The following conversation took place by e-mail in July 2007 over a period of two weeks. During that time, Richard Prince was at work on two projects for the fall, a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and a commission for the Frieze Art Fair in London. Just prior to the interview’s beginning, Prince’s Second House (2001–2007), a minimuseum in upstate New York owned by the Guggenheim, was struck by lightning and burned.

Domenick Ammirati: Do people think you’re lying when you say you’re from the Panama Canal Zone? I’m not entirely sure I believe it myself.

Richard Prince: I’m not sure people even know what the Canal Zone was or where. Maybe something that Rod Serling made up.

Do you feel any special affinity for the palindrome “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama”?

Recently I tried to get Noriega out of his Florida jail and fly him to the Venice Biennale where I was going to install him in a hotel room. I was thinking an audience could line up at the door and get his autograph on an 8-by-10 glossy picture.

He’s getting out this month! You can still do it.

This is exactly the kind of art idea I try to avoid. Too complicated. Too expensive. I like to leave “think” pieces to other artists. Art should be made with cocktail umbrellas.

So then you just claim, point, flash freeze, pin butterflies onto boards. I’m interested in the sense of time in your work. You seem to suspend it in a way that’s hard to articulate. For me the easiest examples are the rephotographs.

Putting a camera in front of another picture. . . Go ahead and do it. You can light it with a couple of lightbulbs—40 watts is enough. Look through the viewfinder and all you see is the other picture. You can stare at it all day. What you’re looking at won’t move. It won’t change. You can come back the next day and it will look exactly the same. You can be lazy about it. You can covet it. You know exactly what you’re going to get before you get it. Whatever I’ve done in my studio has no time. The dates on my work are meaningless. A 1977 photograph is as relevant as a 2007 painting.

I was very sorry to hear about the burning down of Second House. Was it the total loss described in the media? The lightning-strike aspect is bizarre, though I guess that kind of thing happens all the time.

Lightning hit the Second House on Tuesday, June 26. Tearing down the barbed wire and rustling up the cattle came to mind, maybe someone whistling “Dixie.” It’s funny—someone burned a cross on the front lawn of the First House in West Hollywood [1993]. Of all the houses, in all the neighborhoods. . . I’ve asked around: “Have you ever heard of a house being hit by lightning and burning to the ground?” Came the reply, “Don’t reckon I have, at least not in these parts.” Anyway, it’s gone. No more. Most of the contents had been removed and stored by the Guggenheim. The one artwork that was in the house was the Sid Vicious painting done in 1992, titled Third Place. If the Second House is replaced, perhaps by a prefab or kit house, I’ll call it Third Place. It’s the least I can do.

You’re rounding the bases or pulling in a trifecta. I am sorry to hear it, though.

Do you miss New York City?

I miss New York, but I lived there for 25 years. I’m actually there twice a month September through May, so it’s not like I’m completely removed. When I’m there I usually do nothing but go to museums and galleries and bookstores, things that were hard to do when I lived there.

I moved upstate because I wanted the complete opposite experience. I’d never lived in a place with so many trees. I’m in the middle of nowhere in a hill town 2,000 feet above sea level, at the end of a dead-end dirt road surrounded by 90 acres of land that’s (on paper) mine. Sometimes the only people I see besides my family are the FedEx and UPS guys. When I first moved here I started to take photos of neighboring yards and the things that were in them. I started working with the local body shops on my “hoods,” or “bonnets” as you call them. Recently I built my own body shop, where we’re working on whole cars and designing cars. Sometimes I’m not even sure if I’m making art anymore. This is something that I don’t think would have happened if I had stayed in New York. If I had I’d probably be building fire escapes or living in a parking lot.