RICHARD PRINCE

Richard Prince describes Third Place as “the house where my family used to live and is now having a reunion.” Strip mining American cultural life, Prince’s work often exposes dark subcurrents of sexual and familial tension as they expose themselves through humor and other symptoms of psychological dysfunction. Third Place is, as the title suggests, the third in a series of structures, which adopt a vernacular architectural form as the housing for material that speaks to the interior life of its recently departed occupant. Like other houses, this is a place where, as one observer put it, “The circuitry of human relationship was completely shorted out and charred.” Run-down and a little saddle-sore, the house in Desert Hot Springs suggests a cowboy’s retreat. Plastered with “family tweets” and an odd rendering of the artist himself, Third Place reveals itself as a three-dimensional portrait, a state of mind as much as a state of place.

neville wakefield: The title of your Desert X piece, Third Place, begs the question of the first two places. What attracts you to using residences to exhibit your art?

richard prince: It has to do with the fact that it’s not a gallery, and it’s not a museum. I’m not installing after another show closes, and there’s not another show after mine. I’m not bullied into a space. It’s my space; it’s my house. I wanted to be in a house simply because it’s kind of casual, like my studio.

I remember being impressed with Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson. I thought that approach to working was very different from what was going on before them. It seemed more inclusive, more spontaneous—anywhere, anytime, under any circumstance. I like that idea of that kind of site-specific work. It’s sort of like the mobility that a musician has—not being tied down to making work in a studio. The emphasis was more on the conceptual, thinking side; the means weren’t as important as the end.

The house is like one of my books. I get to do in three dimensions what I do in a book, when I put all my photographs side by side into a book. It’s my arrangement, not like a gallery where you install your work with a dealer.

First House was actually the inaugural event for Regen Projects in West Hollywood.

Right, in 1993, and it was like my studio: drop cloths on the floor, the walls stripped to plaster, flood lamps in the corners. The space was intimate…and available. It was a single, ranch-style tract house with tall grass around it and a 1973 Plymouth Barracuda in the yard. It was a stripped-down structure, an exhibition space for the Hoods [car sculptures] and my photographs of magazines.

It all represents a kind of freedom, being unencumbered by obligations to conform or aspire to a certain kind of existence. For Third Place, in Desert X, you installed movie poster-size and sexually charged “family tweets,” some of them with raunchy pictures, printed on vinyl and canvas. They covered the interior and exterior doors, windows, walls, and even some of the floor.

The house is an appropriate context to explore relationships between the sexes. I see a lot of things in terms of sex, but it’s only one ingredient in the work. It might be more important than, say, space or flatness, but they are also ingredients. I’ve been thinking about sex since I was a child, about what images do to me.

When a viewer came onto the property they would encounter these Instagram posts, which were kind of at the mercy of the elements, and at the mercy of the viewers, too, as well as some small, 3D-printed figures that were placed on top of some of the images and on the mantle.

Within about a week of the opening, collectors or vandals stole prints and the 3D-printed sculptures, and we had to close the installation.

Right. First House was bulldozed, and Second House was struck by lightning and destroyed by fire. So I was not surprised when this happened. When it comes to my “family tweets,” anything goes.

It was entropic from the start—the artwork is about the ruin of a family and needed to achieve that state of ruin.

Right.