Purple Magazine
— S/S 2011 issue 15
Richard Prince
James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922 edition, one of 100 copies, inscribed to Henry Kaeser, in custom leather case, collection of the of the artist, photograph Richard Prince
What connects the artist who gave us entertainers, cowboys, nurses, and Hells Angels with their girlfriends to the hallowed turf of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France — the library of kings, repository of French culture, and the stomping ground of Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and other titans of Eurocentric critical theory? C’est evident. Books are a huge influence on Richard Prince’s art. Not just what’s in books, textually speaking. Prince makes art out of books, out of parts of books, and even out of the detritus of the publishing industry. He also happens to own one of the finest collections of late-modern Americana — first editions, manuscripts, letters, and inscribed copies of Nabokov, Southern, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Salinger, Capote, Kesey, and Pynchon; multimedia material from Warhol, The Velvet Underground, Jim Morrison (whose poem and posthumous album, An American Prayer inspired the show’s title), Bob Dylan, Robert Crumb, and Jimi Hendrix; and iconic material from four American authors who are bigger in France than in America: Philip K. Dick, Jim Thompson, Richard Brautigan, and Chester Himes. For American Prayer he presents a mix of gems from his collection and his own art. The resulting gestalt is a typology of American subcultures and their denizens: cowboys, space cowboys, bikers, beatniks, hippies, and punks in science fiction, fantasy, pulp, porn, comics, and rock and roll. How does Richard Brautigan’s fishing license alongside an inscribed first edition of Trout Fishing in America grab you? How about Ken Kesey’s autographed helmet from the Merry Prankster’s Bus? It sits next to the original manuscript of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Or a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix’s penis (remember the groupie duo, the Plaster Casters?) presented with letters Jimi wrote to his father? Blend into all this a quantity of obscure smut, which the BNF automatically receives from publishers as a matter of course, due to French law. Until Richard Prince came along, most of this stuff had never seen the light of day. Maybe they locked it up to keep the janitors from whacking off to it. A few boxes of photography-book porn from the BNF’s deep reserves were sent to Prince. He sent them back, stickered with his signature dots for strategic effect. The 600-page English catalog for the show, co-published by the BNF and Gagosian Gallery, and distributed by Rizzoli, is a collage of texts from the Beat-Hippie-Punk era, which for Prince means 1949-1984. There’s also a catalog in French, with an introduction by Purple’s own Jeff Rian.
Untitled (Original), 2010, original illustration and paperback book, photograph Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
Prince has been called a thief — or worse, an appropriation artist. But, as Jonathan Lethem explains in the catalog’s essay, the use of others’ intellectual property should not be considered theft, but rather as the beauty of second use. In the words of Roberto Bolaño, it’s better to rob from a book than from a safe, because at least you can carefully examine its contents before perpetrating the crime. What connects the artist who gave us entertainers, cowboys, nurses, and Hells Angels with their girlfriends to the hallowed turf of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France — the library of kings, repository of French culture, and the stomping ground of Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and other titans of Eurocentric critical theory? C’est evident. Books are a huge influence on Richard Prince’s art. Not just what’s in books, textually speaking. Prince makes art out of books, out of parts of books, and even out of the detritus of the publishing industry. He also happens to own one of the finest collections of late-modern Americana — first editions, manuscripts, letters, and inscribed copies of Nabokov, Southern, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Salinger, Capote, Kesey, and Pynchon; multimedia material from Warhol, The Velvet Underground, Jim Morrison (whose poem and posthumous album, An American Prayer inspired the show’s title), Bob Dylan, Robert Crumb, and Jimi Hendrix; and iconic material from four American authors who are bigger in France than in America: Philip K. Dick, Jim Thompson, Richard Brautigan, and Chester Himes. For American Prayer he presents a mix of gems from his collection and his own art. The resulting gestalt is a typology of American subcultures and their denizens: cowboys, space cowboys, bikers, beatniks, hippies, and punks in science fiction, fantasy, pulp, porn, comics, and rock and roll. How does Richard Brautigan’s fishing license alongside an inscribed first edition of Trout Fishing in America grab you? How about Ken Kesey’s autographed helmet from the Merry Prankster’s Bus? It sits next to the original manuscript of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Or a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix’s penis (remember the groupie duo, the Plaster Casters?) presented with letters Jimi wrote to his father? Blend into all this a quantity of obscure smut, which the BNF automatically receives from publishers as a matter of course, due to French law. Until Richard Prince came along, most of this stuff had never seen the light of day. Maybe they locked it up to keep the janitors from whacking off to it. A few boxes of photography-book porn from the BNF’s deep reserves were sent to Prince. He sent them back, stickered with his signature dots for strategic effect.
The 600-page English catalog for the show, co-published by the BNF and Gagosian Gallery, and distributed by Rizzoli, is a collage of texts from the Beat-Hippie-Punk era, which for Prince means 1949-1984. There’s also a catalog in French, with an introduction by Purple’s own Jeff Rian. Prince has been called a thief — or worse, an appropriation artist. But, as Jonathan Lethem explains in the catalog’s essay, the use of others’ intellectual property should not be considered theft, but rather as the beauty of second use. In the words of Roberto Bolaño, it’s better to rob from a book than from a safe, because at least you can carefully examine its contents before perpetrating the crime.
