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Lot Essay
In Richard Prince’s painting Every Window in the Place, a borsch-belt groaner is coolly spelled out at the center of a large Bordeaux-hued canvas. This wry postmodern work is part of the artist’s iconic Monochrome Jokes series, a body of paintings featuring gag jokes which he began in 1987 in a dramatic move away from photography inspired works and toward painting. Richard Prince’s appropriative oeuvre self-reflexively reiterates American culture, and Every Window in the Place is indeed an apt cultural mirror. In the present painting, the artist takes a joke—a 1950s-style wisecrack about an insane asylum “inmate” wanting to use a woman’s garter to break all of the windows in the asylum—as a found object, a verbal readymade. In starkly rendering decontextualized, mildly off-color puns in paint, Prince reveals the rich complexity underlying a simple joke. He positions the puns to be contemplated critico-conceptually as indicators of the national subconscious with all of its attitudes, tensions, and fractures. The painterly style of the Monochrome Jokes similarly reflects and reflects upon the heroic masculinity of American Abstract Expressionism, questioning the seriousness and legitimacy of prevailing impassioned artistic styles by taking them too as readymades. The monochromatic canvas of Every Window in the Place evokes Hard-edge painter Ellsworth Kelly’s and Mark Rothko’s colored fields, and the zinger zips across the canvas in a flipped (and flippant) version of Color Field painter Barnett Newman’s vertical “zips” of paint. Playfully subversive, Every Window in the Place—part of the seminal series that Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spectator called “the antimasterpiece…that refuses to behave”—layers jokes on top of one another to a Conceptual end (N. Spector, “Nowhere Man,” in N. Spector (ed.), Richard Prince, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 39).
Minimal, mechanical, and impishly nihilistic, Every Window in the Place puts middle-class American humor (“Repeat these jokes out loud and you can practically hear the Yiddish inflections of Catskills comedians,” writes Nancy Spector) in the dead center of a Color Field monochrome (N. Spector, “Nowhere Man,” in N. Spector (ed.), Richard Prince, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 36). A neatly stenciled yellow text sits upon a large flat burgundy field. With its brushstrokes virtually imperceptible, the work eschews the appearance of human touch and evinces anonymity, much like the notion of a joke in the oral tradition which has no owner. Prince selected the joke to be the stark “antithesis of the pseudoexpressionistic painting painting and sculpture being produced at the time” (N. Spector, ibid., p. 37). He combined an old recycled joke, eternally waiting in the wings to be repeated, with what he viewed as a recyclable painting: to the famous appropriation artist, everything was a readymade, ripe for the taking in an artistic effort to deconstruct authenticity, authorship, masculinity, and identity. Peter Schjeldahl noted that “Prince’s most ambitious works cheerfully vulgarize familiar features of Abstract Expressionism, minimalism [sic], and Pop art,” and indeed Every Window in the Place puts lofty Abstract Expressionist painting in the service of a salty pun (P. Schjeldahl, “The Joker: Richard Prince at the Guggenheim, The New Yorker, 15 October 2007, p. 92). Prince, who collects novelty magazines and pulp fiction novels, frequently culled his “found jokes” from joke books; the Every Window in the Place wisecrack seems to have been particularly popular among college newspapers in the 1950s. The somewhat clinical decontextualization, obfuscation, and isolation of the joke, or the Conceptual neutrality with which the joke is treated in the present work, “bring[s] to the surface the hostility, fear and shame fueling much American humor” (N. Spector, op. cit., p. 37). Prince coaxes the nuances and cultural tensions—the gradations—out of a silly gag, making a joke into art.
The brilliant Monochrome Jokes cycle emerged from Prince’s long-term exploration of the theme of humor. In 1985, Prince began to scribble classic one-liners in pen or ink on pieces of unadorned paper, which he would sell to dealers for $10 a pop—one particularly thrifty dealer requested a 10% discount for two. Funny, facetious, and conceptual, these written jokes emerged in stark contrast to dominant Neo-Expressionist painting and sculpture; they were more Warholian in their ethos. Around the same time Prince also appropriated existing cartoons, often dealing with themes of sexual infidelity, which he went on to enlarge and silkscreen onto canvas. The artist played with meaning through the deliberate confusion of these cartoons’ discursive systems: he overlapped multiple cartoons or switched out cartoon punch lines with borscht-belt humor to a disjunctive and opaquely autobiographical effect. The artist expressed that this abstract signifier-scrambling exercise “gradually became tragic in a quite unexpected way” (R. Prince quoted in N. Spector, op. cit., p. 37). It was in 1987, during an extended stay in Los Angeles, that Prince came up with his greatest joke series, the Monochrome Joke paintings. He painted canvases in uninflected monochromatic hues, minimizing his brushstroke for a mechanical effect. He then stenciled or silkscreened individual jokes in bright colors onto large, pre-stretched canvases, which the jokes bisected. For the artist, whose early works were photographs, painting was at that point an unusual choice. It was in fact the joke paintings that led Prince to adopt painting in the long-term as a technique with which to grapple with the readymade.
Prince’s subject ends up being not a joke, nor a painting, but that most postmodern of things: the structures that underly humor and painting. He probes how the codes of humor and painting function and what sort of cultural assumptions they hide under their attractive surfaces. A leading member of the Pictures Generation, Prince is known for his appropriative work that, with an elegant wit, at once reproduces and critiques American culture. Peter Schjeldahl might have put it best when he said of the popular avant-gardist: “If ‘quintessential artist in a generation’ were a job opening, Prince…would be an inevitable hire” (P. Schjeldahl, op. cit., p. 90).
Minimal, mechanical, and impishly nihilistic, Every Window in the Place puts middle-class American humor (“Repeat these jokes out loud and you can practically hear the Yiddish inflections of Catskills comedians,” writes Nancy Spector) in the dead center of a Color Field monochrome (N. Spector, “Nowhere Man,” in N. Spector (ed.), Richard Prince, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 36). A neatly stenciled yellow text sits upon a large flat burgundy field. With its brushstrokes virtually imperceptible, the work eschews the appearance of human touch and evinces anonymity, much like the notion of a joke in the oral tradition which has no owner. Prince selected the joke to be the stark “antithesis of the pseudoexpressionistic painting painting and sculpture being produced at the time” (N. Spector, ibid., p. 37). He combined an old recycled joke, eternally waiting in the wings to be repeated, with what he viewed as a recyclable painting: to the famous appropriation artist, everything was a readymade, ripe for the taking in an artistic effort to deconstruct authenticity, authorship, masculinity, and identity. Peter Schjeldahl noted that “Prince’s most ambitious works cheerfully vulgarize familiar features of Abstract Expressionism, minimalism [sic], and Pop art,” and indeed Every Window in the Place puts lofty Abstract Expressionist painting in the service of a salty pun (P. Schjeldahl, “The Joker: Richard Prince at the Guggenheim, The New Yorker, 15 October 2007, p. 92). Prince, who collects novelty magazines and pulp fiction novels, frequently culled his “found jokes” from joke books; the Every Window in the Place wisecrack seems to have been particularly popular among college newspapers in the 1950s. The somewhat clinical decontextualization, obfuscation, and isolation of the joke, or the Conceptual neutrality with which the joke is treated in the present work, “bring[s] to the surface the hostility, fear and shame fueling much American humor” (N. Spector, op. cit., p. 37). Prince coaxes the nuances and cultural tensions—the gradations—out of a silly gag, making a joke into art.
The brilliant Monochrome Jokes cycle emerged from Prince’s long-term exploration of the theme of humor. In 1985, Prince began to scribble classic one-liners in pen or ink on pieces of unadorned paper, which he would sell to dealers for $10 a pop—one particularly thrifty dealer requested a 10% discount for two. Funny, facetious, and conceptual, these written jokes emerged in stark contrast to dominant Neo-Expressionist painting and sculpture; they were more Warholian in their ethos. Around the same time Prince also appropriated existing cartoons, often dealing with themes of sexual infidelity, which he went on to enlarge and silkscreen onto canvas. The artist played with meaning through the deliberate confusion of these cartoons’ discursive systems: he overlapped multiple cartoons or switched out cartoon punch lines with borscht-belt humor to a disjunctive and opaquely autobiographical effect. The artist expressed that this abstract signifier-scrambling exercise “gradually became tragic in a quite unexpected way” (R. Prince quoted in N. Spector, op. cit., p. 37). It was in 1987, during an extended stay in Los Angeles, that Prince came up with his greatest joke series, the Monochrome Joke paintings. He painted canvases in uninflected monochromatic hues, minimizing his brushstroke for a mechanical effect. He then stenciled or silkscreened individual jokes in bright colors onto large, pre-stretched canvases, which the jokes bisected. For the artist, whose early works were photographs, painting was at that point an unusual choice. It was in fact the joke paintings that led Prince to adopt painting in the long-term as a technique with which to grapple with the readymade.
Prince’s subject ends up being not a joke, nor a painting, but that most postmodern of things: the structures that underly humor and painting. He probes how the codes of humor and painting function and what sort of cultural assumptions they hide under their attractive surfaces. A leading member of the Pictures Generation, Prince is known for his appropriative work that, with an elegant wit, at once reproduces and critiques American culture. Peter Schjeldahl might have put it best when he said of the popular avant-gardist: “If ‘quintessential artist in a generation’ were a job opening, Prince…would be an inevitable hire” (P. Schjeldahl, op. cit., p. 90).