Richard Prince, Wallace Berman and Their Women
Prince and the Beat-Popper
The show’s centerpiece, a 1986 El Camino wrapped — windows and all, as city buses often are, with advertisements — in a blown-up montage of vintage back-seat-babe photos, isn’t as smart as some of Prince’s other reworkings of cars and their parts, which manage to get at the intersection of girls, horsepower, Americana and aesthetics in the male sexual psyche in interesting ways without being so overt. But it’s not without impact.
I’m not convinced by McKenna’s attempt in her catalog essay to refashion Prince as something of a romantic and a sensitive guy — a maker of works “freighted with feelings of melancholy and loss.” But he is perceptive and astute, and, surprisingly for someone often regarded as a rip-off artist, frequently inventive and never idle. Prince is an artist who will never be as endearing as Berman, but who is more complex than the Warholian enfant terrible or the appropriation poster-boy to which he commonly is reduced.
SHE: Images of Women by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince; Tues.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m., through March 7; Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 658-8088 or www.kohngallery.com.
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