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Lot Essay
Richard Prince, one of the pioneers of the Pictures Generation movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, has built a career out of wryly commenting upon the psychology of pop culture through appropriated imagery—perhaps best epitomized by his iconic Joke paintings. A monumental monochromatic field of subdued color fulfills the role of straight-man to Prince’s comic texts, sometimes presented plain and direct, sometime articulated in ghostly printed letters that seem to wax and wane in intensity across the canvas, and in the case of Untitled (Check Painting) #13, text that has a material quality—painted over literal paper checks embedded into the canvas surface. This recalls the assemblage paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, a hint that the inherent joke of this painting extends beyond the messages of his painted text and into a realm of mimetic satire.
The cloudy brick-red field and fleshy pink central band of text in Untitled (Check Painting) #13 inescapably allude to the feathered, muted reds of Rothko’s monumental canvases or the bifurcating bands of Barnett Newman. While at a glance, the composition appears abstract and perhaps even expressionistic, Richard Prince’s joke is dry and void of emotion, as distanced from the aims of the Abstract Expressionists as possible. The self-deprecating content of the joke mocks the notion of virility altogether, a joke within a joke within a joke, staunchly solidifying Prince’s place within the realm of contemporary simulacra, impishly poking fun at the principles of the past. Even the way the letters of this work’s text seem to dissipate into a blank stream comments upon the decay of reproduction.
Operating around the philosophy that there were already enough pictures in the world, the Pictures Generation artists employed appropriation as a means of exploring theoretical concepts of post-modern simulacrum and the notion that there was no true originality in art. Prince’s Joke paintings and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series capitalized upon ubiquitous cultural staples that have no specific source. Sherman’s film stills are ambiguously recognizable, they could be from any film and yet are from none. Likewise, Prince’s jokes are idiomatic, they belong to a culture not an individual, passed down and told repeatedly, varying slightly depending upon the narrator, their inflection, their intention. In this sense, the jokes of Richard Prince comment on a society built around oral tradition: legends become history, history becomes stories and stories become rumors and jokes. However, the jokes of Prince’s canvas lack perhaps the most vital tool applied to this tradition: the voice. By reducing a traditionally auditory mode of entertainment into a flat, planer stream of text, Prince’s Joke paintings defy straightforward categorization. Although they are clearly appropriative work, they also permeate into the domain of conceptualism, striking similar cords as the text-based production of artist such as John Baldessari and Joseph Kosuth. When these conceptual artists presented text within the context of an artwork, they were forcing their audiences to become a part of the artwork by imploring them to read the composition, almost like a script that adds an element of the theatrical.
Jokes often require a specific style of delivery to elicit the desired response from their audience, but Prince imposes this obligation upon his viewer. The substance and tone of the jokes change as individuals experiences their mental interpretation differently. While some may find the punchline cheekily charming other will find it crass, and even singular interpretation can shift and sway with time. The subjective nature of humor makes it a volatile medium, like a garish color, noticeable and polarizing. However, this electric quality is what allows the paintings to be engaging, alive with energy and the capacity for metamorphosis. Untitled (Check Painting) #13 has an especially magnetic visage, as the pulsating lines of text are scrawled across a lattice of blank checks, an inherently capricious prospect.
The singular energy embedded into the pseudo-expressionistic, check-riddled surface of this work sets it aside as an exemplary post-modernist painting. The very essence of the work is an assemblage of art-historical allusions. Rauschenberg combine paintings, Rothko color-fields and Baldessari text paintings are all parroted and strung together into one joke that is not only laughing at the unfortunate protagonist of its internal riddle, but also at the past fifty years of artistic production. The varied elements all seems to coalesce in a way that instills a sense of strange buzzing serenity upon the work. Despite the plethora of referential elements, ultimately the protagonist of the joke is left alone stranded within an abyssal red field. The moment Prince lingers upon is the silence the settles after the laugher, the contemplation of the exposed attitudes and tensions of society.
The cloudy brick-red field and fleshy pink central band of text in Untitled (Check Painting) #13 inescapably allude to the feathered, muted reds of Rothko’s monumental canvases or the bifurcating bands of Barnett Newman. While at a glance, the composition appears abstract and perhaps even expressionistic, Richard Prince’s joke is dry and void of emotion, as distanced from the aims of the Abstract Expressionists as possible. The self-deprecating content of the joke mocks the notion of virility altogether, a joke within a joke within a joke, staunchly solidifying Prince’s place within the realm of contemporary simulacra, impishly poking fun at the principles of the past. Even the way the letters of this work’s text seem to dissipate into a blank stream comments upon the decay of reproduction.
Operating around the philosophy that there were already enough pictures in the world, the Pictures Generation artists employed appropriation as a means of exploring theoretical concepts of post-modern simulacrum and the notion that there was no true originality in art. Prince’s Joke paintings and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series capitalized upon ubiquitous cultural staples that have no specific source. Sherman’s film stills are ambiguously recognizable, they could be from any film and yet are from none. Likewise, Prince’s jokes are idiomatic, they belong to a culture not an individual, passed down and told repeatedly, varying slightly depending upon the narrator, their inflection, their intention. In this sense, the jokes of Richard Prince comment on a society built around oral tradition: legends become history, history becomes stories and stories become rumors and jokes. However, the jokes of Prince’s canvas lack perhaps the most vital tool applied to this tradition: the voice. By reducing a traditionally auditory mode of entertainment into a flat, planer stream of text, Prince’s Joke paintings defy straightforward categorization. Although they are clearly appropriative work, they also permeate into the domain of conceptualism, striking similar cords as the text-based production of artist such as John Baldessari and Joseph Kosuth. When these conceptual artists presented text within the context of an artwork, they were forcing their audiences to become a part of the artwork by imploring them to read the composition, almost like a script that adds an element of the theatrical.
Jokes often require a specific style of delivery to elicit the desired response from their audience, but Prince imposes this obligation upon his viewer. The substance and tone of the jokes change as individuals experiences their mental interpretation differently. While some may find the punchline cheekily charming other will find it crass, and even singular interpretation can shift and sway with time. The subjective nature of humor makes it a volatile medium, like a garish color, noticeable and polarizing. However, this electric quality is what allows the paintings to be engaging, alive with energy and the capacity for metamorphosis. Untitled (Check Painting) #13 has an especially magnetic visage, as the pulsating lines of text are scrawled across a lattice of blank checks, an inherently capricious prospect.
The singular energy embedded into the pseudo-expressionistic, check-riddled surface of this work sets it aside as an exemplary post-modernist painting. The very essence of the work is an assemblage of art-historical allusions. Rauschenberg combine paintings, Rothko color-fields and Baldessari text paintings are all parroted and strung together into one joke that is not only laughing at the unfortunate protagonist of its internal riddle, but also at the past fifty years of artistic production. The varied elements all seems to coalesce in a way that instills a sense of strange buzzing serenity upon the work. Despite the plethora of referential elements, ultimately the protagonist of the joke is left alone stranded within an abyssal red field. The moment Prince lingers upon is the silence the settles after the laugher, the contemplation of the exposed attitudes and tensions of society.