Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboys), 1980–84
By contrast, Prince’s Marlboro Man series (1980-92) is borne of a strategy closer to Easton’s own, as the photographs of cowboys that once appeared on North American Marlboro cigarette packets are, themselves, photographed and edited into wordless, poster-size images. Despite this fundamental distinction in terms of process, the pieces created by both of these photographers thus function as re-workings of pre-existing cultural texts that, in and of themselves, comprise hyperreal constructions of ?gures or icons devoid of ‘real’ referents. In these terms, what I have termed a misrecognition in relation to my experience of …Blues is, conceivably, either a misrecognition in itself, or simply unimportant, insofar as the hyperreal renders the intertextual fabric of the postmodern cultural text impossible to circumvent.
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