Whereas last week Richard Prince took to his blog Birdtalk to unleash a chirping tirade of anti-ARTINFO vitriol, this week finds the appropriation artist feeling more reflexive and thoughtful, particularly as he recalls early encounters with Jack Goldstein — currently showing at Adam Lindemann’s gallery Venus Over Manhattan — Lawrence Weiner, and Carl Andre. True to form, he also throws in a couple of impenetrable riddles — at least one of which quotes one of his joke paintings — and in the midst of a long story about Andre mentions that “he hit on my girlfriend.”
In a post yesterday, Prince offers his thoughts on essays about Goldstein penned by David Salle and Ashley Bickerton (he prefers the former’s), and relates his first encounters with Goldstein’s paintings in the late-1970s and early-80s. His description of the first one he ever saw is quite lovely:
The first painting I saw of Jack’s was in a summer “preview” show at Janelle Reiring’s loft in Tribeca in 1979. The painting was all one color and in the middle of the painting there was a small “right on” representation of an astronaut falling. Falling falling and falling. It was summersaulting through a monochromatic field of colored space. The painting was magical.
Prince closes his post on Goldstein enigmatically, all the while shedding some light on his personal art collection:
His barking dog, his flaming window, his records with sound tracks of cars crashing are part art history. That’s what we know. I have a couple of his paintings in my collection. That’s what I know. His paintings are the fucking turtle.
His entry from Wednesday about Weiner opens with a mad-lib-like remix of the theme song from The Monkees’s TV show:
“Hey Hey I’m a potter. And people say I potty around. But I’m to busy potting, to put anybody down”. (Last night I had a dream that I had a Monkee on my back).
What does this have to do with Carl Andre?
The pottery everything.
The Monkees not so much.
Improbably, that vintage trash TV reference segues into stories about hanging out with Weiner in Vienna and Andre in New York, and leads Prince to relay the former’s estimation of the latter’s role in the death of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta:
She came in thru the bathroom window…
I don’t what happen to Carl Andre’s wife. No one does, no one will. Lawrence Wiener says Carl didn’t have anything to do with her death, and that’s enough for me.
The closing section of his entry about his interactions with Andre in the 70s finds Prince at his funniest:
The were several times when I would be walking back to my sublet alone, late at night, after last call, four in the morning, and I would run into Carl Andre. (He was probably doing the same thing). The run in was always on West Broadway. No one around. It was amazingly peaceful. The first couple of run-ins I would stop and say. “Hey Carl… it’s me, Richard…” He’d just stare at me in his bib-overalls and walk on by. He would look right through me… X-ray vision. The way he would stare was what bothered me the most. His eyes told me, “I’m fucking Carl Andre and I already know the time”.
Read all of Richard Prince’s Birdtalk posts from this week here.
— Benjamin Sutton