Richard Prince, Nurse Elsa

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0:00:05.3 Steven Zucker: We’re at the Peoria Riverfront Museum looking at a large canvas by Richard Prince. This is called Nurse Elsa. It’s such an incredible testament to our media culture.

0:00:16.5 Bill Conger: It is a confounding image of painting, printing over painting, painting out. There is so much happening here. We assume that there’s some print beneath this, but what we see is primarily this vision of white glowing nurse against a hot pink background.

0:00:36.5 Steven Zucker: And the nurse is such a symbol, at least as represented here, of purity, of good intent, of healing, of femininity.

0:00:43.9 Bill Conger: Nurses are also harbingers of death and disease, and they also are sexual symbols, and they encompass so many things, and it leads me to wonder, what is Richard up to here?

0:00:57.2 Steven Zucker: In that bubblegum pink background, there’s actually a title conflict for Nurse Elsa, and then we see a name Jeanne Bowman just barely emerging. It’s at this moment that you recognize that this is an over life-size version of a pulp novel, the kind that you would’ve found on a little rotating rack in a dime store, in a soda fountain in a drugstore in the 1950s, 1960s, early 1970s.

0:01:22.4 Bill Conger: There is such a feeling of history and time here. The artist drew directly from the actual cover art of an actual novel using an inkjet printer to apply it to a canvas at a much larger scale. And it’s at that point that he goes in and begins to paint and transform this image. This is New York School, Abstract Expressionist brush strokes and drips. And this is a really aggressive gestural painting that is happening around her. It ends up encompassing the background, but also the foreground as well. The stripes on her blouse are muted because of the paint. There are drips down her front. There are drips on her face, there are drips in the background, and I think it’s then when we’re investigating all this incredible paint that we realize this image that emerges from behind her shoulder as being nearly completely painted out.

0:02:16.7 Steven Zucker: So that would’ve been the doctor on the original novel cover. When we compare the painting to the original artwork of the book. It’s interesting to note that the artist has placed a surgical mask over the nurse, but it’s not just over her nose and her mouth, it’s also over her eyes, which obscures her intention. And there is now ambiguity that allows her to both be that traditional symbol of healing, but also perhaps malevolent. Is there a sinister quality here?

0:02:44.7 Bill Conger: It seems sinister, it seems potentially lecherous. It seems mask-like in so many ways. There are so many things that we don’t know about her and her intentions because of this mask.

0:02:57.2 Steven Zucker: It’s so interesting because when you look really closely at the surface of her face, especially of her hair, you can see the breakdown of the printer. You can see the colors that are not quite registering precisely, and it reminds us that this is an overblown print, and the artist clearly wants us to see that. And it is a reference to one of Richard Prince’s most important influences, and that is Andy Warhol. This is very much a pop painting, even though it’s made in the 21st century.

0:03:26.6 Bill Conger: There’s absolutely no doubt that this is referencing early pop as well as other types of assemblage, even though this is a single piece, the implication is that there is collage on top of this, that things have been added to change, to absorb the image and reconstitute it. Yet ultimately, we have to understand this is a book cover. Even though this is seven feet tall. This is absurd as a book cover.

0:03:54.0 Steven Zucker: The uneasy relationship between the human figure and this abstract environment reminds me of one of the other most influential artists on Richard Prince, Willem de Kooning and his women’s series. De Kooning was almost singular among the Abstract Expressionists in his interest in the figure, but also the way that the figure was debased and expressed through pop media.

0:04:14.9 Bill Conger: De Kooning also accused of misogyny, and it is interesting because the center of so many of those women paintings was the mouth, the lips and the lips and mouth have nearly been obscured completely here. That idea that the male artist could be physically attacking in some way, this image and the female persona, the nurse image, I think cannot be escaped here.

0:04:40.4 Steven Zucker: And maybe also in a larger sense, attacking our media culture, attacking the power of images, and the importance that we place on images and the way that they manipulate us.

0:04:50.7 Bill Conger: I think that’s exactly right. What he has done here is taken a given construct, which existed and redefined it, remade it, and created a new world for it. So we are not allowed to engage with this image the way it was designed to be originally.

0:05:07.8 Steven Zucker: These are among his best selling, highest priced works, and it suggests that collectors, or you and I, as we stand in front of this, are still susceptible to the original power of the original allure of that novel cover.

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