RICHARD PRINCE: You know, there's just lots of different
things that I do.
And sometimes I spend a day doing a de Kooning painting.
And then I'll spend the rest of the day
doing a nurse painting.
The next day I'll do a photograph.
And the day after that, I'll do a hood sculpture.
And nothing ever really looks the same.
It really depends upon the subject matter.
The subject matter sort of dictates the look
of the final thing.
I moved to New York around 1973 or something.
And then I left around 1986 to come up here.
I wanted the exact opposite of New York.
I didn't want anything in between.
I wanted something that was really exotic.
So I had never really been in the country.
In fact, it really kind of scared me at first.
This is basically pretty much of an extreme.
We live at the end of a dead end dirt road in
the middle of nowhere.
I've been able to build this environment here.
It's like a little town at the end of the road.
And you can do different projects.
I'm sort of interested in building buildings and fooling
around with architecture, which is something I couldn't
do in the city.
I mean, sometimes I'll go for, like, five or six days, and
the only person I'll see is the FedEx guy, or the UPS guy.
It's not about collaboration up here.
You're pretty much on your own.
I like the idea of just getting lost.
It can get bad up here in the winter.
I mean, it can really drag on you.
It's mostly the ice storms, where you really can't move.
It can get to you.
So this is one of our local establishments.
We can grab some chow here.
We've got this restaurant in town that opens Thursday
through Sunday.
And that's it.
There's no gas station.
There's no grocery store.
There's nothing.
AMANDA WILBER: There's not really much to do in the town.
He's a good customer.
We serve breakfast and lunch.
And usually he gets a Philly steak or
grilled cheese with tomato.
RICHARD PRINCE: Cheesesteak with some potato chips?
-Cheesesteak?
AMANDA WILBER: And chips.
-And potato chips?
RICHARD PRINCE: Yeah.
AMANDA WILBER: I did a photo shoot with him about 2000.
Made the front cover of a magazine called "Purple." I
haven't really seen a lot of his artwork.
I've heard that it's very unique.
RICHARD PRINCE: You know, I have these
impulses and these desires.
And I just go ahead and do it.
I mean, the art world likes to be hammered over the head with
the same thing because they want to feel like
that's what you do.
And they want to be able to say, OK, that's
what he or she does.
I don't know why the cowboys are works that
people really want.
And I don't know why the nurses.
I mean, certainly the nurses--
I have no idea why.
This is the actual, the original
cover for that paperback.
I sort of mess with it intervene, with it, contribute
to it, continue it, and make it my own work.
-So tell me about them.
RICHARD PRINCE: Right now, I'm working on what I refer to as
a de Kooning painting.
Basically, it's something I started doing a couple of
summers ago.
It's gotten to this point right now.
I've always liked de Kooning's women paintings.
It started off with a book of his.
And I just started drawing on it.
And I would just sort of continue to draw, just use him
as a starting point, add stuff to his.
Anyway, I just started fooling around, and one
thing led to another.
After I did the books, I started to make collages.
So it'd be like a one of his women on the left, and one of
my men on the right.
So that was my contribution.
Then I send this out.
This is what I get back.
And it's pretty rough at this particular point.
But basically, I know what I'm going to do with this.
And then it goes from here to here.
It's sort of like a trial and error where I'll put five or
six different arms and legs, just trying
different rhythms out.
Bring this hand down here and crossover.
Put a kind of Picasso-like foot.
You know, it's just kind of a new way of dealing with the
figure, this idea of the photographic part and the
drawing part fused together.
I've never really cared about how the public has
perceived my work.
I could care less.
It's really good that people collect my work because it
means that I can make other work.
We can go in this room here.
You've got to kind of squeeze through.
This is another workspace.
These are paintings that I've kept for myself.
A lot of these are just variations on the joke
paintings that I started doing jokes in 1986.
And the joke paintings were really kind of monochromatic--
just two colors, color on the background, and the joke was
silkscreened in a color.
And then they got very painterly, like this.
This is probably six years ago.
I mean, the reason why I painted them was I wanted to
present the radicality of the subject matter in a very
traditional way.
That's all.
This is about 3,500 pounds of clay.
And all it rolls back, and it rolls forward.
But this is a model, a clay model, for the a Ford GT40.
For me, a lot about what I think about is, I guess, you
could talk about in terms of this idea of continuation.
That all it this is really a--
it's something that's added on from what has
been done before me.
And the idea of buying a book and calling it yours is
something that you have to give yourself
permission to do.
Obviously, someone else can't do it for you.
I mean, a lot of people would probably say, well, wait a
minute, you really can't do this.
You can't go out, and buy a book, and sign it, call it
yours, and sell it.
But for me, that's very easy to do.
It's not really about being new as more as about this idea
something continued.
I've always liked this road.
This is like my little museum.
I always liked the way it sat in this field.
It floated in the sea of grass, which I really love.
We can go in if you want.
It's sort of like, I like the idea of a space that's not
necessarily a gallery or a museum, that's more like a
domestic space.
And the idea that you get when your eye is looking at a piece
that looks out.
And it sees stuff outside the window.
And it's independent of anything.
I really took my time with this.
And I thought about what was going to go in it.
I mean, this place was really screwed up.
It had been used as a hunting lodge.
And the guy died like halfway through.
I mean, it didn't have a bathroom.
It didn't have any walls, or bedrooms, or--
it was pretty nuts.
And I really liked the idea that it was abandoned.
I had my eye on it for years and years.
I used to ride by and look at it.
And there's something about an abandoned house.
It looks like it has a life of its own.
And then I put about 11 or 12 different pieces of art in it.
And that was it.
It's enough.
And then I sold it, the whole thing.
You got the whole thing.
I've got my Sid Vicious paintings here.
These are called cluster flies.
They are kind of the domestic problem.
Yeah, I've got to clean up these flies.
Someone broke in here.
Well, nobody stole anything.
RICHARD PRINCE: Yep, for now.
And that's my '73 Barracuda that's permanently parked.
I guess the original paint is coming through.
I used to drive this thing.
And I guess you could eventually make an
appointment.
You'd be able to come up here and maybe have
some lunch or something.
I was going to use this land-- it's about 80 acres.
I was going to have a festival, a little music
festival, every summer.
And we were going to build some stages.
And I was going to invite people to perform.
But don't think that's going to happen now.