What A Joke: Richard Prince Designs for Louis Vuitton
New York City, US
By Robert Brett Goodwin

The Richard Prince retrospective “Spiritual America” is on view here at the Guggenheim museum until 9 January, but this week there has been a lot more buzz surrounding Prince’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton, the French leather goods maker. This isn’t a first for Vuitton, having previously collaborated with the graffiti artist Stephen Sprouse, Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami, and performance artist Vanessa Beescroft. An artist who examines the highs and the lowest of lows in our consumer culture, Prince is the perfect choice to design for what is surely the most ubiquitous luxury handbag company on earth.

Prince got his start as an artist by copying furniture adverts from the New York Times. His style of appropriation – taking images from other sources– eventually led him to the famous Marlboro Man series of the 1980’s, as well as his nurses and the “joke” series, which have lasted to this day (example joke: “I went to see a psychiatrist. He said, ‘Tell me everything.’ I did, and now he’s doing my act”). That the images were not originally his own does not matter. Prince has borrowed ideas from Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and artists who have explored the relationship between photography and painting such as Gerhard Richter. The result occupies a place somewhere between high-end intellectualism and the low-end of pop culture.

Lately his pieces, particularly the Marlboro man series, have been selling for millions at auction, causing the commercial photographers of the original images a good deal of unhappiness . The photographers have no legal recourse to Prince’s appropriated work. Prince’s reaction to the controversy: "It's all about this idea of America. I've always felt in this country you could do anything you wanted to do…. I have never been censored, never arrested. When this country works, it is a great place to live ." Prince also made a splash at this year’s Frieze Art Fair in London with his piece Pure Thoughts, a pimped-out 1970 Dodge Challenger muscle car, spinning on a pedestal under glaring spotlights and attended to by a woman doing her best impression of Daisy Duke, hot pants and all. He is drawing on the quintessential tropes of American pop culture. So what is he doing designing handbags for a Parisian atelier?

Some of the bags are printed with a deliberate offset, in the style of a Warhol silkscreen. Others combine more than one of the well-known LV patterns into one print. It makes the bag look like a bad Chinese fake – so come 2008, you can own a genuine fake of a fake Louis Vuitton, if you so choose. Other bags feature screen prints and text from the “joke” series. All of them are done in day-glo bright colours (LV creative director Marc Jacobs attributes inspiration to a love of Spongebob Squarepants). Advertisements for the collection will feature six supermodels lounging on the Pure Thoughts Dodge Challenger. Prince has taken the desires of the upwardly mobile and made them available to the upper crust with a knowing wink. The result may be something new after all – an artist’s oeuvre summed up in one handbag collection.

Robert Brett Goodwin

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