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Published on 5/16/08
Published on 5/15/08
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If life were like the movies, Richard Prince’s 30-year career would be an epic car chase (like that scene in one of his favorite movies, Bullitt), with the artist alternately pursuing and dodging the spotlight with squealing tires, gunned engines and copious plumes of exhaust. His visual universe—of Marlboro men, biker chicks, New Yorker cartoons and automobilia, all extracted from our collective image bank and re-presented as photographs, sculptures and paintings—is now firmly entrenched alongside the bluest of blue-chip art. Yet Prince has long cultivated the image of the reclusive maverick who’s more than willing to stray off the art-world grid in pursuit of lowbrow marginalia.
In the past decade, that has meant spending his time building a miniprincipality of installations-cum-establishments in upstate Rensselaerville, where he lives with his wife and children. These projects have included a ramshackle hilltop house that the artist converted into a display space for his works; a stately archive built to hold his collection of rare books, manuscripts and letters (including Vladimir Nabokov’s personal copy of Lolita and a trove of letters from Jack Kerouac to Neal Cassady); and, most recently, the Body Shop, a building on his property where he and his assistants fabricate not only the car-hood sculptures he’s known for, but also “full-bodied cars”—including some that actually work. “You have to be careful of publicity,” he says on the phone from Long Island. “I don’t perceive myself as a popular person. I’ve never coveted that kind of visibility.”
Coveted or not, visibility will be the order of the day when “Richard Prince: Spiritual America,” a major retrospective spanning three decades, opens at the Guggenheim on September 28. A second, smaller show in the museum’s education center will turn the clock back even further on his oeuvre, allowing a rare glimpse into the photographs and collages that preceded his 1977 watershed decision to snap a few photos of furniture ads in The New York Times—the move that some quarters deem the single-handed creation of 1980s Appropriation Art. For his part, Prince seems primed for his close-up. “The Guggenheim is an extraordinary place. It’s very intimidating, but the question is whether or not my art will work in it. And the fact that it’s a question really intrigues me.”
It certainly seems like Prince’s work would be a natural fit for the notoriously commerce-friendly Gugg, which in the past has welcomed both motorcycles and Armani fashion into its famed rotunda. But according to exhibition curator Nancy Spector, Prince’s perspective on popular culture has always been critical. “There hasn’t been much focus on the meaning of his work as a pointed commentary on American culture,” she says. “Not only with respect to the Reagan years, but to our own celebrity-besotted culture.”
Highlights of the show will include American Player, a brand-new sculpture featuring the stripped-down shell of a 1969 Dodge Charger that seems to have run pedal-to-the-metal into its pedestal. (It’s just the latest embodiment of Prince’s long-standing love affair with muscle cars: At London’s Frieze Art Fair this fall, he’ll debut his first fully functional automobile/sculpture, a totally renovated 1970 Dodge Challenger. “The thing is a monster—it’s just awesome looking,” he says.) There will also be a series of paintings based on De Kooning’s “Women” series, given a hermaphroditic twist with the addition of male genitalia. One thing that will not be in the show, however, is the building in Rensselaerville that had housed a collection of Prince’s car hoods. Titled Second House after a similar site-specific piece, First House, that he created from an L.A. bungalow, the structure had been acquired by the Guggenheim for its collection in 2005. This summer it was struck by lightning and burned totally to the ground. “It was probably the first form of criticism toward the Guggenheim show,” Prince notes dryly. Spector says that Prince is in discussion with the museum about the possibility of rebuilding it, adding, “There’s something kind of poetic about the whole thing. Maybe at some point it will become like Harry Potter’s scar, where it will just be part of the history.”
Undeterred by nature, Prince has already begun work on 3rd Place, a house on Long Island that he plans to convert into an installation in the coming months. “The notion of third place is appealing to me. I’ve always sort of liked the idea of the beautiful loser.”
Maybe—but losers aren’t usually feted with major museum surveys. And while Prince may be right to wonder what the verdict on his Guggenheim outing will ultimately be, there’s no doubt that he helped rewrite the book on art’s treatment of popular culture in a way very different from that of Andy Warhol. “I get compared to Warhol a lot,” he allows, “and I really love Warhol, but I’m completely the opposite. The thing is, he’s a perfect example of someone who went out every night. But I’m in bed by 9.”
“Richard Prince: Spiritual America” is at the Guggenheim Sept 28–Jan 9.
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