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Lot Essay
Formerly in the Saatchi collection, All You Can Eat is a dynamic work, featuring Prince's iconic method of appropriation. Here, he appropriates and decontextualizes a joke, leading the viewer down one of several paths of reactions and responses. Prince's aloofness to the general meaning of his artistic oeuvre, along with the abstract nature of this work's silkscreening, do not necessarily create a light-hearted circumstance but rather a nebulous and intriguing atmosphere as we try to discern the appropriate reaction-should we laugh or should we cringe at the joke's dark and somewhat sinister humor? The ambiguity intertwines drollness and uneasiness as Prince transplants a joke of questionable taste into the realm of "high" art. The alteration in context and unseemly underpinnings of the joke become as awkwardly conspicuous as the sense of entertainment it is meant to induce.
Similarly beguiling in All You Can Eat is Prince's abstract composition as there is no direct correlation to the joke. A recycled joke is essentially authorless as it floats around the world freely. In a series of silkscreens Prince produced in the late 1990s, Prince essentially authors jokes by constructing a physical context around the written joke. Prince's silkscreening in All You Can Eat does not demonstrate an evident pattern, but resembles a cellular structure, completely irrelevant to the hand-written joke at the bottom of the work. The varied colors and contrasting nuclei-like black scribbles do not convey an explicit message nor do they collectively portray a distinct image; conversely, they force the viewer to ponder the work in its entirety and consider the function of art.
As to describe when he first started telling jokes, Richard Prince responded, "I never really started telling. I started telling them over" (R. Prince in an interview, "Like a Beautiful Scar on your Head," Modern Painters, Special American Issue, Autumn 2002, Vol 15, Number 3). His response, though it circumvents the question, is immensely telling; it alludes to the fundamental mechanism of appropriation behind not only All You Can Eat, but also his entire body of work. By adopting and subsequently recontextualizing images, text, and objects ensconced in American culture, Prince brings into question traditional notions of art, as well as broader ideas of authorship and individuality.
Although he began his career as a figure painter, Prince earned his first significant recognition through photography. By taking photographs of images that appeared in publications like The New York Times Magazine, he established what would become his legacy of appropriating ready-made elements of American culture. However, the significance of this work extended beyond the simple, subversive innovation of "re-photography." Through his editorial selection and juxtaposition of particular images, the artist wheedled out the underlying social and cultural assumptions, stereotypes, myths, and anxieties that had inhabited the original images, but which had previously activated only the viewers' subconscious considerations.
After years of working through a camera lens, Prince reassumed the more traditional tools of his trade when in the 1980s he began to reproduce illustrations from The New Yorker in pencil on pieces of scrap paper. He called these works "jokes," but was soon troubled by the notion that he was misrepresenting what were more precisely "cartoons." "It occurred to me that if I was to call them 'jokes' then I would need to get rid of the illustration and concentrate on the punch line," he later explained (R. Prince in an interview with B. Appel, www.rovetv.net/pr-interview.)
By appropriating archetypal images and jokes from past Americana, and adding to and altering their meaning through new mediums, Prince creates entirely new and innovative artwork. In All You Can Eat, Prince departs from his blatant appropriation of pop culture images and monochromatic washes of color. The work is neither commonplace nor obvious; instead, it is a synthesis of Prince's sense of humor and intellectualism. All You Can Eat is an exceptional example of Prince's provocative and multifaceted approach towards art.
Similarly beguiling in All You Can Eat is Prince's abstract composition as there is no direct correlation to the joke. A recycled joke is essentially authorless as it floats around the world freely. In a series of silkscreens Prince produced in the late 1990s, Prince essentially authors jokes by constructing a physical context around the written joke. Prince's silkscreening in All You Can Eat does not demonstrate an evident pattern, but resembles a cellular structure, completely irrelevant to the hand-written joke at the bottom of the work. The varied colors and contrasting nuclei-like black scribbles do not convey an explicit message nor do they collectively portray a distinct image; conversely, they force the viewer to ponder the work in its entirety and consider the function of art.
As to describe when he first started telling jokes, Richard Prince responded, "I never really started telling. I started telling them over" (R. Prince in an interview, "Like a Beautiful Scar on your Head," Modern Painters, Special American Issue, Autumn 2002, Vol 15, Number 3). His response, though it circumvents the question, is immensely telling; it alludes to the fundamental mechanism of appropriation behind not only All You Can Eat, but also his entire body of work. By adopting and subsequently recontextualizing images, text, and objects ensconced in American culture, Prince brings into question traditional notions of art, as well as broader ideas of authorship and individuality.
Although he began his career as a figure painter, Prince earned his first significant recognition through photography. By taking photographs of images that appeared in publications like The New York Times Magazine, he established what would become his legacy of appropriating ready-made elements of American culture. However, the significance of this work extended beyond the simple, subversive innovation of "re-photography." Through his editorial selection and juxtaposition of particular images, the artist wheedled out the underlying social and cultural assumptions, stereotypes, myths, and anxieties that had inhabited the original images, but which had previously activated only the viewers' subconscious considerations.
After years of working through a camera lens, Prince reassumed the more traditional tools of his trade when in the 1980s he began to reproduce illustrations from The New Yorker in pencil on pieces of scrap paper. He called these works "jokes," but was soon troubled by the notion that he was misrepresenting what were more precisely "cartoons." "It occurred to me that if I was to call them 'jokes' then I would need to get rid of the illustration and concentrate on the punch line," he later explained (R. Prince in an interview with B. Appel, www.rovetv.net/pr-interview.)
By appropriating archetypal images and jokes from past Americana, and adding to and altering their meaning through new mediums, Prince creates entirely new and innovative artwork. In All You Can Eat, Prince departs from his blatant appropriation of pop culture images and monochromatic washes of color. The work is neither commonplace nor obvious; instead, it is a synthesis of Prince's sense of humor and intellectualism. All You Can Eat is an exceptional example of Prince's provocative and multifaceted approach towards art.