RICHARD PRINCE | RE:CIRCULATION 007 — The Fourth Man Goes Solo
What happens when one member of a group disappears?
A band can survive it.
Sometimes the remaining members continue almost unchanged. Sometimes the person who leaves becomes more famous than the group. Sometimes the departure itself becomes the story.
Photographs are not usually expected to behave this way.
But a small catalogue published in 1980 records four men photographed by Richard Prince. Twelve years later, all four are still together. By the middle of the following decade, three of the same men are circulating under another title.
The documents do not tell us that someone left.
For a moment, let’s call it a breakup anyway.
Room one: four
Altered Subjects: Photography was published for an exhibition at the Ben Shahn Gallery, William Paterson College, New Jersey, in March 1980.
Sixteen pages. Cream wrappers. Saddle-stitched. The cover names no artists.
Inside, Richard Prince is represented by a work listed as:
Four Men Facing Right, series 1979.
Four Ektacolor photographs.
16 × 20 inches each.
Courtesy Castelli Graphics Gallery.
One of the photographs is reproduced.
A man with a moustache wears a pale suit and patterned tie. Behind him is what appears to be a restaurant menu. His attention sits somewhere outside the frame.
Nothing about the reproduction distinguishes him from the oth
er three men he belongs with.
He is one quarter of a group.
And the catalogue is unusually useful because it does almost nothing more than count: four men. four photographs.
In May 1992, Donald Kuspit’s Artforum essay “Richard Prince’s Psychopathic America” reproduced the four images together.
The caption is no longer identical.
The work is now Untitled (four men looking in one direction), dated 1978 rather than 1979. The photographs are given as 20 × 24 inches rather than 16 × 20 and, importantly, as an edition of ten.
The title changes.
The year changes.
The dimensions change.
But the headcount remains stable.
Four.
A man standing beside a boat.
A man in a patterned tie.
The moustached man from Altered Subjects.
A man wearing glasses.
For the moment, the band is intact.
Room two: three
Three of the men remain.
Ten years later, another three-part version appeared at auction under essentially the same title: three Ektacolor photographs, 20 × 24 inches, again described in relation to an edition of ten.
The fourth man — the one standing beside the boat — is absent.
That does not establish what happened.
The 1980 catalogue records four photographs at one size and under one title. Artforum records four at another size and under another title. SFMOMA records three, with dimensions that differ again. The auction record gives another three.
An edition of ten complicates things further. Several sets or configurations could have existed. A three-part work and a four-part work may have circulated simultaneously. A later group may be incomplete. Different records may measure different parts of the print.
The documents presently available do not resolve it.
What they do establish is enough:
four entered the record.
three entered the record.
And one particular man is present in the first configuration and absent from the second.
The archive stops there.
Interpretation begins a little further on.
Suppose, briefly, he went solo.
Room three: 1, 2, 3, 4
Years later, counting turns up again.
Prince’s 1, 2, 3, 4 groups photographic subjects according to number.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
It is difficult not to hear the sequence musically.
Solo.
Duo.
Trio.
Quartet.
And even before anything is played:
one, two, three, four.
The New Rare previously held a copy of 1, 2, 3, 4. It has since circulated into a private collection in Paris.
Its absence from the archive now feels unexpectedly appropriate.
A publication built around counting bodies has itself moved elsewhere, while an earlier Prince work survives in records that cannot quite agree whether its group contains four bodies or three.
There is no reason to claim that 1, 2, 3, 4 explains Four Men Facing Right.
It does not.
Placed beside it, however, it changes the way the earlier photographs can be read.
The sequence can suddenly run backwards:
four.
three.
And somewhere, perhaps:
one.
Room four: Band
Then the word appears.
Untitled (Band), published in 2013–14, accompanies Prince’s Band paintings, works in which rubber bands become material.
The pun requires almost nothing from us.
A band can be elastic.
A band can be musical.
One holds things together.
The other describes people who have agreed, at least temporarily, to remain together.
The title makes both meanings occupy the same word.
Again, there is no evidence that Prince was thinking about the four men when he made the later Band works.
That connection belongs here, in this arrangement.
Room five: Black Bra
Then the metaphor becomes biography.
Black Bra, published by Karma, brings another object from The New Rare archive into the same temporary exhibition.
The publication reproduces the words BLACK BRA across material associated with Prince’s studio and the TIME photo department. Repetition, stamping and administrative paper become part of the image.
But the name carries another history.
Black Bra was also the name of a band Prince was involved with.
At this point “band” is no longer simply something being imposed retrospectively on four photographs of men.
It exists inside Prince’s own biography.
That still does not explain the earlier work.
Nor does it prove that the four men were ever conceived musically.
That would be too tidy.
Instead, Black Bra contributes another object to a relationship that only becomes visible by placing things beside one another.
1, 2, 3, 4 gives us the count.
Untitled (Band) gives us the word.
Black Bra gives us an actual band.
And Four Men Facing Right gives us a member who later disappears from one version of the lineup.
The objects do not cause one another.
They illuminate one another.
Look back at the four men after passing through them and, however briefly, they begin to resemble a band photograph.
Look at the three men later and someone appears to have left.
The soloist
The missing man is useful precisely because there is very little remarkable about him.
He wears a suit.
He stands beside a boat.
He looks to the right.
Within the group, his role is repetition. He is another version of the anonymous masculine type Prince was extracting from advertising: dressed, posed, self-contained, looking somewhere beyond the edge of the picture.
With the other three, he is a category.
Without them, something else begins to happen.
Not necessarily to the photograph.
To our attention.
Where is he?
Does he survive independently?
Does a complete quartet remain elsewhere?
Was the three-part configuration always conceived separately?
Was one photograph simply separated from a set?
None of the documents presently answers those questions.
But the absence has already changed the way the photograph is seen.
The three men remain a group.
The missing man becomes a subject.
That distinction matters.
Inside the 1992 reproduction, four anonymous advertising photographs repeat one another.
Take one away and the absent figure starts to look suspiciously like an individual.
Not because the image changed.
Because its circumstances did.
The group explains him.
The disappearance makes us look.
Return to the catalogue
Altered Subjects: Photography was never supposed to tell this story.
That is part of what makes it useful.
Its job was straightforward: document an exhibition.
It records:
Four Men Facing Right.
1979.
Four Ektacolor photographs.
16 × 20 inches.
Courtesy Castelli Graphics Gallery.
It does not know that twelve years later another publication will call the work something slightly different.
It does not know that a museum will later hold three men.
It does not know that another three will appear at auction.
It does not know about 1, 2, 3, 4.
It does not know about Band.
It does not know about Black Bra.
Printed matter often becomes useful precisely because it cannot anticipate the history that follows it.
A catalogue fixes something temporarily.
Then everything around it moves.
Gallery.
Catalogue.
Magazine.
Museum.
Market.
Each system describes the work.
Each description leaves another version behind.
The photographs themselves may not have changed at all.
Their identity in the record has.
The title Altered Subjects therefore begins to acquire a meaning the exhibition could not have intended.
The subject being altered is no longer only the photograph.
It is the history around it.
There is one line this essay cannot cross.
There is currently no evidence that the fourth photograph was deliberately removed from Four Men Facing Right.
There is no evidence that Prince separated it.
There is no evidence that it was independently sold.
There is no evidence that the later three-part configurations represent an incomplete version of a work that was always supposed to contain four.
Four and three may have been separate arrangements from the beginning.
That uncertainty is not something RE:CIRCULATION needs to repair.
It is the reason to keep looking.
The catalogue preserves four.
Later records preserve three.
And the fourth man becomes unusually visible because, for once, he is not there.
So for a moment we can leave the edition problem to the edition records, the provenance problem to provenance, and allow the archive one less responsible possibility.
One member left the quartet.
The other three carried on.
And somewhere, one anonymous man in a suit beside a boat may be enjoying the longest, quietest solo career in the history of advertising photography.
Today:
ONE QUARTER OF
FOUR MEN FACING RIGHT.
Tomorrow:
THE MONA LISA.
Note on the record
The four/three discrepancy remains unresolved. Altered Subjects: Photography records four Ektacolor photographs in 1980; Artforum reproduces four in 1992 and identifies an edition of ten; SFMOMA records a three-part configuration by 1995; and another three-part example appeared at auction in 2005. Differences in title, date and dimensions between these sources may reflect separate configurations, editions, measurement conventions or cataloguing practices. Nothing presently establishes that a single four-part set was physically reduced to three.