Walker Art Center

Richard Prince on Art Critics: " I guess in those days I didn't particularly understand the relationship between artist and critic, and I didn't care to establish any relationship. Critics tried to tell you what you were doing, and wanted you to make the kind of work that they were thinking about. I probably resented that."



The piece that I would like to focus on is called, “Was That a Girl” by Richard Prince. The artist used two very modern colors (lavender and light green) and bisected the middle by writing, “I met my first girl. Her name was Sally. Was that a girl, was that a girl. That’s what people kept asking.” At first, I was negatively drawn to this piece. I thought it was plain and its meaning was, at first, lost on me. I wanted something that I could instantly understand like Warhol’s “Nine Jackies” (http://www.andywarholposter.com/Nine-Jackies-1964_Print_84.html). But as our tour guide began to talk more about “Was That a Girl” I began to understand and, ultimately, like it better.

This painting confronts sexism with an interesting kind of complexity. Mary Stewart wrote of many different kinds of complexities in “Launching the Imagination” and this painting is most like “Risk-Taking and Safe-Keeping”. One can either read the text as an exclamation, “Boy, was that a girl!” That one, I believe would be “safe-keeping”. The interpreter confronts the phrase “was that a girl” in a way that is most comfortable and, perhaps, follows the rules. Or, it can be read as a question, “Was that a girl?” And that one, I believe, is “risk-taking”. The interpreter confronts the phrase “was that a girl” in a open-ended, surprised kind of way.

I first saw it as a question, “Was that a girl?” And it wasn’t that I took offense to it, I was just put off by it. I felt that it was typical of a modern artist to raise a question like that. I wanted to find something in the modern art section that surprised me. It wasn’t until our tour guide pointed out the two ways that “Was That a Girl” could be interpreted, that I was finally intrigued. This painting, depending on which way you understand it, can give you a very different feeling. I found an article written by Peggy Orenstein for the New York Times that explains how I feel about the piece, “There is something mysterious at work, then, that makes us who we are, something internally driven. Maybe it’s about our innate need to categorize the world around us. My guess, however, is that it’s deeper than that, something that transcends objectivity, defies explanation.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/magazine/13FOB-WWLN-t.html)