An i for an eye

Panda Habitat at the Zoo, Memphis;

Photographs: Courtesy Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Judging from his artistic output—glitter-flocked paintings of pandas, sculptures of blue jeans filled with cement, “fountains” gurgling with Evian water—you might figure Rob Pruitt for a lot of things: cynic, sentimentalist, conceptual prankster. But Apple spokesperson? Yet here he is, in a Hell’s Kitchen bistro, extolling the virtues of his iPhone as if he were Steve Jobs. “I’m really techno unsavvy,” he begins, waving the device. “I’d never downloaded music before, never even typed e-mail. But with this, the wall between me and everything I wanted to do just fell down. It’s magic.”

All that’s missing from this scene is Jobs’s trademark black turtleneck and 501s; Pruitt is crisply dressed for late summer in a light-colored shirt and pants. He just drove in from Montauk, where he shares a house with his partner, the artist Jonathan Horowitz. Pruitt, 44, shows me a picture of the place on, yes, his iPhone. Designed by modernist maestro George Nelson, it is a dune-hugging mid-century beauty. The image is one of several thousand that Pruitt has taken since he bought his phone in ’07—part of a photostream that serves as the core for his new show, “iPhone,” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and its attendant catalog, which is titled iPruitt. If that sounds like taking brand loyalty to an extreme, consider that Pruitt isn’t your average gadget freak: He’s an artist who’s discovered a new, liberating path. “I think of it as my second brain,” he says.

Me as Narcissus, Orient;

Taken together, the works in the show (all printed large) and the book (which resembles an iPhone) function as a visual diary. They capture moments that are seemingly quotidian, yet not: a group on a beach around a bonfire, the artist taking us along as he visits the men’s room stall made famous by Senator Larry Craig. The process seems similar to what the photographer William Eggleston called “making the ordinary, extraordinary.” However, instead of exquisitely framed individual images, Pruitt’s work depends on an aggregate effect: a narrative one in the book, and a structural one for the show—where both the interior and exterior of the gallery will be plastered with 2,000 images, arranged in a brick pattern. “I wanted one year of my life to be the building’s architecture,” Pruitt explains. While the pictures look simple enough, they’re anything but naive. They make references, for example, to Warhol (a pile of Campbell’s Soup boxes in a grocery) and Richard Prince (shots of Brokeback Mountain on TV that recall Prince’s Marlboro men).

Duck II, Memphis

Pruitt didn’t initially buy his iPhone to make art. “Taking pictures was the easiest point of entry into using it,” he says. “Then I started feeling proud of the results. I’d say to friends, ‘Look at these! Don’t you think I might have some, like, talent?’ I never felt that way with anything else I’ve done.”

A strange sentiment, but not so odd considering the bumpy trajectory of his career. Back in the early ’90s, Pruitt was half of a collaborative duo with artist Jack Early. Pruitt & Early were a sensation, rising to the top of the art world with works like Sculpture for Teenage Boys (which consisted of six-packs of beer plastered with head-shop stickers for rock groups and weed). Their emergence, however, took place just as the boom that birthed Schnabel and Koons gave way to recession and a more astringent aesthetic of identity politics. In this environment, the pair went too far: In 1992, they did a show at Leo Castelli gallery featuring ’70s blaxploitation and Black Power icons. Despite being meant as an homage (Pruitt grew up in Washington, D.C., a.k.a. “Chocolate City”), the show was roundly condemned as puerile and racist. The telephone—the landline sort—stopped ringing. Pruitt & Early broke up, and Pruitt, on his own, began a comeback that took five years.

The Senator Larry Craig Stall, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport;

One of the highlights of the ensuing period was an invite-only “performance” at a private loft that consisted of a 50-foot line of cocaine on a mirror on the floor. Attendees were welcome to indulge, provided they allowed Pruitt to photograph them. There were plenty of takers, including art-world insiders who’d snubbed him after the Castelli “disaster.” The piece was not only a publicity stunt, as he readily admits, but also an act of revenge. “It was awfully funny to see these people, who hadn’t been treatingme well, on their knees like pigs to the trough.”These days, one senses a certain equanimity in Pruitt; certainly his iPhone project, which points to a new maturity in his oeuvre, suggests as much. “It’s been like art yoga,” he says. “I’m feeling all limber.”

Rob Pruit’s “iPhone” opens Sat 13 at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise