Richard Prince
“American Prayer,” Richard Prince’s first Paris solo museum exhibition, makes a case for the artist’s sustained relationship to appropriated source material just as his use of copyrighted images is under pressure due to a lawsuit French photographer Patrick Cariou recently won against him. France’s venerable five-hundred-year-old national library has filled sixteen vitrines with selections from Prince’s personal collection of books, manuscripts, and ephemera, including a check from Lenny Bruce, a drum kit signed by the Velvet Underground, an acid test card belonging to Neal Cassady, a letter by Thomas Pynchon, and the first issue of Horny Biker Slut Comics; other items relate to Truman Capote, Ed Ruscha, R. Crumb, the Slits, Russ Meyer, Jimi Hendrix, Isaac Asimov, Yoko Ono, and Richard Brautigan in this curated collection of cool circa 1949–84.
Two of Prince’s own nurse paintings, three car hood sculptures, and numerous rephotographed images round out the exhibition. The artist’s selections from the Bibliothèque’s post-1968 fanzines, underground newspapers, and marginal publications, and a sound track (featuring the Clash and Sonic Youth), add a punk vibe. A librarian’s catalogue essay identifies Prince’s collection of three hundred soft-core nurse novels (Night Nurse and Jet-Set Nurse among them) not as valuable documents but as pulp that might inspire a Prince painting. It’s big, generous display of rarities, art, and scholarship with an ulterior motive.
The show serves as a defense of 1970s theories of image and authorship. Yet at its start, if appropriation worked to expose and subvert the power of hegemonic media, Prince’s stance was less resistant than those of peers Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Martha Rosler. Prince worships the real––the first edition, the autobiographical, the collectible. His use of images is not so much critique as homage. This makes him less subversive than his cohorts, but perhaps more amenable to the institutional support he has found in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
