Lot Essay
It is a well known convention of advertising that a straight picture can be saved by a bent headline and the more bent the picture is, the straighter the headline should be. No stranger to the power of images and advertising, Richard Prince has harnessed this concept with aplomb in his celebrated series of Joke paintings. The present work is no exception as its deadpan delivery of a Borscht Belt one-liner acts to cunningly undermine painting's status as the highest art form.
Executed in 2001, Ranting and Raving is a work that tracks Prince's trajectory to a more gestural style of painting. The stencilled words stutter across the canvas, stopping and starting, dropping and repeating letters so that the typography abuts the edges of the canvas in a solid block. The roughly painted matt black canvas has the emphatic simplicity of Minimalism. And yet at its centre is a corny joke that deliberately punctures the high-minded nature of Ad Reinhardt's grids and the dark, ponderous voids of Marc Rothko. Even the typeface is intentionally unobtrusive, the seriousness and authority of its appearance creating a strange tension with the flippant content. 'The subject comes first. Then the medium I guess,' Prince has explained. 'Like the jokes. They needed a traditional medium. Stretchers, canvas, paint. The most traditional. Nothing fancy or clever or loud. The subject was already that. So the medium had to cut into the craziness. Make it more normal. Normalize the subject. Normality as the next special effect' (quoted in R. Brooks, J. Rian & L. Sante, eds., Richard Prince, London, 2003, p. 20).
Prince made his first foray into comedy in 1985, when he began sketching cartoons from The New Yorker and Playboy. Yet he quickly dropped the image to concentrate on the punch line, recycling a wealth of well-worn jokes of the Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman variety into his iconoclastic paintings. The Jokes made a dramatic break from Prince's "re-photographed" advertising images, but they encapsulate the same interest in audacious appropriation, the seductiveness of mass culture and the death of the author. Ranting and Raving therefore reflects Prince's quest to unearth the desires and prejudices of middle America, while simultaneously deflating the more elevated aspects of its society. And in keeping with the antiheroic mentality that defines his practice, it ultimately asks us not to take it all too seriously.
Executed in 2001, Ranting and Raving is a work that tracks Prince's trajectory to a more gestural style of painting. The stencilled words stutter across the canvas, stopping and starting, dropping and repeating letters so that the typography abuts the edges of the canvas in a solid block. The roughly painted matt black canvas has the emphatic simplicity of Minimalism. And yet at its centre is a corny joke that deliberately punctures the high-minded nature of Ad Reinhardt's grids and the dark, ponderous voids of Marc Rothko. Even the typeface is intentionally unobtrusive, the seriousness and authority of its appearance creating a strange tension with the flippant content. 'The subject comes first. Then the medium I guess,' Prince has explained. 'Like the jokes. They needed a traditional medium. Stretchers, canvas, paint. The most traditional. Nothing fancy or clever or loud. The subject was already that. So the medium had to cut into the craziness. Make it more normal. Normalize the subject. Normality as the next special effect' (quoted in R. Brooks, J. Rian & L. Sante, eds., Richard Prince, London, 2003, p. 20).
Prince made his first foray into comedy in 1985, when he began sketching cartoons from The New Yorker and Playboy. Yet he quickly dropped the image to concentrate on the punch line, recycling a wealth of well-worn jokes of the Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman variety into his iconoclastic paintings. The Jokes made a dramatic break from Prince's "re-photographed" advertising images, but they encapsulate the same interest in audacious appropriation, the seductiveness of mass culture and the death of the author. Ranting and Raving therefore reflects Prince's quest to unearth the desires and prejudices of middle America, while simultaneously deflating the more elevated aspects of its society. And in keeping with the antiheroic mentality that defines his practice, it ultimately asks us not to take it all too seriously.