Accoutrements of a glittering pop career reveal… Prince liked purple
My Name Is Prince O2 Arena, London
In 2007, Prince played a 21-night residency at the O2 Arena, turning the vast, impersonal Greenwich dome into a musical home from home. Eighteen months after his shocking and untimely death at the age of 57, the much-loved multi-instrumental superstar is back in residence.
Or, at least, that seems to be the idea.
My Name Is Prince is an exhibition of items from his legendary suburban Minneapolis estate, Paisley Park, a neatly laid-out display of dozens of outlandish costumes and personalised instruments from across his career, set to a backdrop of Prince music and videos, with atmospheric stage lighting sweeping across purple walls and floors. There really is a lot of purple. Prince liked purple, apparently.
That, unfortunately, is about the level of revelation you can expect. The outfits are flamboyant and fabulous, elaborately patterned, sequinned and brocaded and certainly worth a peek.
What is genuinely striking when you see all of Prince’s stage clothes together is how short he was. There is a cabinet of shiny, glittery, colourful boots, all sporting 6in heels, which he wore to extend his natural 5ft 3in. The smallness, though, is also bizarrely emphasised by the use of headless mannequins. It makes a rather sad visual metaphor for an exhibition that gives everything but the man himself.
Prince can be seen on multiple screens, playing and dancing in videos, posing on posters and record covers, but these are all familiar images. There is very little that fans won’t already be well acquainted with. It is certainly intriguing to gawp at the branded artefacts and admire his custom-built leopard skin and curlicue-shaped guitars, but there is almost nothing intimate or personal, no attempt to reveal the man behind the myth.
Only one cabinet in the whole exhibition contains some notebooks of lyrics, with only a couple of pages facing up to be read. The slightly tatty contents stand in marked contrast to the polished slickness of everything else on display. There is an otherworldly frisson in contemplating the everyday banality of branded Office Max stationery covered in Prince’s handwriting. His bold, purposeful penmanship, speckled with urgent capitals, offers a rare glimpse of an inner life, evidence of an actual human being at work, conjuring up the fantasy displayed all around us with just the power of his imagination.
There is one room in the exhibition that made me deeply sad, offering up a sterile re-creation of Paisley Park itself. The building has all the charm of a business centre. Every room has been photographed empty, while a costume stands guard over his antiseptic empire. Was Prince really this isolated and lonely? It made me yearn for evidence of Prince’s other life, so deeply expressed in the wild adventures and emotional riches of his music.
Assembled with the assistance of his surviving siblings and heirs, this is an exhibition that ignores Prince’s religious conversion to a Jehovah’s Witness, turns a blind eye to his love and sex life, blurs over his complicated family history and all but erases every musician he ever played with.
The V&A’S David Bowie Is and The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains retrospectives have showed what kind of creative synergy and enlightenment might be realised in an ambitiously and lovingly curated rock’n’roll exhibition. That is the kind of exhibition Prince deserves.
Unfortunately, this has zero interest in doing anything more than perpetuating a myth. Prince has long since left the building.
Until Jan 7. Tickets: theo2.co.uk