richard prince the second house
A Connoisseur of the Unnoticed, Having His Moment
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: December 31, 2004
Chris Ramirez for The New York Times
No more East Village rentals: Richard Prince in his studio upstate in Rensselaerville, N.Y.
RENSSELAERVILLE, N.Y. - It could be the setting for a murder mystery: a 1960's prefabricated house sitting empty in the middle of a field, only the silver insulation left on its exterior. Buried in the unkempt foliage out back is a 1973 Dodge Barracuda painted a flat black.
"It's very 'Twin Peaks,' " said the artist Richard Prince, 55, as he pulled his pickup truck through the thicket. "The house is simple, very indigenous to the area."
Mr. Prince bought the abandoned one-story structure and the surrounding 80 acres sight unseen in 2001. "A New Jersey cop had built it as a place to hunt," he explained. "It was a total mess."
What about the car? "Everyone has a car in their yard," he said, adding that the silver insulation rather than proper siding is common for the area, too.
As neglected as the house appears from the outside, inside is a series of carefully conceived gallery spaces for art by Mr. Prince, whose work has been in high demand lately. From the 1990's, there is a sculpture fashioned from a car hood, a publicity photograph of Sid Vicious and a planter cast from an old car tire. A road barrier cast in plaster was made four years ago. There is also an example from his 1988-89 series of joke paintings, on which the words of a joke appear. (Among the best known are "Every time I meet a girl who can cook like my mother she looks like my father" and "I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.")
The house, the car, the art are all for sale. But only as a package. And it comes with conditions: nothing can be removed, unless a work of art is requested for an exhibition. (Mr. Prince would not divulge his asking a price; interested parties may contact his dealer, Barbara Gladstone.)
Any buyer of what he calls "The Second House" (he and his family live in an old farmhouse elsewhere on the property) will get a sampling of the best of Mr. Prince: an original, often dark slice of American pop culture seen through paintings, sculptures, drawings and objects, all wrapped up in a neat domestic package. Since the late 1970's, Mr. Prince has been preoccupied with his personal perspective on American life. He has recorded it by rephotographing magazine images - cowboys appropriated from Marlboro cigarette advertisements, pictures cribbed from periodicals about bikers, surfers, car fanatics and heavy-metal musicians.
Mr. Prince has a fascination with pulp fiction, too. He has taken images of female nurses from the covers of 1940's erotic novels, for example, and made them the basis of a series of paintings, after a little twisting to make them his own. These nurses are somewhat demonic. Some are smeared with blood, others are wearing pristine white surgical masks.
Mr. Prince relishes things that go unnoticed by most people and uses them as the subject of his work - like the jokes, which are sometimes accompanied by cartoons that capture his imagination but are unrelated to the words of the jokes.
Obscure No More
Unlike Julian Schnabel or Robert Longo or the scores of other artists who came of age in the 1980's and whose moment has faded, Mr. Prince was ignored for years. Only now is he considered something of a superstar. His works are fought over at auctions, and institutions like the Museum of Modern Art are scouring the market to find some of his early work. The galleries PaceWildenstein and Gagosian are nibbling at the artist's heels, trying to persuade him to switch from Ms. Gladstone, the Chelsea dealer who has represented him since 1987.
In late February Gagosian will show a group of Mr. Prince's new paintings at its Los Angeles gallery. Called "The Check Paintings," they incorporate canceled checks from other artists, friends and celebrities, and the exhibition has been timed to coincide with the Oscars. "I always believed he would be a great artist, even though he was underrecognized for years," Ms. Gladstone said. "His work is understated, subtle."
There are diehard collectors of Mr. Prince's work, including Michael Schwartz and the Miami collectors Donald and Mera Rubell, who began buying his work 20 years ago. But they are exceptions. Most of the people now paying high prices for his joke paintings, cowboy photographs and hood sculptures only recently discovered his work.
Chrissie Isles, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who included a group of Mr. Prince's car hoods in the museum's 2003 biennial, said she believed he was popular now because he spoke to "the cut-and-paste generation."
"He is not about vulgarity as much of the 1980's artists were; rather he's about defining appropriation," she said. "Richard's weaving pop culture - whether it's the cinema or Hell's Angels - into something new that people can understand."
A Surprise $700,000
Ms. Gladstone bristles at the notion that Mr. Prince is "hot" right now.
"Hot is a dangerous thing, a double-edged sword," she said. "A lot of people like and need market validation." Indeed, in the contemporary art world, which runs in large part on the herd instinct, it was only when an early joke painting of Mr. Prince's sold in May for more than $700,000 at a Phillips, de Pury & Company auction in Chelsea that certain people began to pay attention. Since then his prices have risen.
So has an appetite for the kind of images he captures.
"He is an artist who takes time to appreciate," said Peter Brant, the newsprint magnate and collector who has been buying Mr. Prince's work in depth for the last couple of years. "I went to see the nurse show and was flabbergasted," he added, referring to an exhibition at Gladstone last year.
Sandy Heller, a Manhattan art adviser, said Mr. Prince's appeal was not limited to Americans: "Europeans love it, too, because it's their view of what America is, as they know it from movies. He's Warhol's heir."
Mr. Prince is a big Warhol fan. "Warhol and I have two things in common," he said. "We have the same birthday and the same dentist." He collects Warhol books. But then again, Mr. Prince is an obsessive book collector.
His growing collection of books begins with Orwell's "1984," because it was written in 1949, the year he was born, and includes everything from serious literature (he has 56 editions of Nabokov's "Lolita") to those 1940's erotic novels.
Some works he collects in depth. Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," for instance. "I have everything but the manuscript - galleys, advanced proofs, one with a trial dust jack, an inscribed copy of his sister's, everything I can find," Mr. Prince said. He also has what is believed to be the only known portion of the original manuscript of "The Godfather" - the author's typed version complete with corrections in his own hand - and an inscribed copy of Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls."
"When I was growing up we didn't have books," he said. "We only had A-G of the encyclopedia." Mr. Prince was born in the Panama Canal Zone but grew up in Braintree, Mass., a suburb of Boston.
The San Francisco Art Institute rejected his application, which proposed as his project driving the teachers around in a 1968 Dodge Charger, the same model used in the movie "Bullitt." So he moved to New York in 1973 and began working at Time-Life, doing odd jobs like compiling tear sheets or working in the employee bookstore.
"I had a secret studio in the subbasement," he said. "At the end of the day all I had left was a batch of advertisements, so that's when I began rephotographing them," he recalled. At that time, he said, he didn't have his own studio. "I barely had an apartment; I rented rooms for $75 a month in the East Village."
A Times Square Moment
Even now he doesn't have a darkroom. Everything is done in commercial labs. For a while during his days at Time-Life he had the graveyard shift, working all night compiling tear sheets. During his two-hour break he would hang out in Times Square "and pretend I was Tony Curtis in the 'Sweet Smell of Success,' " he said. It wasn't until 1985 that he mustered up the courage to quit and work as an artist full time.
For years Mr. Prince supported himself with odd jobs. One of his favorites, he said, was editing photographs for Mademoiselle magazine covers. "I got paid $500 a cover," he said. "My girlfriend was the art director, and she would come home at night with the shoot, and I'd select four or five images and rate them."
The year was 1985, and during that time newsstand sales increased 11 percent, he said. "It was totally anonymous work," Mr. Prince added. "I liked it that way."
Little has changed. Today he likes his anonymous life in Rensselaerville, where he and his wife, Noel, and their two children moved seven years ago. Near their old farmhouse is a cluster of buildings that serve as his studio and galleries. (These buildings are not for sale.) A small retrospective of Mr. Prince's work fills the walls of these galleries- many of the early joke paintings, the car hood sculptures and a selection of drawings.
Mr. Prince has kept the first photograph he ever took: at Woodstock in 1969. He had borrowed his mother's camera but it had only one exposure left on the roll of film. "It was driving me nuts," he said. "So at 7:30 I just whirled around and snapped it." He framed the shot - a glimpse at the audience around him - and mounted his concert ticket on the back.
Mr. Prince's archives and library are so large that he recently bought an 1820's building in town, which he plans to turn into a library.
"The public will be able to come in, and it's a place I can exhibit any work that has to do with books," he said. "I've always liked the idea of controlling the space in which the work is shown. It goes back to the idea of domestic space, space that feels comfortable."
The nurse paintings weren't so good, I'm sorry to report.
Slightly off topic: I have a cancelled check signed by Moe Howard of the Three Stooges.
The line about only having A-G of the encyclopedia is funny.
signed, "The Cut and Paste Generation"
|
- bill 1-01-2005 2:14 am
A Connoisseur of the Unnoticed, Having His Moment
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: December 31, 2004
Chris Ramirez for The New York Times
No more East Village rentals: Richard Prince in his studio upstate in Rensselaerville, N.Y.
RENSSELAERVILLE, N.Y. - It could be the setting for a murder mystery: a 1960's prefabricated house sitting empty in the middle of a field, only the silver insulation left on its exterior. Buried in the unkempt foliage out back is a 1973 Dodge Barracuda painted a flat black.
"It's very 'Twin Peaks,' " said the artist Richard Prince, 55, as he pulled his pickup truck through the thicket. "The house is simple, very indigenous to the area."
Mr. Prince bought the abandoned one-story structure and the surrounding 80 acres sight unseen in 2001. "A New Jersey cop had built it as a place to hunt," he explained. "It was a total mess."
What about the car? "Everyone has a car in their yard," he said, adding that the silver insulation rather than proper siding is common for the area, too.
As neglected as the house appears from the outside, inside is a series of carefully conceived gallery spaces for art by Mr. Prince, whose work has been in high demand lately. From the 1990's, there is a sculpture fashioned from a car hood, a publicity photograph of Sid Vicious and a planter cast from an old car tire. A road barrier cast in plaster was made four years ago. There is also an example from his 1988-89 series of joke paintings, on which the words of a joke appear. (Among the best known are "Every time I meet a girl who can cook like my mother she looks like my father" and "I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.")
The house, the car, the art are all for sale. But only as a package. And it comes with conditions: nothing can be removed, unless a work of art is requested for an exhibition. (Mr. Prince would not divulge his asking a price; interested parties may contact his dealer, Barbara Gladstone.)
Any buyer of what he calls "The Second House" (he and his family live in an old farmhouse elsewhere on the property) will get a sampling of the best of Mr. Prince: an original, often dark slice of American pop culture seen through paintings, sculptures, drawings and objects, all wrapped up in a neat domestic package. Since the late 1970's, Mr. Prince has been preoccupied with his personal perspective on American life. He has recorded it by rephotographing magazine images - cowboys appropriated from Marlboro cigarette advertisements, pictures cribbed from periodicals about bikers, surfers, car fanatics and heavy-metal musicians.
Mr. Prince has a fascination with pulp fiction, too. He has taken images of female nurses from the covers of 1940's erotic novels, for example, and made them the basis of a series of paintings, after a little twisting to make them his own. These nurses are somewhat demonic. Some are smeared with blood, others are wearing pristine white surgical masks.
Mr. Prince relishes things that go unnoticed by most people and uses them as the subject of his work - like the jokes, which are sometimes accompanied by cartoons that capture his imagination but are unrelated to the words of the jokes.
Obscure No More
Unlike Julian Schnabel or Robert Longo or the scores of other artists who came of age in the 1980's and whose moment has faded, Mr. Prince was ignored for years. Only now is he considered something of a superstar. His works are fought over at auctions, and institutions like the Museum of Modern Art are scouring the market to find some of his early work. The galleries PaceWildenstein and Gagosian are nibbling at the artist's heels, trying to persuade him to switch from Ms. Gladstone, the Chelsea dealer who has represented him since 1987.
In late February Gagosian will show a group of Mr. Prince's new paintings at its Los Angeles gallery. Called "The Check Paintings," they incorporate canceled checks from other artists, friends and celebrities, and the exhibition has been timed to coincide with the Oscars. "I always believed he would be a great artist, even though he was underrecognized for years," Ms. Gladstone said. "His work is understated, subtle."
There are diehard collectors of Mr. Prince's work, including Michael Schwartz and the Miami collectors Donald and Mera Rubell, who began buying his work 20 years ago. But they are exceptions. Most of the people now paying high prices for his joke paintings, cowboy photographs and hood sculptures only recently discovered his work.
Chrissie Isles, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who included a group of Mr. Prince's car hoods in the museum's 2003 biennial, said she believed he was popular now because he spoke to "the cut-and-paste generation."
"He is not about vulgarity as much of the 1980's artists were; rather he's about defining appropriation," she said. "Richard's weaving pop culture - whether it's the cinema or Hell's Angels - into something new that people can understand."
A Surprise $700,000
Ms. Gladstone bristles at the notion that Mr. Prince is "hot" right now.
"Hot is a dangerous thing, a double-edged sword," she said. "A lot of people like and need market validation." Indeed, in the contemporary art world, which runs in large part on the herd instinct, it was only when an early joke painting of Mr. Prince's sold in May for more than $700,000 at a Phillips, de Pury & Company auction in Chelsea that certain people began to pay attention. Since then his prices have risen.
So has an appetite for the kind of images he captures.
"He is an artist who takes time to appreciate," said Peter Brant, the newsprint magnate and collector who has been buying Mr. Prince's work in depth for the last couple of years. "I went to see the nurse show and was flabbergasted," he added, referring to an exhibition at Gladstone last year.
Sandy Heller, a Manhattan art adviser, said Mr. Prince's appeal was not limited to Americans: "Europeans love it, too, because it's their view of what America is, as they know it from movies. He's Warhol's heir."
Mr. Prince is a big Warhol fan. "Warhol and I have two things in common," he said. "We have the same birthday and the same dentist." He collects Warhol books. But then again, Mr. Prince is an obsessive book collector.
His growing collection of books begins with Orwell's "1984," because it was written in 1949, the year he was born, and includes everything from serious literature (he has 56 editions of Nabokov's "Lolita") to those 1940's erotic novels.
Some works he collects in depth. Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," for instance. "I have everything but the manuscript - galleys, advanced proofs, one with a trial dust jack, an inscribed copy of his sister's, everything I can find," Mr. Prince said. He also has what is believed to be the only known portion of the original manuscript of "The Godfather" - the author's typed version complete with corrections in his own hand - and an inscribed copy of Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls."
"When I was growing up we didn't have books," he said. "We only had A-G of the encyclopedia." Mr. Prince was born in the Panama Canal Zone but grew up in Braintree, Mass., a suburb of Boston.
The San Francisco Art Institute rejected his application, which proposed as his project driving the teachers around in a 1968 Dodge Charger, the same model used in the movie "Bullitt." So he moved to New York in 1973 and began working at Time-Life, doing odd jobs like compiling tear sheets or working in the employee bookstore.
"I had a secret studio in the subbasement," he said. "At the end of the day all I had left was a batch of advertisements, so that's when I began rephotographing them," he recalled. At that time, he said, he didn't have his own studio. "I barely had an apartment; I rented rooms for $75 a month in the East Village."
A Times Square Moment
Even now he doesn't have a darkroom. Everything is done in commercial labs. For a while during his days at Time-Life he had the graveyard shift, working all night compiling tear sheets. During his two-hour break he would hang out in Times Square "and pretend I was Tony Curtis in the 'Sweet Smell of Success,' " he said. It wasn't until 1985 that he mustered up the courage to quit and work as an artist full time.
For years Mr. Prince supported himself with odd jobs. One of his favorites, he said, was editing photographs for Mademoiselle magazine covers. "I got paid $500 a cover," he said. "My girlfriend was the art director, and she would come home at night with the shoot, and I'd select four or five images and rate them."
The year was 1985, and during that time newsstand sales increased 11 percent, he said. "It was totally anonymous work," Mr. Prince added. "I liked it that way."
Little has changed. Today he likes his anonymous life in Rensselaerville, where he and his wife, Noel, and their two children moved seven years ago. Near their old farmhouse is a cluster of buildings that serve as his studio and galleries. (These buildings are not for sale.) A small retrospective of Mr. Prince's work fills the walls of these galleries- many of the early joke paintings, the car hood sculptures and a selection of drawings.
Mr. Prince has kept the first photograph he ever took: at Woodstock in 1969. He had borrowed his mother's camera but it had only one exposure left on the roll of film. "It was driving me nuts," he said. "So at 7:30 I just whirled around and snapped it." He framed the shot - a glimpse at the audience around him - and mounted his concert ticket on the back.
Mr. Prince's archives and library are so large that he recently bought an 1820's building in town, which he plans to turn into a library.
"The public will be able to come in, and it's a place I can exhibit any work that has to do with books," he said. "I've always liked the idea of controlling the space in which the work is shown. It goes back to the idea of domestic space, space that feels comfortable."
- bill 1-01-2005 2:16 am [add a comment]
The nurse paintings weren't so good, I'm sorry to report.
Slightly off topic: I have a cancelled check signed by Moe Howard of the Three Stooges.
The line about only having A-G of the encyclopedia is funny.
signed, "The Cut and Paste Generation"
- tom moody 1-01-2005 3:49 am [add a comment]