The picture is pure '69, the Promised land of a 'Woodstock Nation' dropped and camped-out amidst the sylvan rock 'n rolling hills of upstate New York. Like much else, exact times and dates – Friday at around seven–thirty in the evening – are open to speculation. Judging from the hazy and listless crowd, the event appears in the lull of hedonistic remission. It could be adrift in any one of those lapsed moments of generational consciousness that began with the promotor's failure to erect a chainlink fence around the event and ended with a kid passed out in his sleeping bag being crushed to near death by a sanitation back hoe. In other words, it's the stuff of mythic Woodstock; a photograph that so perfectly captures the imperfect collusion of free-love and basement chemistry, it seems to belong less to a personal archive than to the image bank of the era.

According to its author, the picture is the only one he took of that historic weekend. Brown acid being easier to come by than film, he soon realized that the single exposure he had left in his camera this would be his one shot at the event. So rather than labor the economy of opportunity he simply "stood up, whirled around and (click) took it." Wasted. And for those who may harbor doubts as to its origination, to the pitch-perfect album-cover verity of the Woodstock moment, he presents on the reverse side of the picture his original ticket - or at the very least, a ticket made original by virtue of it being his.

Richard Prince has never found the circumstance or inclination to practice photography, even as he has taken it - in and out of his studio - for well-documented rides. His earliest works were born of the second-hand daylight of re-photography. Recently he has driven the camera out from under the cover of cult magazines into the rural backwaters of his upstate surroundings. And just as the notorious celebrity pictures caption the territory of the over-exposed, so the Albany county of Prince's current photography underwrites the under-exposed to create a real estate of ever changing prospectus.. In this, the aboveground pools, tire-planters, hoops, garages and empty storage facilities are the road signs marking the passage from the made-up to the run-down. Anti-monuments, they speak to the vanquished dreams of mobility and the tragic-comic confinement of these backyard pioneers. Prince finds his spiritual knife-edge in the poetry of these alien places, where less than extreme situations have become inevitable. Here, in the hinterlands, time and unemployment work their easthetic, making of utility and purpose their own art of the genuinely unnecessary.

What Prince does practice is his own kind of cosmopoliyan localism. Local venaculars – the governement of in-law, out-law and by-law – are the very specific material ofd his very abstract art. He draws the protocols of post-war, post-painterly abstraction across the visual architecture of his surroundings. In doing so he subverts popular assumptions about the nature of familiar things. And just as the hoops take Kenneth Noland's targets to the backbourd and rebound their high international style into the boondocks of the upstate yards, so the paintings bounce their humor around the court of transcendance, playing their zips and dribbles to an audience of drunks, comics adulterers and theives.

The ranch house that Prince bought and renovated as part of his art, may be the ideal home for such misplaced ideals. It's an unremarkable structure in a remarkable situation. Standing alone in a pristine tract of landscape, it has the kind of sent-off prefabricated look of a catalogue offering. As houses go, the no frills structure that Prince has chosen, is a not too distant cousin of the doublewide trailer – the basic unit of the rural readymade – save for an attached garage signalling its placement a few rungs up the ladder of architectural evolution. Clad in reflective silver it has a similar air of impermanence. Seen against a spilt horizon of gently undulating land and big sky, it appears as a hallucination of detachment, a deliberate landscape intervention as generically mannered an unapproachable as a small-ad in a local digest or a cowboy in a color field painting.

And as if to remind us that this house is not a home, its figurative occupants are both painted. Within the garage a matt-black customized 'cuda pays homage to a bygone era of assembly-line menace. (If as the saying goes in England, a man's home is his castle, in America a man's castle is his garage.) Inside the house, a paint-dipped effigy of Alfred E. Newman, legendary mascot of Mad Magazine, lends stoner psychosis to the gearhead promise of permanently annexed speed. Nice Place to visit this no-shit abstraction, but you might not want to stay there. In this his most accomplished landscape eulogy to human nature Prince takes us to the end of the road. Running on empty through the thwarted hopes and dreams of the sixties, he creates cul-de-sacs of grand aesthetic dysfunction; places where driver-less cars and bed-less houses become the conditions of provocatively art-less art.

Monochrome is the color of this kind of comedy. It appears where you least expect it in casual arrangements, propped against walls, in crates, under wraps, stretched tight over t-shirts and pinned to the facades of houses and paintings as if to expose the inside humor to the elements of the outdoors. Its sudden condensations run through the landscape in much the same way that the lanes of text run through his paintings. Across the sacred divinity of his pure abstraction – of surfaces believed to be compelling enough to withstand the circumstance of nothing going on – he writes the rejoinders of the absurd. The circles and ellipses he tattoos onto the white Rymaneseque skins of his canvasses lend their cartoon expressionism to the blank canvas of the borrowed idea. White paintings come striated with black humor, black paintings with encaustic white humor: 'White painting: "I don't know what to do. My house has burned to the ground, my wife died, my car's been stolen and the doctor says I gotta have a serious operation." Black Painting: "What you kicking about, you white ain't you."'

The jokes belong to the categories Freud termed tendentious and speculative, categories others would simply call bad and borscht. Those that invoke the house of God seen from the vantage of the Cross belong to the former while those that address the truth by means of a lie - I put an ad in a swinger's magazine and my parents answered it – belong to the latter. Prince, the master of material artifice, compounds the two forms to create tendentiously speculative art. In canvassing his jokes he makes joke paintings that make a joke of painting. And the fact that the material of both has been worked beyond the point of exhaustion only adds to the tragedean comedy by which the original sins of post-war abstractions have become the un-orinal lies of travelling salesmen psychiatrists and other advent expressionists. Held in a narrow band of superficial depth, Prince's one-liners are the room-service deliveries of endlessly revisionist histories. But by holding onto them he refuses to fall for the curruptions of their success, converying instead a gamblers euphoria at playing the game his own way.

With all his work Prince asks us to read between the lines. In this, the space between partially formed truths and partially formed lies, he unravels the mythologies of his and other pasts. Here in the open country between the hoods and hoodlums, hip hop and the nursing home the ticket and the event is spiritual America. And whatever else we may or may not think without the chainlink of division, its a free concert from here on.





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