artist points out, collects and compiles.
There is no doubt that there is a clear connection between the works of Prince and Monk, but we also find differences. Prince is a collector of art, furniture, books, images and references, he needs to appropriate things to make things evident, he uses mimicry to say something completely different, which in his case is very specific: what is hidden behind the so-called “American identity”. Monk, for his part, would surely agree with Vito Acconci’s answer to a question about the definition of his practice as a conceptual artist: “I don’t have any particular skills, but I know how to use the Yellow Pages”.
