,2000.jpg)
Marc Jacobs + Richard Prince for Louis Vuitton Handbag Project,2008
El fetiche de la enfermera reaparece, para el lanzamiento de la bolsa Louis Vuitton
Richard Prince talks to J.G. Ballard
Richard Prince talks to J.G. Ballard
ARTFORUM International March 2003, XLI No. 7 pg.70
40th Anniversary Special Issue: the 1980's Part I
J.G. Ballard: You were born in the Panama Canal Zone?
Richard Prince: Yes. In 1949.
Ballard: Panaman? Panamerican?
Prince: Yes. Something like that? I left with my mother and sister after my
father had been detentioned for presumably stockpiling arms and munitions for
what I imagined was the 19th nervous breakdown of Cuba. This was in 1956.
He was later released, moved to Hawaii and from there has been moving to and
from the city of Saigon (what is now known as Ho Chi Minh City).
Ballard: Aren't children born in the Canal Zone called Zonians?
Prince: Yes. The Canal Zone has represented for some time the concept of
unlimited possibility.
Prince: This year, eleven years after I left Panama, I tried to return to
Panama.
Ballard: You're eighteen?
Prince: Yes.
Ballard: The newspapers said your flight to Panama originated from Hawaii.
How did that happen?
Prince: I've been living with my father in Honolulu all summer. Blonde on
Blonde, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors. There's an aesthetic revolution going on.
Class systems have seemed to disappear. Things are opening up. I'm sure the
liberation will be brief. My father has become involved in introducing a
defoliant in Vietnam. Someone wants the jungles to disappear so U.S. soldiers can
see the enemy. The death of affect I think they call it.
Ballard: Your father sounds like someone who guarantees hostility and
incomprehension. A jungle is a hard thing to get rid of.
Prince: He would say something like he's interested in the hard light of
contemporary reality. He'd say his task is to invent reality, not fiction. He
talks like that. What some people dream of and write about, he actually does.
He loves Vietnam. He loves Vietnam women. I remember him saying something
about how he works with a group that call themselves Team Strange.
Ballard: Why return to Panama?
Prince: I was about to turn eighteen. I have a choice, by law, to become
either a Panamanian or an American or both. My father still has contacts with
government officials in Panama, and we thought it might be smart, for the
future, to secure a dual citizenship. The security required me to show up in
person. He put me on a PBY B-Moth. I landed in Panama three days before my
eighteenth birthday. I was following in my father's footsteps.
Ballard: I read in the paper that your troubles started with improper, or I
think it was, "the lack of sufficient papers or identity".
Prince: It was really stupid. I didn't have a photograph of myself in my
passport. Somehow the photograph that had been in my passport became unglued
and fell out somewhere. I don't knowâ€|I don't know how it happened. All I know
is when I opened my passport in Customs I found it was gone. The agents there
just looked at me and started shaking their heads.
Ballard: Your father?
Prince: I don't know.
Ballard: They kept you there for four days?
Prince: Five. At the airport.
Ballard: They treat you okay?
Prince: Psychic Jujitsu. That's all.
Ballard: Then what?
Prince: I became a citizen of British Airways.
Ballard: What I read in the newspapers sounded like you were living inside
an enormous novel.
Prince: I've spent the last three weeks on a jumbo jet crisscrossing the
Caribbean and Atlantic five times because no country will admit me.
Ballard: British immigration officials finally admitted you and held you in
custody while trying to arrange admission back to the U.S.?
Prince: Yes, British Airways has spent more than $13,500 feeding and flying
me around. I've racked up about 20,000miles in eight consecutive days of
jetting back and firth between London, Jamaica, Bermuda, and the Bahamas.
Ballard: According to immigration authorities, the Panamanians flew you to
the Bahamas Aug. 8, but then you were detained twelve days and put on a British
Airways flight to London.
Prince: Yes. I was never clear why I was sent to the Bahamas from Panama.
I have my own ideas. My own suspicions. But someone's orders put me on a
plane from the Bahamas to London, and when London wouldn't admit me, they sent me to Kingston, Jamaica. Jamaica refused me entry and sent me back to London.
London again turned me back to Kingston, which promptly flew me to London
again. En route I was refused entry in Bermuda. On Wednesday I landed here for
the third time and was allowed to remain in detention on British soil.
Ballard: You're still in detention?
Prince: Yes. But I don't know for how long. My father tells me he's flying
in in a couple of days. I talked to him three nights ago. He sounded
uncharacteristically light. Almost amused. He said he was close to the bottom of
it. He said something about wanting the exact details, hard information,
everything. My father likes to know what Charlie Manson has for breakfast. That's
why I emphasize everything.
Ballard: Earlier you said, "your own ideas"--- what do you mean, "your own
ideas"?
Prince: I'm not sure. At first I thought my return trip to Panama
backfired. Something like someone couldn't get to my father so they got to his son.
That kind of thing. My father's one of those imaginative criminals who wakes
up in the morning and almost makes a resolution to perform some sort of deviant
or antisocial act, even if it's just sort of kicking the dog. He says he
does this to establish his own freedom. What can I say? He's got a lot of
enemies.
Ballard: What do you think it is your father really does?
Prince: He's interested in applying the physical facts of the environment on
people. What he calls the third revolution. The "facts" he says are the
things that have come after the consumerism of the postindustrial revolution.
Ballard: In other words?
Prince: He invades people's lives with the very products they produce.
Ballard: He modifies the behavior of a particular group of people by what
they consume?
Prince: Exactly. He uses things like TVs, microchips, computers, chemicals,
tape recorders, cameras. He's very advanced at how to undermine your
situation with what you think you already own and what you think you might control.
Ballard: Like say, the film in your camera?
Prince: Yes. Something as ordinary as a roll of Tri-X. He can very easily
dismantle the convention of getting back your snapshots by infusing those
snapshots with the element of imagination and thus destabilize what was expected
to be everyday pedestrian reality. Serious illness and trauma could result
upon opening what was hoped to be pictures of your sweetheart or pictures of the
family barbecue. Once a friend of his told me how he planned to somehow
prescribe a type of contact lens for Castro, a kind that would produce dystopia.
Imagine Castro putting on a shirt and thinking the shirt was alive. Sometimes
his ideas are outlandishly absurd. Really funny. Some of them sound like a
joke. Never knowing when to take him seriously is part of his design.
Ballard: The joke, as you call it, is not far from the joke British Airways
is pulling on you right now. It's almost as if your present citizenship is a
direct result of one of your father's extreme hypotheses. What you find
yourself in is a type of religion offered up and advanced by British Airways: an
open-ended confession where the moral and psychological conclusions have yet to
be proven. They have this person, you, and they're looking at you and asking
themselves who is he, what is heâ€|they're treating your existence as if it were
a huge invention.
Prince: It's true. They're not taking me at face value. And that's what
surprises me. Maybe it's a conspiracy. I mean I know who I am is an enormous
accident, but I never thought they did. My father taught me that the position
of the observer itself affects the behavior of electrons or the fundamental
particles that are being observed. And I accept that. My identity is a
complete billion-to-one chance. But at the same time totally real. It's a paradox
we all have to live with, he says. But I'm beginning to see my situation is
too ideal for accidents.
Prince: In a way my situation for the last three weeks has been classic.
It's true. Something you read about in the newspapers. And if I can make any
sense out of these weeks in the air, they won't seem so random and meaningless
as I first thought they were. That's what I am trying to do now. Make sense.
Ballard: It's almost like you've been in an atrocity exhibition. British
Airways represents itself as another perfectable, meaningful world. You find
yourself enshrined in this Homeric journey, having to test yourself against vast
scientific and technological systems that began to unwind the moment you were
born, and here you are trying to unwind them even more.
Prince: Overdetermination. I should feel strange. Pissed off or something.
But I don't. You know, if I think about my situation, it's just another
conventionalized reality. What's happening to me is probably normal. Or going
to be. A look at things to come perhaps. The people who have been flying me
around haven't exactly acted surprised. I guess this is why I didn't get itâ€|but
am beginning to get it now. I'm beginning to get the sense that it's the
sensation of normality that might be the most extreme conclusion to the
hypothesis.
Ballard: Normality as the next special effect?
Prince: Something like that.
Ballard: How do you approximate the idea of sacrifice on British Airways?
What do you do? What would your father do? Kill the stewardess?
Prince: My father?-he'd cut off her nipples and feed the steward his penis.
Ballard: What would you do?
Prince: I don't know. British Airways is far too powerful to commit a
genuinely evil or morally repugnant act. I simply lack the ability to impose
myself to that extent on such an environment. I don't think my being a monster
would have any direct consequences on British Airways.
Ballard: Do you think your father stole your photograph? Did he set up some
kind of initiation rite for you? Father to son? A coming of age: a sort of
test, pass or fail-a ritual?
Prince: My father is a psychopath. Everybody knows, or maybe they don't,
but psychopaths never go out of fashion. That's what I know. And I'm beginning
to know that my last three weeks was maybe a birthday present. Love Dad.
You know, a birthday present from Dad? And if that's true, I guess I'll just
have to thank him in some totally convincing style.
*About this text: originally published under the title "Extra-ordinary",
Punch magazine, September 1967, by J.G. Ballard, author of Crash, Highrise,
Concrete Island. This version, published for the first time in ZG, was transcribed
by Richard Prince from J.G. Ballard's notes taken in an August '67
conversation between J.G. Ballard and Richard Prince.
Appeared in Spiritual America Richard Prince, a catalogue for IVAM, the
Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, in 1989; page 8. Published by Apeture.
ARTFORUM International March 2003, XLI No. 7 pg.70
40th Anniversary Special Issue: the 1980's Part I
J.G. Ballard: You were born in the Panama Canal Zone?
Richard Prince: Yes. In 1949.
Ballard: Panaman? Panamerican?
Prince: Yes. Something like that? I left with my mother and sister after my
father had been detentioned for presumably stockpiling arms and munitions for
what I imagined was the 19th nervous breakdown of Cuba. This was in 1956.
He was later released, moved to Hawaii and from there has been moving to and
from the city of Saigon (what is now known as Ho Chi Minh City).
Ballard: Aren't children born in the Canal Zone called Zonians?
Prince: Yes. The Canal Zone has represented for some time the concept of
unlimited possibility.
Prince: This year, eleven years after I left Panama, I tried to return to
Panama.
Ballard: You're eighteen?
Prince: Yes.
Ballard: The newspapers said your flight to Panama originated from Hawaii.
How did that happen?
Prince: I've been living with my father in Honolulu all summer. Blonde on
Blonde, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors. There's an aesthetic revolution going on.
Class systems have seemed to disappear. Things are opening up. I'm sure the
liberation will be brief. My father has become involved in introducing a
defoliant in Vietnam. Someone wants the jungles to disappear so U.S. soldiers can
see the enemy. The death of affect I think they call it.
Ballard: Your father sounds like someone who guarantees hostility and
incomprehension. A jungle is a hard thing to get rid of.
Prince: He would say something like he's interested in the hard light of
contemporary reality. He'd say his task is to invent reality, not fiction. He
talks like that. What some people dream of and write about, he actually does.
He loves Vietnam. He loves Vietnam women. I remember him saying something
about how he works with a group that call themselves Team Strange.
Ballard: Why return to Panama?
Prince: I was about to turn eighteen. I have a choice, by law, to become
either a Panamanian or an American or both. My father still has contacts with
government officials in Panama, and we thought it might be smart, for the
future, to secure a dual citizenship. The security required me to show up in
person. He put me on a PBY B-Moth. I landed in Panama three days before my
eighteenth birthday. I was following in my father's footsteps.
Ballard: I read in the paper that your troubles started with improper, or I
think it was, "the lack of sufficient papers or identity".
Prince: It was really stupid. I didn't have a photograph of myself in my
passport. Somehow the photograph that had been in my passport became unglued
and fell out somewhere. I don't knowâ€|I don't know how it happened. All I know
is when I opened my passport in Customs I found it was gone. The agents there
just looked at me and started shaking their heads.
Ballard: Your father?
Prince: I don't know.
Ballard: They kept you there for four days?
Prince: Five. At the airport.
Ballard: They treat you okay?
Prince: Psychic Jujitsu. That's all.
Ballard: Then what?
Prince: I became a citizen of British Airways.
Ballard: What I read in the newspapers sounded like you were living inside
an enormous novel.
Prince: I've spent the last three weeks on a jumbo jet crisscrossing the
Caribbean and Atlantic five times because no country will admit me.
Ballard: British immigration officials finally admitted you and held you in
custody while trying to arrange admission back to the U.S.?
Prince: Yes, British Airways has spent more than $13,500 feeding and flying
me around. I've racked up about 20,000miles in eight consecutive days of
jetting back and firth between London, Jamaica, Bermuda, and the Bahamas.
Ballard: According to immigration authorities, the Panamanians flew you to
the Bahamas Aug. 8, but then you were detained twelve days and put on a British
Airways flight to London.
Prince: Yes. I was never clear why I was sent to the Bahamas from Panama.
I have my own ideas. My own suspicions. But someone's orders put me on a
plane from the Bahamas to London, and when London wouldn't admit me, they sent me to Kingston, Jamaica. Jamaica refused me entry and sent me back to London.
London again turned me back to Kingston, which promptly flew me to London
again. En route I was refused entry in Bermuda. On Wednesday I landed here for
the third time and was allowed to remain in detention on British soil.
Ballard: You're still in detention?
Prince: Yes. But I don't know for how long. My father tells me he's flying
in in a couple of days. I talked to him three nights ago. He sounded
uncharacteristically light. Almost amused. He said he was close to the bottom of
it. He said something about wanting the exact details, hard information,
everything. My father likes to know what Charlie Manson has for breakfast. That's
why I emphasize everything.
Ballard: Earlier you said, "your own ideas"--- what do you mean, "your own
ideas"?
Prince: I'm not sure. At first I thought my return trip to Panama
backfired. Something like someone couldn't get to my father so they got to his son.
That kind of thing. My father's one of those imaginative criminals who wakes
up in the morning and almost makes a resolution to perform some sort of deviant
or antisocial act, even if it's just sort of kicking the dog. He says he
does this to establish his own freedom. What can I say? He's got a lot of
enemies.
Ballard: What do you think it is your father really does?
Prince: He's interested in applying the physical facts of the environment on
people. What he calls the third revolution. The "facts" he says are the
things that have come after the consumerism of the postindustrial revolution.
Ballard: In other words?
Prince: He invades people's lives with the very products they produce.
Ballard: He modifies the behavior of a particular group of people by what
they consume?
Prince: Exactly. He uses things like TVs, microchips, computers, chemicals,
tape recorders, cameras. He's very advanced at how to undermine your
situation with what you think you already own and what you think you might control.
Ballard: Like say, the film in your camera?
Prince: Yes. Something as ordinary as a roll of Tri-X. He can very easily
dismantle the convention of getting back your snapshots by infusing those
snapshots with the element of imagination and thus destabilize what was expected
to be everyday pedestrian reality. Serious illness and trauma could result
upon opening what was hoped to be pictures of your sweetheart or pictures of the
family barbecue. Once a friend of his told me how he planned to somehow
prescribe a type of contact lens for Castro, a kind that would produce dystopia.
Imagine Castro putting on a shirt and thinking the shirt was alive. Sometimes
his ideas are outlandishly absurd. Really funny. Some of them sound like a
joke. Never knowing when to take him seriously is part of his design.
Ballard: The joke, as you call it, is not far from the joke British Airways
is pulling on you right now. It's almost as if your present citizenship is a
direct result of one of your father's extreme hypotheses. What you find
yourself in is a type of religion offered up and advanced by British Airways: an
open-ended confession where the moral and psychological conclusions have yet to
be proven. They have this person, you, and they're looking at you and asking
themselves who is he, what is heâ€|they're treating your existence as if it were
a huge invention.
Prince: It's true. They're not taking me at face value. And that's what
surprises me. Maybe it's a conspiracy. I mean I know who I am is an enormous
accident, but I never thought they did. My father taught me that the position
of the observer itself affects the behavior of electrons or the fundamental
particles that are being observed. And I accept that. My identity is a
complete billion-to-one chance. But at the same time totally real. It's a paradox
we all have to live with, he says. But I'm beginning to see my situation is
too ideal for accidents.
Prince: In a way my situation for the last three weeks has been classic.
It's true. Something you read about in the newspapers. And if I can make any
sense out of these weeks in the air, they won't seem so random and meaningless
as I first thought they were. That's what I am trying to do now. Make sense.
Ballard: It's almost like you've been in an atrocity exhibition. British
Airways represents itself as another perfectable, meaningful world. You find
yourself enshrined in this Homeric journey, having to test yourself against vast
scientific and technological systems that began to unwind the moment you were
born, and here you are trying to unwind them even more.
Prince: Overdetermination. I should feel strange. Pissed off or something.
But I don't. You know, if I think about my situation, it's just another
conventionalized reality. What's happening to me is probably normal. Or going
to be. A look at things to come perhaps. The people who have been flying me
around haven't exactly acted surprised. I guess this is why I didn't get itâ€|but
am beginning to get it now. I'm beginning to get the sense that it's the
sensation of normality that might be the most extreme conclusion to the
hypothesis.
Ballard: Normality as the next special effect?
Prince: Something like that.
Ballard: How do you approximate the idea of sacrifice on British Airways?
What do you do? What would your father do? Kill the stewardess?
Prince: My father?-he'd cut off her nipples and feed the steward his penis.
Ballard: What would you do?
Prince: I don't know. British Airways is far too powerful to commit a
genuinely evil or morally repugnant act. I simply lack the ability to impose
myself to that extent on such an environment. I don't think my being a monster
would have any direct consequences on British Airways.
Ballard: Do you think your father stole your photograph? Did he set up some
kind of initiation rite for you? Father to son? A coming of age: a sort of
test, pass or fail-a ritual?
Prince: My father is a psychopath. Everybody knows, or maybe they don't,
but psychopaths never go out of fashion. That's what I know. And I'm beginning
to know that my last three weeks was maybe a birthday present. Love Dad.
You know, a birthday present from Dad? And if that's true, I guess I'll just
have to thank him in some totally convincing style.
*About this text: originally published under the title "Extra-ordinary",
Punch magazine, September 1967, by J.G. Ballard, author of Crash, Highrise,
Concrete Island. This version, published for the first time in ZG, was transcribed
by Richard Prince from J.G. Ballard's notes taken in an August '67
conversation between J.G. Ballard and Richard Prince.
Appeared in Spiritual America Richard Prince, a catalogue for IVAM, the
Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, in 1989; page 8. Published by Apeture.
Richard Prince talks to Steve LaFreniere
Richard Prince talks to Steve LaFreniere
ARTFORUM International March 2003, XLI No. 7 pg.70
40th Anniversary Special Issue: the 1980's Part I
Steve LaFreniere: You weren't in Douglas Crimp's "Pictures" exhibition, but
a lot of people seem to think you were, maybe because of your later
association with Helene Winer, who was at Artists Space before starting Metro Pictures.
Did you feel a kinship to the artists in the "Pictures" show?
Richard Prince: I've never said this before, but Doug Crimp actually asked
me to be in that show. I read his essay and told him it was for shit, that it
sounded like Roland Barthes. We haven't spoken since. I didn't know anybody
in the show at the time. I later became friends with Troy Brauntuch. I still
like his work.
SL: What you read didn't ring true in terms of what you were doing?
RP: 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. I had a
similar argument with Craig Owens. We had a difficult exchange and I ended up
not talking to him. But I more or less had feelings about what they were
describing. We were on parallel roads.
I also didn't understand Crimp's choices. There were a whole bunch of
people who could have been in that show, like James Casebere and Jim Welling, or
Laurie Simmons and Sarah Charlesworth- but none of them were, and that didn't
seem to make sense to me. There didn't seem to be any photography.
SL: Did not being in the show end up affecting your career?
RP: Well, like you said, people seem to think I was in it. People like
Cindy Sherman weren't in it too. I don't know who really ever read that essay.
Those shows and essays are for other critics. So I don't know what affects a
career. I do know that I would continually change what I did, which didn't help
in the beginning, but did in the end.
SL: I'd always assumed that you purposely made your early photos have an
amateur look, and that you'd done them quickly. But looking at them today would
suggest otherwise. How worked-on were pictures like Untitled (three women
looking in the same direction) 1980?
RP: I had limited technical skills regarding the camera. Actually, I had no
skills. I played the camera. I used a cheap commercial lab to blow up the
pictures. I made editions of two. I never went into a darkroom. And yes, I
really worked hard on Women. I mean, that piece still looks like it was purposely made.
SL: So you sort of fell into photography?
RP: In the early '80's I didn't have the subject matter for painting. I
didn't have the "jokes" until 1986. What I did have was magazines. I was
working at Time Life and was surrounded by magazines. I wanted to present the
images I saw in these magazines as naturally as when they first appeared. Making a
photograph of them seemed the best way to do it. I tore up the magazines and
re-photographed the pages. What I put out was a real photograph. It was
seamless. It wasn't a collage. I didn't exactly "fall" as much as steal.
SL: The cliché is that the dealers were all powerful then. But what about
the collectors?
RP: I think certain collections are powerful. I saw one in 1987, at the
Merino's in Monaco, where they placed a big Thomas Ruff next to a "Big Nude" by
Helmut Newton. They were leaning against the wall. It made me change my mind.
In the early '80's, to be collected by Charles Saatchi was another way to be
included, to be a part of what was happening. To be in instead of out, or so
it seemed at the time. Anyway, I was "left out". Nobody bought my early
work. I couldn't even give it away.
SL: You don't have such great memories of the collectors.
RP: The Rubells gave pretty good parties. Michael Schwartz started
collecting in the mid-'80's, concentrating on about ten artists. I remember one woman
collector asking me who "anon" was. She was surprised she didn't know him or
her, because they seemed to be listed in a lot of collections. She didn't
realize "anon" stood for anonomys. The best thing about being collected is
getting money.
SL: Do you think the critics understood what you were doing?
RP: I wasn't aware that there was much critical writing in the '80's about
my work. I think people were more focused on David Salle, Schnabel, Fischl,
Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer.
SL: Well, I remember one person gushing about your work's "complete
eventlessness".
RP: That sounds like cartoon language. Kind of like when Susan Sontag
describes taking a photograph as a "soft murder".
SL: Longo, Schnabel, Sherman-they've all made movies. I've often wondered
why you haven't.
RP: I'm not very collaborative. I like being alone. Working alone. I hate
actresses. I don't like having to ask permission. A green light is not something
I'd be happy waiting for.
SL: What films back then had an impact on you?
RP: The Road Warrior. First Blood. Alien. Drugstore Cowboy. The Terminator.
Did Blade Runner come out in the '80's? If it did, I liked that one- the
original, not the director's cut.
SL: In your novel Why I Go to the Movies Alone, there's this notion of
"counterfeit memory", the media landscape replacing personal history. Has that
idea panned out?
RP: Do androids dream of electric sheep? Virtual reality. Cloning.
Sampling. Substitutes. Surrogates. Stand-ins. It's either here or right around
the corner.
SL: True, and a lot of art is now addressing those very subjects. Do you
have any connection to younger artists?
RP: Most of my connections are with artists who are dead. From Smithson on
back. I go to the Met and crash on fourteenth-century icons. Younger ones?
I don't know. I like Collier Schorr. John Currin.
SL: What did you make of digital theorists like Gene Youngblood, who found
the cautions of people like Rosalind Krauss and Baudrillard alarmist?
RP: I'm not sure what "digital theory" is. I don't know who Gene Youngblood
is. I never read Baudrillard. I read Christian Metz. I read Truman Capote.
When my little girl falls on the pavement and her teeth go through her lower
lip and I have to take her to the hospital and watch her get stitches, I
don't really think about "almost real" or "really real". I don't think about
what's real anymore.
SL: Have you ever thought of your work as abstract?
RP: The "Joke" paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can't
speak English, if you can't read them they become abstract.
SL: Yes, I imagine the photos were received somewhat differently outside of
the US!
RP: First time I showed my photos was in Germany, 1978. Artists like
Kippenberger and Walter Dahn were very supportive. They grew up on Armed Services
Radio; they liked rock 'n roll; they liked the "Girlfriend" pictures.
SL: So many of those subjects you appropriated then still have pop currency
today. There are still biker-chick magazines on the stands, showgirl jokes in
Playboy, and Marlboro ads with cowboys. I just looked through my copy of
Inside World, and it seemed pretty up to date.
RP: The subject matter that I chose wasn't exactly popular, but it wasn't
obscure. It just wasn't fashionable. It was more like mainstream cults.
They're still around. They show up at airports. They have their own conventions.
They have their own C-SPAN. They call you up just before you sit down to
dinner. Anyone can find them.
SL: What was your first thought that you heard Andy Warhol had died?
RP: Sad. We had the same dentist. I used to run into him in the waiting
room. We used to talk about "collecting". This was the early '80's. I had
just started collecting first-edition books. He was a great artist.
SL: I recently read an essay that describes your work as "tight-lipped in
the Warholian manner". I thought that was pretty funny.
RP: I'm not sure what it means. Close to the vest? All-knowing?
Effortless? I remember seeing Warhol interviewed: He let someone else answer the
questions for him. He just sat there smiling, like he was throwing his voice.
"Tight-lipped"? I'm thinking it might mean "ventriloquist".
SL: There were references to so many bands in your work. Were you inspired
by music?
RP: I'm not so sure I was inspired by them, but I liked the Smiths. I saw
Sonic Youth in the late '80's in London. They were great. I liked the way
they rocked the Kitchen.
SL: You worked consistently back then with "trash" imagery, an area that
designers also began mining for 'zines and CD covers. Some even mimicked your
strategies, like blurring and aggressive cropping. Were you taking notice?
RP: If I noticed anything, I noticed that rock videos in the mid-'80's started using
"found" footage and started shooting black-and-white images with color film.
SL: The latter I would very much identify with you. Are you still
fascinated by muscle cars?
RP: Another "like", another subtext.. The movie Vanishing Point. The movie
Bullitt. I like the way a particular car gets painted by a teenager, you
know, primed and flaked. Carroll Shelby, the guy who put together the 1967 GT500
Mustang, is very cool. Car culture is pretty much about extended adolescence.
SL: I met a young woman recently who was wearing an Ed "Big Daddy: Roth
T-shirt. She later e-,ailed me that she was "into hot rod stuff, Kid Congo
Powers, Robert Williams, and Richard Prince. It seemed like a logical paradigm.
RP: I don't know who Kid Congo Powers is. Great name. I know the other
two. I wonder if it would be a logical paradigm if she were wearing a Jackson
Pollack T-shirt.
ARTFORUM International March 2003, XLI No. 7 pg.70
40th Anniversary Special Issue: the 1980's Part I
Steve LaFreniere: You weren't in Douglas Crimp's "Pictures" exhibition, but
a lot of people seem to think you were, maybe because of your later
association with Helene Winer, who was at Artists Space before starting Metro Pictures.
Did you feel a kinship to the artists in the "Pictures" show?
Richard Prince: I've never said this before, but Doug Crimp actually asked
me to be in that show. I read his essay and told him it was for shit, that it
sounded like Roland Barthes. We haven't spoken since. I didn't know anybody
in the show at the time. I later became friends with Troy Brauntuch. I still
like his work.
SL: What you read didn't ring true in terms of what you were doing?
RP: 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. I had a
similar argument with Craig Owens. We had a difficult exchange and I ended up
not talking to him. But I more or less had feelings about what they were
describing. We were on parallel roads.
I also didn't understand Crimp's choices. There were a whole bunch of
people who could have been in that show, like James Casebere and Jim Welling, or
Laurie Simmons and Sarah Charlesworth- but none of them were, and that didn't
seem to make sense to me. There didn't seem to be any photography.
SL: Did not being in the show end up affecting your career?
RP: Well, like you said, people seem to think I was in it. People like
Cindy Sherman weren't in it too. I don't know who really ever read that essay.
Those shows and essays are for other critics. So I don't know what affects a
career. I do know that I would continually change what I did, which didn't help
in the beginning, but did in the end.
SL: I'd always assumed that you purposely made your early photos have an
amateur look, and that you'd done them quickly. But looking at them today would
suggest otherwise. How worked-on were pictures like Untitled (three women
looking in the same direction) 1980?
RP: I had limited technical skills regarding the camera. Actually, I had no
skills. I played the camera. I used a cheap commercial lab to blow up the
pictures. I made editions of two. I never went into a darkroom. And yes, I
really worked hard on Women. I mean, that piece still looks like it was purposely made.
SL: So you sort of fell into photography?
RP: In the early '80's I didn't have the subject matter for painting. I
didn't have the "jokes" until 1986. What I did have was magazines. I was
working at Time Life and was surrounded by magazines. I wanted to present the
images I saw in these magazines as naturally as when they first appeared. Making a
photograph of them seemed the best way to do it. I tore up the magazines and
re-photographed the pages. What I put out was a real photograph. It was
seamless. It wasn't a collage. I didn't exactly "fall" as much as steal.
SL: The cliché is that the dealers were all powerful then. But what about
the collectors?
RP: I think certain collections are powerful. I saw one in 1987, at the
Merino's in Monaco, where they placed a big Thomas Ruff next to a "Big Nude" by
Helmut Newton. They were leaning against the wall. It made me change my mind.
In the early '80's, to be collected by Charles Saatchi was another way to be
included, to be a part of what was happening. To be in instead of out, or so
it seemed at the time. Anyway, I was "left out". Nobody bought my early
work. I couldn't even give it away.
SL: You don't have such great memories of the collectors.
RP: The Rubells gave pretty good parties. Michael Schwartz started
collecting in the mid-'80's, concentrating on about ten artists. I remember one woman
collector asking me who "anon" was. She was surprised she didn't know him or
her, because they seemed to be listed in a lot of collections. She didn't
realize "anon" stood for anonomys. The best thing about being collected is
getting money.
SL: Do you think the critics understood what you were doing?
RP: I wasn't aware that there was much critical writing in the '80's about
my work. I think people were more focused on David Salle, Schnabel, Fischl,
Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer.
SL: Well, I remember one person gushing about your work's "complete
eventlessness".
RP: That sounds like cartoon language. Kind of like when Susan Sontag
describes taking a photograph as a "soft murder".
SL: Longo, Schnabel, Sherman-they've all made movies. I've often wondered
why you haven't.
RP: I'm not very collaborative. I like being alone. Working alone. I hate
actresses. I don't like having to ask permission. A green light is not something
I'd be happy waiting for.
SL: What films back then had an impact on you?
RP: The Road Warrior. First Blood. Alien. Drugstore Cowboy. The Terminator.
Did Blade Runner come out in the '80's? If it did, I liked that one- the
original, not the director's cut.
SL: In your novel Why I Go to the Movies Alone, there's this notion of
"counterfeit memory", the media landscape replacing personal history. Has that
idea panned out?
RP: Do androids dream of electric sheep? Virtual reality. Cloning.
Sampling. Substitutes. Surrogates. Stand-ins. It's either here or right around
the corner.
SL: True, and a lot of art is now addressing those very subjects. Do you
have any connection to younger artists?
RP: Most of my connections are with artists who are dead. From Smithson on
back. I go to the Met and crash on fourteenth-century icons. Younger ones?
I don't know. I like Collier Schorr. John Currin.
SL: What did you make of digital theorists like Gene Youngblood, who found
the cautions of people like Rosalind Krauss and Baudrillard alarmist?
RP: I'm not sure what "digital theory" is. I don't know who Gene Youngblood
is. I never read Baudrillard. I read Christian Metz. I read Truman Capote.
When my little girl falls on the pavement and her teeth go through her lower
lip and I have to take her to the hospital and watch her get stitches, I
don't really think about "almost real" or "really real". I don't think about
what's real anymore.
SL: Have you ever thought of your work as abstract?
RP: The "Joke" paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can't
speak English, if you can't read them they become abstract.
SL: Yes, I imagine the photos were received somewhat differently outside of
the US!
RP: First time I showed my photos was in Germany, 1978. Artists like
Kippenberger and Walter Dahn were very supportive. They grew up on Armed Services
Radio; they liked rock 'n roll; they liked the "Girlfriend" pictures.
SL: So many of those subjects you appropriated then still have pop currency
today. There are still biker-chick magazines on the stands, showgirl jokes in
Playboy, and Marlboro ads with cowboys. I just looked through my copy of
Inside World, and it seemed pretty up to date.
RP: The subject matter that I chose wasn't exactly popular, but it wasn't
obscure. It just wasn't fashionable. It was more like mainstream cults.
They're still around. They show up at airports. They have their own conventions.
They have their own C-SPAN. They call you up just before you sit down to
dinner. Anyone can find them.
SL: What was your first thought that you heard Andy Warhol had died?
RP: Sad. We had the same dentist. I used to run into him in the waiting
room. We used to talk about "collecting". This was the early '80's. I had
just started collecting first-edition books. He was a great artist.
SL: I recently read an essay that describes your work as "tight-lipped in
the Warholian manner". I thought that was pretty funny.
RP: I'm not sure what it means. Close to the vest? All-knowing?
Effortless? I remember seeing Warhol interviewed: He let someone else answer the
questions for him. He just sat there smiling, like he was throwing his voice.
"Tight-lipped"? I'm thinking it might mean "ventriloquist".
SL: There were references to so many bands in your work. Were you inspired
by music?
RP: I'm not so sure I was inspired by them, but I liked the Smiths. I saw
Sonic Youth in the late '80's in London. They were great. I liked the way
they rocked the Kitchen.
SL: You worked consistently back then with "trash" imagery, an area that
designers also began mining for 'zines and CD covers. Some even mimicked your
strategies, like blurring and aggressive cropping. Were you taking notice?
RP: If I noticed anything, I noticed that rock videos in the mid-'80's started using
"found" footage and started shooting black-and-white images with color film.
SL: The latter I would very much identify with you. Are you still
fascinated by muscle cars?
RP: Another "like", another subtext.. The movie Vanishing Point. The movie
Bullitt. I like the way a particular car gets painted by a teenager, you
know, primed and flaked. Carroll Shelby, the guy who put together the 1967 GT500
Mustang, is very cool. Car culture is pretty much about extended adolescence.
SL: I met a young woman recently who was wearing an Ed "Big Daddy: Roth
T-shirt. She later e-,ailed me that she was "into hot rod stuff, Kid Congo
Powers, Robert Williams, and Richard Prince. It seemed like a logical paradigm.
RP: I don't know who Kid Congo Powers is. Great name. I know the other
two. I wonder if it would be a logical paradigm if she were wearing a Jackson
Pollack T-shirt.
Like A Beautiful Scar On Your Head / Modern Painters SPECIAL AMERICAN ISSUE Autumn 2002
Like A Beautiful Scar On Your Head
Modern Painters SPECIAL AMERICAN ISSUE Autumn 2002
Volume 15, Number 3.
"For our SPECIAL AMERICAN ISSUE, we invited Richard prince to curate an
on-the-page installation. Best known for his photographs and his joke paintings, Prince reveals in his email responses to MODERN PAINTERS' questions that while his sources are multifarious, by no means anything goes".
Have you always been funny?
Richard Prince: No, I'm not so funny. I like it when other people are
funny. It's hard being funny. Being funny is a way to survive. It's like that
joke: Jewish Man to his Friend: 'If I live I'll see you Wednesday. If I don't
I'll see you Thursday'.
When did you start telling jokes?
Prince: I never really started telling. I started telling them over. Back in 1985,
in Venice, California, I was drawing my favorite cartoons in pencil on paper.
After this I dropped the illustration or image part of the cartoon and
concentrated on the punch line.
What was your first joke? And when did you tell it?
Prince: The 'psychiatrist' joke. 1986- when I was living in New York, in the back of
303 Gallery on Park Ave. South. Like this- 'I went to see a psychiatrist. He
said "tell me everything", I did, and now he's doing my act'. I wrote it out
by hand on a piece of paper with a pencil. On a small piece of paper. I
called it a "Hand-Written "joke.
Are they always your own jokes?
Prince: None of them are mine. I get them from magazines, books, the internet.
Sometimes from the inside of a bank. You know they're just like blueprints that
float around the sky and show up on a cloud. Sometimes I buy them from other
criminals. People tell them to me. Ministers. Rabbis. Priests. Once I saw
one in the washing machine spinning around getting clean.
Do you laugh at your own jokes?
Prince: No.
Are there comedians you enjoy watching?
Prince: Sam Kinison. Bernie Mac. Richard Pryor. Phyllis Diller. Rodney
Dangerfield.
Are there any no-go areas of humour?
Prince: Religious paintings. Religious jokes. Black paintings. Black jokes. White
paintings. White jokes. Right and wrong. Responsibility. Crossing a line.
Step over this line if you want to fight, and then that someone does and you
step back and draw another line. 'Why did the Nazi cross the road?' That's
it. My no-going area is like living in sand. Moving by wading more than
swimming. I mean I wouldn't kill for a joke. There's a lot of areas the world
goes where it shouldn't be going. The world is fucked up enough without me
fucking it up more.
Most people start painting and then add words. Did you start the other way?
Prince: I got my supplies. I got my houseboat. I got a good pair of shoes. The
light is good. The clock is ticking. I wake up and I'm doing it in my sleep.
The bed is made and the floor is clean. It's my turn to drive, I sit back. I stare.
I stare at the painting and I forget. It's finished. Then I get more canvas and
more stretchers and more paint and start over.
When did you first think that you were a serious artist?
Prince: In 1967. I was seventeen. I walked into the Whiskey on Sunset Strip and
heard Jim Morrison sing Roadhouse Blues.
Does your art come from an autobiographical source?
Prince: It's all just like me. And it's all what I like. If you like it, I'll call
it mine. But you can't say it's all mine. Some of me, some of you. Most of
me, none of you. It's like when they ask me where I'm from- I say, 'not from
any place really'. And they say, 'What? Born in a balloon?'
What do you see as your major influences?
The Canal Zone. Peach Street in Braintree, Mass. Zorro. Carving the word
'shit' on my desk in fifth grade. Getting to know how to make it come out of
my cock in sixth grade. Steve McQueen and the two cars in the movie Bullitt.
Watching Lee Harvey Oswald get shot on TV. The Vietnam war. Martin Luther
King's assassination. Jackson Pollack. Lenny Bruce. Jimmy Piersol (he played
baseball for the Boston Red Sox and he was mentally unstable). Touching the
Berlin Wall in 1968. Rod Sterling. Hugh Hefner. What's My Line? Truth or
Consequences. Who Do You Trust? The Ed Sullivan Show (all TV shows). Milton
Bradley. Christian Metz. Lew Welch (a poet). Two Lane Blacktop (a movie).
Woodstock. Procol Harum. Blonde on Blonde. Beach combing in Weymouth, Mass,
when I was a teenager. West Side Story- especially the outfit Bernardo wore
to the YMCA dance. The INs and OUTs of the New York Social Register. The
fragrance counter at Sak's Fifth Avenue. Carol Shelby. The shininess of the
Velvet Underground. The Beach Boys'. In My Room. The World of Video. Tons
more. Tons.
Are there other artists working today or in the past that you rate highly?
Christopher Wool. Jeff Koons. Fischli & Weiss. David Hammonds. Sarah
Lucas. Martin Kippenberger. Rosemarie Trockel. Walter Dahn. George Condo.
James Casebere. James Welling. Dike Blair. Ricky Sparrow. Damien Hirst.
Thomas Ruff.
Is advertising a major influence in your work?
Overdetermination. Art directed. Psychologically hopped-up. Too good to be
true. The way it could be but never is. I wouldn't say an influence so much
as a sub-text. I've always liked when the impossible looks possible. Like a
good Sci-Fi film.
Although your subject matter is loud, your palette seems quiet.
Is this how you see it?
Yes. Like a beautiful scar on our head.
As well as jokes, are you also working on other kinds of painting?
YES. I'm painting nurses. I like their hats. Their aprons. Their shoes.
My mother was a nurse. My sister was a nurse. My grandmother and two cousins
were nurses. I collect 'nurse' books. Paperbacks. You can't miss them.
They're all over the airport. I like the words 'nurse', 'nurses', 'nursing'.
I'm recovering.
Do you work at the same time with photographic images as well as
written ones?
Yes. Mixing up the medicine. Pajamas and a pipe. Slippers and a dog. Back
and forth. Which is which? Bang a gong. Dip a brush. Click a camera.
It's a free concert from now on.
Do you find it confusing to work in different media at the same time?
There's nothing confusing about making art for me. I can't build a house. I
can't ride a horse. I can't repair a car. I can't sing and I can't vote.
Wavy hair. Freckles on a face. An arm defined by a vein. I can make art.
Does working and living outside of New York help to focus the
mind on art matters and avoid art politics?
I like living outside. Working outside. Right now outside is good. I can
eat politics, I can sleep politics, but I don't have to drink politics.
Modern Painters SPECIAL AMERICAN ISSUE Autumn 2002
Volume 15, Number 3.
"For our SPECIAL AMERICAN ISSUE, we invited Richard prince to curate an
on-the-page installation. Best known for his photographs and his joke paintings, Prince reveals in his email responses to MODERN PAINTERS' questions that while his sources are multifarious, by no means anything goes".
Have you always been funny?
Richard Prince: No, I'm not so funny. I like it when other people are
funny. It's hard being funny. Being funny is a way to survive. It's like that
joke: Jewish Man to his Friend: 'If I live I'll see you Wednesday. If I don't
I'll see you Thursday'.
When did you start telling jokes?
Prince: I never really started telling. I started telling them over. Back in 1985,
in Venice, California, I was drawing my favorite cartoons in pencil on paper.
After this I dropped the illustration or image part of the cartoon and
concentrated on the punch line.
What was your first joke? And when did you tell it?
Prince: The 'psychiatrist' joke. 1986- when I was living in New York, in the back of
303 Gallery on Park Ave. South. Like this- 'I went to see a psychiatrist. He
said "tell me everything", I did, and now he's doing my act'. I wrote it out
by hand on a piece of paper with a pencil. On a small piece of paper. I
called it a "Hand-Written "joke.
Are they always your own jokes?
Prince: None of them are mine. I get them from magazines, books, the internet.
Sometimes from the inside of a bank. You know they're just like blueprints that
float around the sky and show up on a cloud. Sometimes I buy them from other
criminals. People tell them to me. Ministers. Rabbis. Priests. Once I saw
one in the washing machine spinning around getting clean.
Do you laugh at your own jokes?
Prince: No.
Are there comedians you enjoy watching?
Prince: Sam Kinison. Bernie Mac. Richard Pryor. Phyllis Diller. Rodney
Dangerfield.
Are there any no-go areas of humour?
Prince: Religious paintings. Religious jokes. Black paintings. Black jokes. White
paintings. White jokes. Right and wrong. Responsibility. Crossing a line.
Step over this line if you want to fight, and then that someone does and you
step back and draw another line. 'Why did the Nazi cross the road?' That's
it. My no-going area is like living in sand. Moving by wading more than
swimming. I mean I wouldn't kill for a joke. There's a lot of areas the world
goes where it shouldn't be going. The world is fucked up enough without me
fucking it up more.
Most people start painting and then add words. Did you start the other way?
Prince: I got my supplies. I got my houseboat. I got a good pair of shoes. The
light is good. The clock is ticking. I wake up and I'm doing it in my sleep.
The bed is made and the floor is clean. It's my turn to drive, I sit back. I stare.
I stare at the painting and I forget. It's finished. Then I get more canvas and
more stretchers and more paint and start over.
When did you first think that you were a serious artist?
Prince: In 1967. I was seventeen. I walked into the Whiskey on Sunset Strip and
heard Jim Morrison sing Roadhouse Blues.
Does your art come from an autobiographical source?
Prince: It's all just like me. And it's all what I like. If you like it, I'll call
it mine. But you can't say it's all mine. Some of me, some of you. Most of
me, none of you. It's like when they ask me where I'm from- I say, 'not from
any place really'. And they say, 'What? Born in a balloon?'
What do you see as your major influences?
The Canal Zone. Peach Street in Braintree, Mass. Zorro. Carving the word
'shit' on my desk in fifth grade. Getting to know how to make it come out of
my cock in sixth grade. Steve McQueen and the two cars in the movie Bullitt.
Watching Lee Harvey Oswald get shot on TV. The Vietnam war. Martin Luther
King's assassination. Jackson Pollack. Lenny Bruce. Jimmy Piersol (he played
baseball for the Boston Red Sox and he was mentally unstable). Touching the
Berlin Wall in 1968. Rod Sterling. Hugh Hefner. What's My Line? Truth or
Consequences. Who Do You Trust? The Ed Sullivan Show (all TV shows). Milton
Bradley. Christian Metz. Lew Welch (a poet). Two Lane Blacktop (a movie).
Woodstock. Procol Harum. Blonde on Blonde. Beach combing in Weymouth, Mass,
when I was a teenager. West Side Story- especially the outfit Bernardo wore
to the YMCA dance. The INs and OUTs of the New York Social Register. The
fragrance counter at Sak's Fifth Avenue. Carol Shelby. The shininess of the
Velvet Underground. The Beach Boys'. In My Room. The World of Video. Tons
more. Tons.
Are there other artists working today or in the past that you rate highly?
Christopher Wool. Jeff Koons. Fischli & Weiss. David Hammonds. Sarah
Lucas. Martin Kippenberger. Rosemarie Trockel. Walter Dahn. George Condo.
James Casebere. James Welling. Dike Blair. Ricky Sparrow. Damien Hirst.
Thomas Ruff.
Is advertising a major influence in your work?
Overdetermination. Art directed. Psychologically hopped-up. Too good to be
true. The way it could be but never is. I wouldn't say an influence so much
as a sub-text. I've always liked when the impossible looks possible. Like a
good Sci-Fi film.
Although your subject matter is loud, your palette seems quiet.
Is this how you see it?
Yes. Like a beautiful scar on our head.
As well as jokes, are you also working on other kinds of painting?
YES. I'm painting nurses. I like their hats. Their aprons. Their shoes.
My mother was a nurse. My sister was a nurse. My grandmother and two cousins
were nurses. I collect 'nurse' books. Paperbacks. You can't miss them.
They're all over the airport. I like the words 'nurse', 'nurses', 'nursing'.
I'm recovering.
Do you work at the same time with photographic images as well as
written ones?
Yes. Mixing up the medicine. Pajamas and a pipe. Slippers and a dog. Back
and forth. Which is which? Bang a gong. Dip a brush. Click a camera.
It's a free concert from now on.
Do you find it confusing to work in different media at the same time?
There's nothing confusing about making art for me. I can't build a house. I
can't ride a horse. I can't repair a car. I can't sing and I can't vote.
Wavy hair. Freckles on a face. An arm defined by a vein. I can make art.
Does working and living outside of New York help to focus the
mind on art matters and avoid art politics?
I like living outside. Working outside. Right now outside is good. I can
eat politics, I can sleep politics, but I don't have to drink politics.
"ART TALK! RICHARD PRINCE"
http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1213891072
http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1219795828
http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1217632646
http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1213949991
http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1219795828
http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1217632646
http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1213949991
FRANZ KLINE - y el inconsciente fotográfico Wilkes-Barre, 1910 - Nueva York, 1962
(Black reflections, 1959)
DENNIS HOPPER - la actuación y la cultura popular Dodge City, 17 de mayo de 1936
(Dennnis hopper, 1971 por Andy Warhol)
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