Richard Prince's Mythical Norm

My paper will examine the early 1980s work of Richard Prince through the lens of what writer Audre Lorde described as the "mythical norm": “Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows ‘that is not me,’” she writes. “In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society.” Indeed, this description offers a rubric for thinking about many of Prince's subjects from these years--the Marlboro cowboys, the businessmen, etc. But where Prince's work has often been imagined as a hit against the media, as appropriation or theft, it also confronted a hegemonic subject position held in place by the media world. My paper will try to figure out the nature of that position. Did it destablize it? Hold it up for questioning? Or did it, like so many Oedipal revolts, reestablish the authority of the Father? My paper will conclude by analyzing a related body of work, Glenn Ligon's paintings of Richard Pryor jokes, as a way of getting at these questions.