Blasting mats, for those unfamiliar, are heavy-duty mats stitched together from pieces of car tire, devised to catch flyrock from controlled explosions. Twenty years ago, Richard Prince started making work from disused blasting mats, suspending them from customized frames at his studio in Rensselaerville, New York. They hang, slumped and heavy, from metal I-beams, strung up like racks of meat. The blasting mats belong to a vocabulary of impoverished imagery, much like the abandoned cars, solitary basketball hoops, and makeshift tire planters found scattered across rural New York, which Prince started photographing when he relocated Upstate in 1996. They are precisely the kind of object for the taking—readymade, symbolic…fictional. Contained within them are the vestiges of consumerism and industry, and all their promises from the past.
The series "Folksongs", shown at Gagosian in 2025, grew out of these same monumental blasting mats that Prince had hauled onto his property Upstate—not yet as artworks, but simply as objects, materials waiting to become something else. One night, wind moved through the perforated rubber and produced a faint squeal, an accidental sound carried through the weight of the mats themselves. A kind of folk music emerging from folk material. From there came the title: Folksongs.
Untitled (Blasting Mats) (2006–08), on view opening today in "Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince", an exhibition curated by Nancy Spector for the Fondazione Prada venue at Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice.
