Richard Prince’s hall of smoke and mirrors at Gagosian London

A young boy tips water on a clown. A man lifts his svelte wife from the swimming pool by the waist. A mother wrestles with an inflatable dolphin. These are holiday snaps for a world on fire because behind the care-free abandonment of aspirational French families at leisure, reading translations of Hemingway and sunbathing, impossible yellows and reds burn like a simmering flame on an unattended stovetop, about to engulf the veneer of bourgeois freedom. But that makes sense: we are in Richard Prince’s hall of mirrors, a place where codes of ethics are mixed up with insinuations of violence, and where the status anxiety that drives every advertising campaign is applied to our most intimate and private relationships.

A new exhibition of Prince’s early photography opened across Gagosian’s two Mayfair galleries on 5th October. Between the two spaces, Prince tracks the psychotic self-stylisation of America between 1977 and 1987, from the angsty grunge of the B-rate punk scene–his so-called Bitches and Bastards–to the manicured wedding portraits selling the look of love to Ivy League alumni waking up in Reagan’s new morning. They are pictures of Prince working out what he is about, and getting much of it right, in the gilded age of “greed is good”. Diamonds on busts say “gala at the country club”; make-up boxes say “I hate the way my eyes look in this light”. There are one or two moments of rare intimacy, too. An Ektacolor self-portrait sees the artist in a nice suit with high-contrast eyebrows and pursed lips that half suggest a graduand in drag. A double portrait of his friend and fellow Pictures Generation peer, Cindy Sherman, observes her in full pensive mode and a bob haircut. Each offers a more aestheticised composition of lighting and perspective amid the gaudy gauze of American advertising in decadent free-fall.

Down the street, in the Davies Street building, the photographs are foregrounded by a slender rectangular black base that gives them the illicit sensation of film negatives on an undeveloped roll. Titled The Entertainers, and presumably re-photographed from low-budget fashion magazines, they feel like portraits of aspiring actors moonlighting as servers in dive bars, politely smiling back at the photographer. They are the kind of pictures taken for the joy of taking pictures: to make a point of being a voyeur, to acknowledge you’ve looked, with all the power that implies, but you’ll never get the film printed. That’s part of the twinge-in-the-tummy joy of Prince’s works. We are reminded that there is always a kind of theft in every picture we take, stealing something of the person photographed to use them as a means to an end, whether for posterity or perversion. Prince was cutting his teeth during this decade, but he had already found his subject: the horror and the exposure in the things that give us pleasure.

An 18-year-old Prince never interviewed J.G. Ballard, the English satirist known for his studies of the human mind warped and drugged up by mass media, but Prince said he did. The “interview”, Extra-ordinary, was supposedly conducted in 1967 and has now been republished in a book accompanying the Gagosian show. “Ballard” sounds confused about Prince’s yarns about the Panama Canal Zone, “psychic jujitsu” and his opaque claim to be a citizen of British Airways. “Everybody knows or maybe they don’t,” Prince concludes the interview, “but psychopaths never go out of style.”

Unlike Ballard, I’m certain that I’ve interviewed Prince. Through monumental floor-to-ceiling windows, we watched the foamy suds of the waves at Humlebæk force themselves on the rocks outside like an unwanted guest at a half-opened door. A fire roared to Prince’s left. On that afternoon in Denmark, after the interview, I thought to myself: maybe that’s why, inexplicably, Prince still commands these kinds of spaces at these kinds of prices. The psychotic never goes out of style.

Extract from Extra-ordinary 

Time of Conversation: 1967 

J.G. Ballard: You were born in the Panama Canal Zone?

Richard Prince: Yes. In 1949.

Ballard: Panaman? Panamerican?

Prince: Yes. Something like that. I left with my mother and sister after my father had been detentioned for presumably stockpiling arms and munitions for what I imagine now was the 19th nervous breakdown invasion of Cuba. This was in 1956. He was later released, moved to Hawaii and from there has been moving to and from the city of Saigon (what is now Ho Chi Minh City).

Ballard: Aren’t children born in the Canal Zone called Zonians?

Prince: Yes. The canal has represented for some time the concept of unlimited possibility.

Prince: This year, eleven years after I left Panama, I tried to return to Panama.

Ballard: You’re eighteen?

Prince: Yes.

Ballard: The newspapers said your flight to Panama originated from Hawaii. How did that happen?

Prince: I’ve been living with my father in Honolulu all summer. Blonde on Blonde, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors. There’s an aesthetic revolution on. Class systems have seemed to disappear. Things are opening up. I’m sure the liberation will be brief. My father has become involved in introducing a defoliant in Vietnam. Someone wants the jungles to disappear so U.S. soldiers can see the enemy. The death of affect I think they call it.

Ballard: Your father sounds like someone who guarantees hostility and incomprehension. A jungle is a hard thing to get rid of.

Prince: He would say something like he’s interested in the hard light of contemporary reality. He’d say his task is to invent reality, not fiction. He talks like that. What some people dream of and write about, he actually does. He loves Vietnam. He loves Vietnam women. I remember him saying something about how he works with a group that call themselves Team Strange.

Ballard: Why return to Panama?

Prince: I was about to turn eighteen. I have a choice, by law, to become either a Panamanian or an American or both. My father still has contacts with government officials in Panama, and we thought it might be smart, for the future, to secure a dual citizenship. The security required me to show up in person. He put me on a PBY B-Moth. I landed in Panama three days before my eighteenth birthday. I was following in my father’s footsteps.

Ballard: I read in the paper that your troubles started with improper, or I think it was; “the lack of sufficient papers of identity.”

Prince: It was really stupid. I didn’t have a photograph of myself in my passport. Somehow the photograph that had been in my passport became unglued and fell out somewhere. I don’t know … I don’t know how it happened. All I know is when I opened my passport in Customs I found out it was gone. The agents there just looked at me and started shaking their heads.

Ballard: Your father?

Prince: I don’t know.

Ballard: They kept you there for four days?

Prince: Five. At the airport.

Ballard: They treat you okay?

Prince: Psychic Jujitsu. That’s all.

Ballard: Then what?

Prince: I became a citizen of British Airways