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Lot Essay
Dripping with the same painterliness of Jackson Pollock's heroic abstractions, Richard Prince's Untitled (Already) deliberately punctures the seriousness of Abstract Expressionism's great masterpieces. Disrupting any reading that Prince's painting may be completely abstract, the artist has superimposed one of his signature borsht-belt one-liners, stenciled across the expanse of the canvas. Beneath the textured crimson drips and boldface letters, a quilted collage of photographs of the influential 1960s rock band, lead by Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground and their one time manager and Pop icon, Andy Warhol appears. As a result, Untitled (Already) emerges as a contemporary palimpsest, a conceptual layering of imagery which allows Prince to juxtapose a range of seemingly discordant materials in order to play a complex game with the recognizability of celebrities both specific to the art world and not: Pollock, Reed, Warhol, and of course Prince himself.
First making their appearance in the mid-1980s, when Prince had drawn reproductions of cartoons from publications such as The New Yorker juxtaposed with unrelated and incongruous punch-lines from jokes, the Joke paintings emerged as the hand-crafted continuation of the appropriation art that had previously dominated his work. Soon realizing that the jokes themselves possessed a visual and conceptual power, Prince began to present the near-clinical deadpan on monochrome canvases that superficially echoed the esteemed range of simplicity and minimalism in art--placing the canvases serious and authoritative appearance in strange tension with the flippant content. Untitled (Already) pushes the joke further, stenciling the joke across a combination of references to Abstract Expressionist painters and the Pop art machine, Andy Warhol.
Here, Prince has deliberately carried out a cheeky assault on the venerated fathers of American Post-War art by extinguishing the air of earnestness that surrounded their grand gestures. The masculinity so often associated with the Cedar Tavern bar, with the hard-painting figures such as Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning as well as the lofty concepts that underpinned their theories of abstraction have been tauntingly anchored in stenciled letters and printed photographs that directly opposes the Abstract Expressionist's famous credo, 'I am Nature.' Executed on top of a mechanical medium with photographs of the Factory leader himself along with the Velvet Underground--famous for a series of multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable--Untitled (Already) pits Pop and Abstract Expressionism against each other in a single arena. Prince seeks to amuse the viewer while defacing the art of an earlier generation with his classic one-liner, an act essentially no different from Andy Warhol's Piss Paintings or 'abstractions' derived from Rorschach patterns. Through this process, Prince makes an unlikely and playfully subversive union between two opposing artistic genres.
First making their appearance in the mid-1980s, when Prince had drawn reproductions of cartoons from publications such as The New Yorker juxtaposed with unrelated and incongruous punch-lines from jokes, the Joke paintings emerged as the hand-crafted continuation of the appropriation art that had previously dominated his work. Soon realizing that the jokes themselves possessed a visual and conceptual power, Prince began to present the near-clinical deadpan on monochrome canvases that superficially echoed the esteemed range of simplicity and minimalism in art--placing the canvases serious and authoritative appearance in strange tension with the flippant content. Untitled (Already) pushes the joke further, stenciling the joke across a combination of references to Abstract Expressionist painters and the Pop art machine, Andy Warhol.
Here, Prince has deliberately carried out a cheeky assault on the venerated fathers of American Post-War art by extinguishing the air of earnestness that surrounded their grand gestures. The masculinity so often associated with the Cedar Tavern bar, with the hard-painting figures such as Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning as well as the lofty concepts that underpinned their theories of abstraction have been tauntingly anchored in stenciled letters and printed photographs that directly opposes the Abstract Expressionist's famous credo, 'I am Nature.' Executed on top of a mechanical medium with photographs of the Factory leader himself along with the Velvet Underground--famous for a series of multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable--Untitled (Already) pits Pop and Abstract Expressionism against each other in a single arena. Prince seeks to amuse the viewer while defacing the art of an earlier generation with his classic one-liner, an act essentially no different from Andy Warhol's Piss Paintings or 'abstractions' derived from Rorschach patterns. Through this process, Prince makes an unlikely and playfully subversive union between two opposing artistic genres.