Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art

6. Richard Prince: The Fetish and Automotive Maleficium

\\ 227 richard prince’s Car Fetishes The role of the automobile in the art of Richard Prince appears, upon first glimpse, simple and basic, its semiotic function merelya matterof caricaturing the putative “American love affair with the car.”1 Because much of his investment in the car, artistic and otherwise, has coalesced around the banalities of car culture, including speed and the freedom of the open road, 1970s muscle cars, hot rod magazines, and pictures of the babes of hot-rodding men, we understand the automobile to plainly signify desire in his work. From this perspective, the car symbolizes an insatiable craving for, bluntly said, more, more speed, more women, more money, more power, the force ofwhich is proofof testosteronewrit large and manhood unlimited. It is also, simply put, a fetish.We look first to what might be considered the most obviChapter 6 the fetish An d Auto m o tive M ALEFICIUM richArd Prince 228 // Automotive Prosthetic ous, the Freudian definition of the fetish, in order to get some sense of the psychological roots of Prince’s fetishism. In Freudian terms, Prince’s interest in the car, his automobile fetish, could be interpreted as a matter of phallic substitution: the automobile reinforces his manhood by mechanically extending the artist’s phallic body.2 In so many words, he wears his penis in the form of a roving mechanical prosthetic. He pronounces—enlarges—his penis by way of a fast, powerful car. When Prince had an auto body shop in upstate New York refabricate a 1970 Dodge Challenger for the European art fair Frieze in 2008, he extended his phallus through the automobile in order to heighten not only his manhood but also the anti-art stakes of his automobile-based work (Figure 6.1). Describing this untitled work of art, Prince says, “It’s like art but isn’t. The fact that it runs changes it. You can sit it in an art gallery, but then you can get in it and drive away. What happens to it when you do—does it lose the art? I think it does, and I like that.”3 At work here is Prince’s particular strategy à rebours the art establishment , as it unfolds within its very precincts and entails a collapsing of high culture into a specific grain of low, namely the base culture of muscle cars, white trashdom, and high-throttle, Hollywood-manufactured machismo. The 1970 Dodge Challenger is an icon of muscle cars made famous by the Figure 6.1. richard Prince, Untitled, 2008. courtesy of richard Prince studios and gagosian gallery, new york and rensselaerville, new york. Richard Prince \\ 229 road-chase movieVanishing Point (1971), starring Barry Newman as “Kowalski ,” a macho man and the quintessential adrenaline junky. The seeming simplicity of Prince’s automobile fetish gives way to a hydra-headed process of psychological investment, both as Prince intends his fetish of the car to function outwardlyas a thumb-in-the-eye attackon the political correctness of the art world and as it is an inward practice, a sincere fetish of an adored object, namely the muscle car. Richard Prince’s relationship to the car is affective , even existential: evidence of a strain of sentimental conceptual art. Prince had his completely rebuilt 1970 Dodge Challenger painted in a shade of bright orange-yellow called “Vitamin C,” echoing the inventive though kitschy names of muscle-carenamels.4 Reinforcing the sense that the car is an extension of his mind-body continuum, the bright colors are reminiscent of the dazzling plumage of a peacock. At Frieze, tricked out with the latest twenty-first-century technology, including, as Prince explained with great attention to detail, a “high-tech transmission, chassis, suspension, all new interior, bucket seats, dash, 440 horsepower, 5.7-liter engine,” the car sat still on a circular, mirrored, and rotating platform.5 Viewers posed for pictures with it as though it were the latest concept car being displayed in a car show.6 In transforming the high-art precinct of the Frieze fair into an automobile bazaar, Prince not only brought to bear his personal penchant for the vulgar and what to some might be the brute, utilitarian form of everyday life, but also set in relief with great poignancy the frenzied yet base sense of monetary exchange and profit at work in the typical international art fair. It was one commodity like another commodity in...