Richard Prince: Continuation

[Dave Monroe]

Richard Prince: bagged, tagged, dragged back to his cave
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 28/06/2008


Richard Prince puts objects he loves into his art - and into amazing
collections at his home. He talks to novelist Hari Kunzru

In pictures: Richard Prince: Continuation at the Serpentine Gallery
Richard Prince most recently came to the attention of people outside
the art world in 2005 when his "re-photograph" of a cowboy, lifted
with deliberate crudeness from a Marlboro cigarette advertisement,
became the first photo to fetch more than $1 million at auction. A
similar photograph of a photograph, showing another American icon
riding his horse against a cloudy blue sky, is on display at the
Serpentine Gallery in London as part of a retrospective of Prince's
career that opened on Thursday.

Since the Seventies, Prince has enjoyed a controversial reputation on
the international art scene for his witty appropriations of popular
culture, which have given rise to as many lawsuits as they've raised
philosophical questions about authenticity and authorship. In 1983,
for instance, he was sued unsuccessfully by Brooke Shields, whose
naked, prepubescent image he re-photographed under the title,
Spiritual America.

His cowboys are jostled by kitsch nurses taken from pulp novels of the
Fifties and Sixties, by biker chicks, hot-rodders and rock stars. He
has framed celebrity cheques and made large text-paintings of cheesy
Borscht-Belt jokes.

In the words of the New York scene commentator (and long-time friend)
Glenn O'Brien, "he is to Andy Warhol what Jean-Luc Picard is to
Captain James T Kirk". In short, he's about as far away from the
Romantic notion of the artist as original creator - breathing life
into raw material through the operation of his unique genius - as it's
possible to get.

All of this means he might not be the first person you'd expect to
hear rhapsodising about the relationship between James Joyce and Ezra
Pound. Yet Prince the appropriator, the repeater, the image thief, is
also a compulsive collector. In fact, he's one of the world's great
bibliophiles. In recent years, his passion for books, particularly
20th-century literature, has been fuelled by enormous injections of
cash, thanks to the eye-popping prices his work now commands: in 2007,
a similar cowboy photograph to the one auctioned for $1.24 million in
2005 sold for $3.4 million. Those photos are in editions of two, by
the way, plus an artist's proof.

By contrast, books are cheap. The record price for a signed first
edition of Ulysses is $460,000. As one of the victors of the art boom,
Prince now has the financial muscle to compete with institutions for
archives and estates. His library, a converted 1820s building in the
tiny town of Rensselaerville in upstate New York, houses a major
collection of 20th-century first editions, proofs, manuscripts and
letters, including work by Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Sylvia Plath,
Philip K Dick, William Burroughs and Vladimir Nabokov, alongside an
extraordinary array of magazines and ephemera, from detective pulp to
Black Panther propaganda.

Some of these works have found their way into Prince's art: recent
pictures incorporate first editions into pieces of furniture. Prince
brought much of this work to the UK for the Serpentine exhibition, but
decided against showing it. "It didn't work. I would need the room to
be about 5ft wider," he says.

In the flesh, Prince isn't a flamboyant figure. There's a cultural
trace of the Seventies New York downtown scene in the cropped greying
hair, the rumpled black suit and tennis shoes. He speaks with the
deliberation and confidence of someone who owns a lot of real estate
and runs a studio operation that has grown in complexity and ambition
to include a fully working car bodyshop. Friendly without being the
slightest bit ingratiating, there's an awkwardness about him that
suggests he finds socialising not altogether straightforward, a
reserve that doesn't quite mask a strain of fierce acquisitive pride,
the raw machismo of someone who gets his kicks out of finding and
possessing something no one else owns.

"As a book collector, what you want is the copy that you wouldn't
dream of having, that you wouldn't think was out there," he says,
before listing several such copies he's recently bagged, tagged and
dragged back to his cave. This takes the form of a fire-proof,
water-proof, electronically secure walk-in safe in the library, a
"depository", as he terms it, for the 3,000-odd, "really rare" items
(he has no idea how many books he has in total), each lovingly
conserved and presented in a slipcase made by a local craftsman. His
collecting seems to bleed seamlessly into his art - there's the same
wish to enshrine things, to make connections between them.

Here are some cool things Richard Prince owns: Nabokov's desk copy of
the Olympia Press first edition of Lolita, heavily corrected and
annotated; a letter written by Sylvia Plath the day before she killed
herself; the only known copy of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key to
retain its original dust cover ($175,000 to you, sir); Jimi Hendrix's
letters to his dad; Neal Cassady's copy of On the Road; Kerouac's
previously unknown original scroll manuscript of Big Sur (twice as
long as the published book); the manuscript of The Godfather as well
as the letter in which the editor suggested changing the title from
The Mafia to The Godfather; letters by Thomas Pynchon written in the
late Sixties, while he was at work on Gravity's Rainbow, and… I'll
stop for a moment and let you catch your breath.

Is there a logic to it? Or is this just a man who loves reading, and
has the money to indulge his tastes?

"A slight logic," Prince admits. "An artificial limit. The collection
is supposed to start in 1949, the year I was born. Since Orwell's 1984
was published in 1949 - I've got a great copy - I decided to end it in
1984. I thought that'd be funny. I set that up about five years ago.
There's also obviously some art books, but mostly there's photography,
and there are three cultural aspects - beats, hippies and punks - any
book that has to do with those social movements, as well as fine
literature. Some authors are very specific, like Kerouac, Kesey,
Richard Brautigan. I love Brautigan. But I do go outside - I have
Hemingway. You have to have a Joyce." That's how you tell when someone
has a real collecting kink: "I have Hemingway" - as frankly
fetishistic as his paintings of masked nurses.

Is there an end point? Now he has a "dream copy" of Ulysses and can
spend Saturday mornings alphabetising in his own personal two-storey
library, where is there to go?

"I think the end point will come when the catalogue is done. I'll
design it and it'll be an artist's book. Probably three volumes. I'll
be able to enjoy the collection sitting down on a chair in my place.
Anyway, I'm beginning to think it needs someone to take care of it,
someone who can really take care of it. Eventually it'll either go up
for auction, or to an institution, or an institution will come and say
we want to run the library, keep it intact. So those are the three
options, and whether or not I will cherry-pick 15 of the books and
some of the letters, I don't know. It's going to be very difficult to
part with my letters from Kerouac to Neal Cassady…"

'Richard Prince: Continuation' is at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2
(020 7402 6075), until Sept 7. Hari Kunzru's most recent novel, 'My
Revolutions', is out now. He will be in conversation with John Gray at
the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion on Aug 1.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/06/28/baprince128.xml

Richard Prince:
Continuation
26 June - 7 September 2008

http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2008/06/richard_princecontinuation26_j.html