I have no illusions about being able to control how the "Pictures" show I organized at Artists Space in 1977 will be understood historically, but for the record I did not, as Richard Prince claims in "Richard Prince Talks to Steve Lafreniere" [March 2003], ask him to be in the exhibition or show him the essay for the catalogue. I didn't know Prince or his work at the time. Prince himself has written, in 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years [Artists Space, 1998], "I wasn't aware of the 'Pictures' show or what other people were doing. I'd been living in the West Village completely isolated and working at Time-Life. ... I had a very punk attitude, a chip on my shoulder. I thought I was doing something no one else was doing, and therefore it couldn't possibly be incorporated into anything that was going on."
Douglas Crimp, New York
The Response (Letter to the Editor by Richard Prince - ART FORUM Summer 2008)
Paint it white. I'm a liar. And I cheat too. I make things up and I can't be trusted. It's not my fault. I've always been a thief and started stealing when I was six years old. I took a knife from a hardware store, brought it home, and when my father asked me if I did it, I told him no. ... I didn't take anything. ... I'm innocent.
I grew up watching television shows like Who Do You Trust and What's My Line? and Truth or Consequences. My parents worked for the government and when I would ask what they did exactly I could never get a straight answer. Straight wasn't happening for me ... odd, different, and off, was what was normal.
We moved around a lot and my father was always away. It wasn't until I was a teenager when I was visiting him in Hawaii that I learned that he worked for the CIA. This was in 1966 and he was based in Honolulu and going over to Vietnam helping to defoliate the forest so our troops could get a better look at the enemy. He always told me he was an electrical engineer. In his spare time he would sit in the basements of our various houses and fool with his ham radio. His call letters were WIUOH UNCLE OBO HOW. He tried teaching me Morse code. Da Dit Dit Dit ... Dit Dit Da Dit ... That was as far as I got. He never gave me anything.
I was born in Panama. The Canal Zone. In Balboa Hospital. My mother used to work for the OSS down there ... an organization that came before the CIA. She used to tell me stories about working for Joe Kennedy, the president's father. She used to tell me stories about standing around in people's closets. Maybe that's where I got that joke ... My parents kept me in a closet ... until I was fifteen, I thought I was a suit. I never believed the stories she told me.
Fiction for me has always been better than fact. That's why I love the movies so much. My mother took me to see West Side Story when I was ten and I think I've been in that movie ever since. I loved the way Bernardo looked, his hair and dark skin, and especially what he wore to the YMCA dance ... the black suit with tapered pants and thin lapels and the skinny black tie over a purple shirt. I had never seen anyone dress like that. What I never saw was what I always wanted. My parents would never let me wear an outfit like Bernardo's. They would never let me wear his pointy shiny boots ... what would later become Beatle boots. They would never let me wear my hair long. They always told me what to do and what they would tell me was always wrong. I remember in the eighth grade Mick Jagger came on TV on the Ed Sullivan Show and he wore a gray sweatshirt. Gray sweatshirts were associated with beatniks and my father got so pissed off he threw a lamp at the TV.
Alternative lifestyle has always attracted me. Hip versus square ... us against them ... bohemian, Left Bank, the Village, North Beach, City Lights. When I first moved to SoHo in 1974 it represented "the other side" ... a place free from the straights, the narrow-minded, the churchgoing, the proms and parades, the crew cuts and the medals. I was able to get there because I got out of the draft by faking paranoid psychosis. ... Uncle Sam almost got me but at the end of the day I gave the authorities a letter from a shrink stating that I would more than likely fire upon any person who would teach me how to use a weapon. Getting out of the draft was the happiest day of my life. "Faking" would start filling my wallet. Practicing without a license would be my shingle.
It's hard for me to believe in the world. ABC, CBS, NBC are jokes. Time and Newsweek are beterosexual. The Warren Commission was a comic book. Gandhi, King, Lennon, and the two Kennedys gave hope and got smoked. That atom bomb is a sidecar on a motorcycle. The sun isn't yellow it's chicken.
I eat politics, I sleep politics, but I don't drink politics. If you can tell me who the president of France was when Gauguin was painting in Tahiti I'll pay for your graduate school. I lied when I said I was invited by Doug Crimp to be in his "Pictures" show. I was fooling around. I made it up. My judgment frosted. The truth of the matter didn't apply. I tried to get away with it and paint it white. I added on to the story. You could say I was writing under a pseudonym. I was never there to begin with. I had never met him, wasn't aware of the show, and didn't know any of the artists in the show. I had never been to Artists Space. I was living in the West Village on Eleventh Street rephotographing advertisements in magazines. I thought I was doing what he was talking about. For years people assumed that I was in the show. I gave up telling them I wasn't. I just started agreeing. I was the host of my own game show. Lying was my contribution.
Richard Prince, Rensselaerville, NY
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