Richard Prince

Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer, born in 1949 in Panama.  Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975.  Starting in 1977, Prince photographed four photographs, which previously appeared in the New York Times.  This process of re-photographing continued into 1983, when his work Spiritual America featured Garry Gross’s photo of Brooke Shields at the age of ten, standing in a bathtub, as an allusion to precocious sexuality and to the Alfred Stieglitz photograph by the same name. 

Alfred Stieglitz, Spiritual America, 1923

His image, Untitled (Cowboy), a “rephotograph” of a photograph taken originally by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement, was the first rephotograph to raise more than $1 million at auction when it was sold at Christie’s New York in 2005.

Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1989

Beginnings of Typology Selection

These are my first images when deciding what to select as a typology...this was obviously during the winter months, being playful with the lifecycle of a snowman.

The other idea for my typology was the opening for the World Superbike and MotoGP races.  The ideas of sport and consumerism, cross-continent culture, and appropriation art.

Typology

I've been working on my Typology project, a component of our final project.  I've been reading a lot of Robert Smithson's writings and looking at his work, specifically he's contemplation of sites and non-sites, and idea of resolving a lacuna or filling the gap.  "Everything is two things that converge.  This range of convergence is really the great area of speculation." (From Smithson's comments at the Earth Art Symposium in 1969).  I'll admit that a lot of Smithson's work is heavy reading for me, and not totally clear but I've enjoyed digging deeper into the ideas and understanding of Smithson. 

"As you live deeper in the heart,

the mirror gets clearer and clearer."

~Rumi~

Mirror Stratum

Robert Smithson, Mirror Stratum, 1967

Filling the Gap

Smithson's elaborate and ambitious project for the Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, (1969) art exhibit involved a number of Nonsite sculptures - Mirror Displacements - which he created in one of the galleries of the museum, each comprising mirrors and rock salt amassed from the nearby Cayuga Salt Mine.  He also made a Subsite-Sub-Nonsite piece that related a work installed "underground," that is, in a stone closet in the museum's basement, with a Subsite above ground at the Cayuga Salt Works' quarry.    Connecting the Subsite to the gallery was third element, a Mirror Trail, which mapped the placement of eight mirrors along a path that Smithson had laid out to link the art in the institution in Ithaca with the outdoor locations beyond the city.  Modest photographs of the mirrors in situ accompanied this map. 

On one wall of the gallery, he exhibited the Ithaca Mirror Trail piece together with small photographs of mirrors in the mine shaft.

On the floor, Smithson installed a group of sculptures variously composed from mirrors and salt crystals.

Photography was relegated from the status of crucial indexical (shift from context to context) witness to that of documentary supplement, while mirror reflection now assumed a vital place.  Henceforth, when he employed photography in his art, Smithson would question the image's capacity to convey anything beyond a sense of temporal absence or loss: it had become, in short, equivalent to the mirror reflection , a lacuna in perception's modalities.

*Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, George Baker et al., University of California Press, 2005 

Reflections

Excerpts from Robert Smithson's Incidents of Mirror-travel in the Yucatan, 1969

"The mirror itself is not subject to duration, because it is an ongoing abstraction that is always available and timeless.  The reflections, on the other hand, are fleeting instances that evade measure.  Space is the remains, or corpse, of time, it has dimensions."
~THE THIRD MIRROR DISPLACEMENT

"Reflections fall onto the mirrors without logic, and in so doing invalidate every rational assertion.  Inexpressible limits are on the other side of the incidents, and they will never be grasped."
~THE FOURTH MIRROR DISPLACEMENT

"There was a friction between the mirrors and the tree; now there is a friction between language and memory.  A memory of reflections becomes an absence of absences."
~THE SEVENTH MIRROR DISPLACEMENT

The Contemplative Camera

Take a closer look at a rain-streaked windowpane, the drain of a kitchen sink, or the gravel underfoot.  At first glance, these ordinary objects may seem to hold little aesthetic or spiritual merit.  But for students of contemplative photography, or Miksang, these small slivers of perception represent a marriage between eye, mind, and heart.

Miksang, which means "good-eye" in Tibetan, is a process that captures arresting moments of everyday life-and deepens our awareness of them-by using the simplest mechanics of a camera.  Inspired by the dharma art and Tibetan Buddhist teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinphoche, Miksang doesn't take much heed of formal photography techniques or professional standbys like complicated lighting setups.  Without manipulation and distortion, the eye and the lens are free to simply see.  As famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once wrote, "People think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing."

Credit - Julie Dubose

Contemplative photography's roots go back to 1954, when 15-year-old Chögyam Trungpa took his first photograph.  The next few decades would see him flee Tibet to India in the footsteps of the Dalai Lama, study comparative religioin at Oxford University, bring Tibetan Buddhism to the West, and found Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.  Through it all, he continued to shoot rolls of film.

Credit - Katherine Adams

In 1979, a commercial photographer named Michael Wood took notice.  Wood wouldn't immediately praise the photography: "I had mixed reactions," he says.  "From one point of view I thought he really didn't have his techniques together.  But I hadn't seen anything like it; it stopped me in my tracks."  Wood began studying Trungpa's dharma art teachings and imitating his work.  Eventually, he combined the philosophy with his own professional photography experience to create the methodical exercises at the heart of Miksang.

The art form has flourished over the past 25 years through trainings around the world and at the Miksang Institute for Contemplative Photography in Boulder.  "We teach anywhere that is available," says Julie DuBose, the Institute's cofounder.

"Miksang is about being present and available."

~Brian Sano, yoga & Miksang instructor

*Dakota Sexton, Yoga International, Winter 2011-12