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Anywhere else, this would be a funky bungalow. In West Hollywood, it's a tear-down. But the modest house is enjoying an exotic cultural moment before it becomes a memory. "First House" is the site of Richard Prince's installation of paintings and other works through April 30. It is the inaugural event for Regen Projects, formerly the Stuart Regen Gallery, which has scaled back its operations to fund four special projects a year.
Is this a joke? Well, yes and no. The paintings are jokes. Lettered mostly in black on white, the canvases of various sizes make visitors to the house commit contemporary art heresy-they giggle and guffaw, nudge and wink.
My brother just married a two-headed lady. Is she pretty, you ask? Well, yes and no.
Prince, who lives in New York, got this idea in 1985 after spending four months making art in a rented house in Venice. In West Hollywood, he has approximated aspects of his studio by putting drop cloths on some of the floors and sanding others, stripping the walls down to plaster and wall board and standing cheap flood lamps in the corners. Conventions of an art gallery merge with those of a home. The ambience is intimate yet awkward. Paintings of jokes hang or lean on every wall in aesthetic cacophony. "In a way, it's about display and arrangement," he says.
I don't like to brag but I got good looking kids. Thank God my wife cheated on me.
Seated on a fat roll of canvas on the living-room floor, Prince is dressed, as he often is, in a black suit jacket and white T-shirt. He has a rakish, rock star quality that has earned him a certain notoriety in the worlds of rock music, advertising and film. "If read literally, the jokes are tragic," he admits. "It's a way to cope, to deal with certain realities, absurdities, what I find unbelievable in this world. I don't really have a sense of humor. With my jokes, you are not sure if you should laugh at them or agree with them. Either way, it's a powerful reaction."
A young kid bragged to the judge that he'd shot another kid for a quarter. The judge said, "How can you shoot...