A Night and a Day with Stephen Prina

When I interviewed him a few days after the film screening and live performance that accompanied last Friday’s opening of “Retrospection Under Duress, Reprise”, the survey of his work currently on display in the main lobby gallery of the Carpenter Center, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies Stephen Prina joked to me that he describes the evening as his quinceanera, a Spanish term used to describe the traditional coming-of-age ceremony for young women. Joking or not, the description is particularly apt; Prina, a formerly Los Angeles-based artist who was recently tenured by the Visual and Environmental Studies department, certainly seems to be the little darling of Harvard’s arts community. The word on the street among VES students is that he’s both an extremely accomplished (did I mention famous?) practitioner in his own right and an excellent teacher; he’s the guy everyone wants to study with. And the buzz among the faculty seems to be equally positive, at least if the casual comments made by other professors to their students—not to mention the smug looks and smiling faces of the faculty members in attendance on Friday night—are any indication.

Nevertheless, for the uninitiated Friday night’s event may have seemed a little odd. The first part of the event was a screening of one of Prina’s short films, Vinyl II in the Carpenter Center auditorium. Filmed at the Getty museum in Los Angeles (it was originally commissioned by the museum), Vinyl II could almost be described as a kind of extremely slow-paced music video. The bulk of the film depicts a group of musicians playing a score written by Prina himself while sitting in two of the Getty’s galleries, punctuated with shots of the baroque paintings hanging on the gallery walls. Most of the students I talked to afterward found the film’s lack of recognizable narrative or meaning to be thoroughly confusing.

For those of us who were confused by the film, the ensuing live performance did little to alleviate our condition. The audience filed back up the stairs from the auditorium to the main gallery and found ourselves in what was just like a normal gallery opening—complete with catered goodies and champagne—except that in one corner the artist himself was playing a grand piano and crooning into a microphone. The music itself varied in quality and enjoyability (it was a pastiche of covers ranging from Joni Mitchell to Carol King, mixed with Prina’s original music), but what most audience members seemed most confused about was how, exactly, they were supposed to approach the performance. Should one simply relax and enjoy the music, forgetting that the event was technically a performance art piece rather than a rock show? And if this was the idea, was it ok to be bored with the music if it didn’t measure up to other rock shows one had been to? Or perhaps the context was a key part of the performance, and one should search for the irony in an artist transforming a gallery into a cabaret?

It’s hard to decide what something means if you don’t even know how to frame a discussion of its potential meaning, and I think there were moments when many audience members (myself included) were tempted to dismiss the whole event as meaningless. What ultimately prevented such a dismissal on my part, however, (besides the obvious fact that it would be simplistic and immature) were clear hints offered by Prina’s work itself that he has to be taken seriously. His film, for example, while not perhaps immediately comprehensible, was clearly both intelligent and extremely well crafted, particularly in the sophisticated plays on scale, distance and speed which it used to reveal the Ghetty gallery space. And even if the work itself hadn’t warned me against an overly simplistic reading, Prina’s reputation alone would have been sufficient—one need only flip through back issues of Artforum to see that Prina is widely respected by the critical establishment, and every one of his current students with whom I have spoken so far calls him a truly excellent teacher.

It was with great curiosity, then, that I turned to my interview with Prina, hoping that a conversation with him would help me understand his work. And indeed, it ultimately did, but not quite in the way I originally hoped, for it seems that part of coming to grips with Prina’s work is admitting that “understanding” it (in the old-fashioned sense of assigning a subject and a meaning) is impossible.

Prina’s work is both extremely sophisticated and extremely complex, and I run the risk of oversimplifying in attempting to offer a concrete description of it. However, for the sake of this discussion I would say that Prina’s work is founded on acknowledging, perhaps even embracing, several fundamental impossibilities in contemporary art making. The first has to do with the production of meaning. Prina told me that at a certain point in his career, taking a cue from the well known French cultural theorist Roland Barthes, he realized that it is impossible for a work of art to express a singular meaning. In other words, it is impossible to eliminate connotation, to prevent the uncontrolled proliferation of meanings attached to an object—there is no “zero degree” of meaning in art. (Incidentally, this is the major distinction between Prina and the so-called “conceptual artists” working the 1970s. Most conceptual artists tried to strip their art down to the point where it expressed only fundamental concepts. Prina himself may found certain works on fairly abstract—one could even say conceptual—notions, but he also accepts and encourages the contamination of such concepts with historical, cultural and personal associations.)

The other impossibilities are even harder to categorize, but I would say that they are probably best described as having to do with expression and progress. According to Prina (and he is certainly not alone in this opinion) the narrative of historical progress in art—which has been with us in one form or another at least since the Renaissance and which formed the backbone of the modernist movement—has been so thoroughly debunked by post-modern theory that it is simply no longer possible to talk about art developing in any logical way or progressing toward any general goal. But that’s not all. At the same time that he thus denies art a general progressive purpose, Prina also closes off an avenue that has traditionally been viewed as one of art’s more specific purposes. This is personal expression, which he views as too cliché-ridden and problematic to be a viable artistic activity today.

One might see these ideas as almost nihilistic, but in reality they are extraordinarily liberating. For what Prina has managed to do here is break down several deeply entrenched structures which in the past have dictated to the artist both how meaning should be made and what it should be (either meaning as personal expression or meaning as progress). Accordingly, he is left with a complete freedom in regard to meaning, an almost infinitely open field within which all meanings are possible and everything is potentially meaningful.

And the genius of Prina’s work seems to lie precisely in the agility and creativity with which he is able to play this field. He is a past master at creating extraordinarily rich and complex objects, thick concatenations of meaning. Prina has carefully planned out even the smallest details of both his works themselves and the way they are displayed, from the texture or color of his materials to the way the objects are attached to the floor or wall, and all of these details contribute to the layering of meaning in the end product. Unfortunately, I don’t have space here to for me to provide an extended discussion of specific examples, but suffice it to say that after walking through the gallery with Prina and hearing him talk about his work, I’m sure that he could give you at least ten different layers of meaning for any single one of his pieces, ranging from art historical references (as in series of pieces based on, among other things, the dimensions of various Manet paintings) to personal associations (that shiny bike on top of the piano was a gift from a friend who lived near Prina in L.A., a kind of token to remember the Latino culture of his old neighborhood), to self-reflexive allusions to his own work (a substantial portion of the work on display is a series of graphic constructions featuring photographs and floor plans of another recent retrospective of Prina’s work, which incidentally had the same title he chose to give to the Harvard show).

While the sophistication of this play with meaning is immediately clear, it is still hard to know how Prina’s work should ultimately be evaluated, largely because much of it is predicated on the very idea that generalized goals for art making (and therefore generalized criteria for its judgment) no longer exist. At this point, however, I think I can learn a lesson from Prina himself. When I asked him if, despite the clearly open ended if not fragmentary nature of his work, he believed there was any underlying thread—however tenuous—running through his entire practice, he replied that he ultimately views all of his art making as a very personal attempt to describe his own position as a subject in the word with as much particularity as possible—to document and articulate his own subjectivity. Interpreting this comment in relation to my own attempts to evaluate Prina’s work, I take it to mean that in lieu of any objective critical framework, all I’m left with are the answers to a few very personal questions: What effect did this work have on me? And how does it change my thinking?

In response to these questions, I would say that Prina’s work instills in me both a profound respect and a vague uneasiness. As I have already made clear, I admire his ability to play within the open field of meaning that he has opened up for himself, but somehow I can’t help but wish he could also push beyond it. I worry about getting lost in endless tangles of allusions, about the possibility that our ostensible freedom to play with meaning in reality forces us to forfeit the potential to formulate any meaning at all. Toward the end of our conversation, Prina told me that one of things he likes in his work is that it exposes multiple options of meaning and interpretation, that it precludes the possibility of adopting any single, authoritative position. I certainly would never advocate anything as reactionary as an authoritative model of meaning production, but I have to admit I think I might be interested in making a stand for particularity in meaning, or at least in re-opening a discussion of its possibility. Suppose we were to push beyond self-reflexivity and personal and historical reference—what new possibilities for meaning might we find? Of course I realize that in talking about any kind of “pushing beyond,” with its implications of hierarchy and progress, I’m flirting with hugely problematic concepts, but I’ll make two arguments in my own defense. The first is that I’m still young, and therefore have something of a license to be hopeful; I don’t yet have to accept some of the (grim?) impossibilities that Prina seems to have internalized so thoroughly. The second is that Prina himself is no stranger to introducing and examining problematic concepts in his own work, and so I think it’s only fair that he grant me room to explore this one.