Stephen Prina is an art polymath whose mediums include drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video and film. He is also a composer and musician who has interpreted works by Beethoven, Schoenberg, Sonic Youth, Steely Dan and many others. Indeed, his largest fan base may be not within the art world, but outside of it, where he is known as a member of the avant-garde rock band The Red Krayola and as a solo pop singer whose terrific album Push Comes to Love was released by Drag City in 1999.
Born in 1954, in Galesburg, Ill.—he received a BFA from Northern Illinois University in 1977 and an MFA from CalArts in 1980—Prina makes art project by project, developing discrete, thematically related bodies of work whose serial-like components often reappear, newly iterated, in subsequent installations. Projects are often grounded in historical subjects, and preexisting works of visual art, architecture, music and film are regular points of departure. In 2011, for instance, the artist conceived a sculpture installation for the Secession, in Vienna, that involved re-creating 28 built-in elements from two demolished Los Angeles houses designed by Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953), who had begun his career in the Austrian capital. Titled As He Remembered It, the installation originated in Prina’s having seen, late one night in the 1980s in a La Brea Avenue storefront, a pink built-in bookshelf by Schindler that looked to him like an amputated limb.
In the following conversation, you will discover that, according to Prina, the sculptures in As He Remembered It accurately replicate neither Schindler’s furniture nor Prina’s memory image, their title notwithstanding. Beautiful and brainy, and by no means opaque, his work opens itself most fully to audiences willing to take the time to unravel its discernible clues. As with good pop songs, cascading coincidences matter more than right answers. From early in his career, Prina has improvised on the Surrealist convention of the exquisite corpse, and that device is a fitting metaphor for our engagement with his work, in that we, as audience, must complete it. His polymorphic art is transactional: its call awaits our response.
To read more, click here or download it below.
