I am so bummed when I was in high school one of the first copies of art forum I bought had a special insert all about Richard Prince's First House. The article really made an impression on me and I wrote about Richard Prince for my freshman year art history term paper. I had really wanted to visit Second House. Damn you lightning why don't you just bother Walter DeMaria? he's at least asking for it!
PRINCE’S SECOND HOUSE DESTROYED
An act of nature has destroyed Richard Prince’s Second House, an art installation located near the artist’s home in Rensselaerville, N.Y. On June 28, 2007, lightning hit the building, sparking a fire that reduced the wood structure to ashes. The House, along with the 80-acres surrounding it, had been acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 2005, which had committed to keep the unique project open to the public 10 years before transferring its contents to its own collection.
Prince, known for his use of appropriated imagery, had purchased the four-room shack as an example of "found architecture" that was an "ersatz slice of Americana," as the Guggenheim described it at the time of its purchase. The building had been abandoned for 12 years prior to the artist’s acquisition, and he remodeled the interior to create what New York Times art scribe Carol Vogel described as the centerpiece of a "private, rural theme park."
One notable component of the work was a suite of 11 Prince sculptures made as casts of actual car hoods, but they were not in the building at the time of the fire, according to the Guggenheim press office. However, all the other items in the installation, which included a joke painting, planters made from old tires, a table made from a basketball backboard, a jewelry cabinet displaying a necklace fashioned from bread fasteners, and a selection of first-edition books about Woodstock from Prince’s library, are presumed to have been lost to the flames. The Guggenheim had described this collection of works as a "definitive example of Prince’s practice."
Second House was the sequel to First House, an installation the artist created in Los Angeles in 1993. First House was destroyed to make way for new property after Prince’s three-month lease on the L.A. space had ended. A retrospective of the artist’s work, "Richard Prince: Spiritual America," opens at the Guggenheim Museum in New York later this year.
http://siteimages.guggenheim.org/gpc_work_midsize_955.jpg
July 10, 2007
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5 comments:
one thing about prince's work is that a lot of it can be reproduced fairly easily. a nurse painting would be a shame to lose, but a joke painting could be remade without anyone knowing the difference. i know the chapman brothers were remaking some of the stuff they lost in the saatchi warehouse fires.
i don't know about the work being remade second house was an extension of much of richard's recent efforts to catalouge his own history. much of the work in it and in his self curated retrospective at barbara gladstone was work that he had bought back right around the time his work started to take off auction wise. (hence his suite of cancelled check paintings having details like "to mike ovitz:$250,000" the amount of money wrapped up in this project was immense. prince has always been concerned with editions, like the library he is still compling of first editions, but i think second house was closer to a first edition as first house may have been closer to a manuscript. I did however see many of the abjects included in second house because they were included in the aformentioned gladstone show, but i really wanted to make the trip to the real deal.
yeah, obviously the house itself was a unique thing, too. last time i checked his website is down.
hi - i went to there on tuesday... took some photos. i don't know how to e-mail you directly, but, saw your post and thought you might like to see these.
http://anaba.blogspot.com/2007/08/richard-prince.html
Hi Martin. I'm based in the U.K. and I've been R.P. fan since 1992.
Recently I had my original Spiritual America IVAM catalogue signed by Richard at the Serpentine Show in London.
I'm heading to New York later this year and wondered if you could email the address / closest landmark area / road of the site of Second House?
My email is max@maxmalandrino.com
my website has some of my work on too:
http://www.maxmalandrino.com/
Any help would be greatly appreciated..thanks.
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