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Lot Essay
Painted in 1989, Neighbor's Wife is one of Richard Prince's so-called Joke Paintings. A deadpan joke takes up some of the space in the centre of a monochrome canvas. Usually, this would be the arena for all sorts of painterly adventures, but Prince has deliberately restrained himself, controlled himself, presenting us with a narrative in the form of a witticism, and a witticism that appears aged at that, as though pillaged from the act of a stand-up comedian of yesteryear.
Prince uses the deadpan presentation of this joke in order to expose the mechanics that are used to control a viewer. He has disassembled the process of artistic representation and the way it demands interpretation, distilling it to a strange essence. In this way, he controls his viewer. We read the joke, we laugh or groan in reaction to it. We have taken in this brief narrative and have reacted to the painting's raw narrative content. Visually, Neighbor's Wife echoes the uncluttered monochromes of Yves Klein; it has the emphatic simplicity of Minimalism. And yet in its centre is a joke, deliberately puncturing the seriousness of those prior examples. Even the font is deliberately unobtrusive, the seriousness and authority of its appearance in 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' (Prince, quoted in R. Rian, 'Interview', pp. 6-24, in R. Brooks, J. Rian & L. Sante, Richard Prince, London, 2003, p. 20).
In his Joke Paintings, Prince made a dramatic break from the use of appropriated media and advertising images that had provided so much of his source material previously. And yet there is a similar mentality at play here, a similar formula being approached from the other end. Where in other works, the Marlboro Man, gleaming interiors and beautiful models were stripped of their context, exposing the intense and idealised consumer imagery being used to manipulate viewers, here we are confronted by a hackneyed, appropriated joke captured in crisp letters in oil on canvas, as opposed to the photographic reproductions of many of Prince's other works. And it is through this joke and our inevitable reaction to it, whatever that reaction may be, that Prince illustrates the processes that underlie our reflex appreciation and interpretation of images, of paintings, of the news, of billboards, of the media, exposing the bare bones of the artist's vocation, or trade, and of the manipulation behind our visual culture as a whole.
Prince uses the deadpan presentation of this joke in order to expose the mechanics that are used to control a viewer. He has disassembled the process of artistic representation and the way it demands interpretation, distilling it to a strange essence. In this way, he controls his viewer. We read the joke, we laugh or groan in reaction to it. We have taken in this brief narrative and have reacted to the painting's raw narrative content. Visually, Neighbor's Wife echoes the uncluttered monochromes of Yves Klein; it has the emphatic simplicity of Minimalism. And yet in its centre is a joke, deliberately puncturing the seriousness of those prior examples. Even the font is deliberately unobtrusive, the seriousness and authority of its appearance in 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' (Prince, quoted in R. Rian, 'Interview', pp. 6-24, in R. Brooks, J. Rian & L. Sante, Richard Prince, London, 2003, p. 20).
In his Joke Paintings, Prince made a dramatic break from the use of appropriated media and advertising images that had provided so much of his source material previously. And yet there is a similar mentality at play here, a similar formula being approached from the other end. Where in other works, the Marlboro Man, gleaming interiors and beautiful models were stripped of their context, exposing the intense and idealised consumer imagery being used to manipulate viewers, here we are confronted by a hackneyed, appropriated joke captured in crisp letters in oil on canvas, as opposed to the photographic reproductions of many of Prince's other works. And it is through this joke and our inevitable reaction to it, whatever that reaction may be, that Prince illustrates the processes that underlie our reflex appreciation and interpretation of images, of paintings, of the news, of billboards, of the media, exposing the bare bones of the artist's vocation, or trade, and of the manipulation behind our visual culture as a whole.