I visited the Guggenheim yesterday for the final day of the Richard Prince retrospective. Afterwards I tried to find more quiet contemplation uptown, resulting in a visit to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, which is undergoing a significant amount of construction following a fire in 2001.

The work that resonated with me most in Spiritual America —though very different than the rest of the show—was Prince’s photo series “Untitled (Upstate).” About 5 years ago, BIG magazine released its Upstate NY issue (#56) . According to the synopsis on the site, “As a separate country, Upstate New York is ripe for BIG exploration. Its visual language is replete with irony, contrast, and anachronistic moments. Its history is defined more often by troughs than peaks — not the bland trajectory of growth and progress other “resort” areas share. Its rituals are compelling — from weekenders’ frenzied escapes to locals’ lascivious pastimes. BIG Upstate will revolve around these contrasts: old made new, ugly made beautiful, the dilapidated preserved.”

This issue arrived on the newsstands when I was an impoverished college student who couldn’t really afford the $30 cover price, so I didn’t purchase the magazine, which was probably a mistake since I think about it all the time. My hazy recollection of the introduction contained a statement about how the issue was and wasn’t specific to New York state – every state or metropolitan area has an “upstate”, and that the upstate exists as this universal, American other. Even after eight years in New York, I still consider this place home.

The description from the Gugg discusses how this other American culture, explored throughout Prince’s work, plays out in the upstate photo series: “Training his camera on the local environment, he inventories the signs of a languishing culture: junk-laden backyards, tire planters, graffitied shacks, rusting carcasses of old automobiles, above-ground pools wrapped for winter, lone basketball hoops in grassy fields, and empty highways leading to nowhere in particular. In images that are at once melancholic and strangely transcendent, the Untitled (upstate) photographs capture a below-the-radar vernacular that remains outside the aesthetics of mainstream pop culture.”

The photographs Prince’s upstate photo series aren’t particularly groundbreaking, but alongside works like “Cowboys” and “Girlfriends” (the “gangs” were pretty amazing), a particular viewpoint emerges about the utter weirdness of the American experience. This America, a perverted compendium of subcultures, is fraught with an idealized cowboy culture epitomized by Marlboro Men and Ronald Reagan, bikers and their girlfriends, drag racers, off-color jokes and Catskill comedians, pulp novels, sexualized prepubescent girls, autographed headshots, Sponge-Bob Squarepants, rock and roll, hippies. What Prince is showing us in his detached way is beautiful and warped and disturbing but human.

After The Richard Prince Experience I took a walk northwest, and ended up on 110th and Amsterdam. During my first year in New York, I spent 6 weeks of my foundation drawing course inside the Cathedral trying to understand the structure of the arches and vaults while tourists walked by and commented on my work. I remember this being extremely traumatic – I was not only insecure about my draftsmanship, but also about my own spirituality. I was freshly arrived from rural America, and to me, churches were places meant for praying, not drawing or photographing or buying trinkets at the gift shop. Something in me changed during this time. When I came back yesterday, I discovered that the entrance was now gray and dismal and temporary, and a photograph replaced what was once a breathtaking view of the sanctuary.