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Lot Essay
Painted in 1996, Untitled is a rollicking example of Richard Prince’s Joke Paintings. Prince began his series of Jokes at the end of the 1980s, combining zingy one-liners with either monochrome backdrops or colourful abstractions. In the present painting, multi-hued marbled forms fill much of the canvas. In the blank, off-white space beneath, Prince has scrawled a wisecracking caption: ‘My boyfriend just married a girl who’s bisexual. Claims he’s going to change her. He did. Three years later she’s a lesbian’.
Prince is famous for his wry appropriations and recontextualisations which unite vernacular material with high culture. He rose to prominence during the 1980s as part of the Pictures Generation, a loose affiliation of artists whose imagistic juxtapositions unpacked the linguistics of pictures. Like his peers, Prince is an accumulator of images, particularly those found in advertisements and mass media; as his friend the photographer Craig McDean said, ‘Richard Prince is a fierce collector. If you said that he has elevated collecting to an art form, you would be accurate’ (C. McDean, ‘Richard Prince’, Interview, 23 November 2008). Prince’s first works to reach critical acclaim were the Cowboys, a photographic series for which he re-photographed Marlboro Cigarettes’ print advertisements as a means of questioning notions of authenticity, originality, and authorship.
At first glance, the Joke Paintings appear to suggest a dramatic break from the appropriated media which had thus far dominated Prince’s oeuvre, but like his Marlboro men, the witticisms were also thieved, taken from old books and issues of The New Yorker. Looking at the cartoons, Prince began to think about the joke’s text as its own standalone image: without the illustration, he found that the words were rendered abstract. As the Pictures Generation repeatedly sought to reveal, meaning is only ever contextual. With its zippy pacing and overt bravado, the joke of Untitled gestures to this earlier comedic lineage, but it also illustrates Prince’s larger project: an inquiry into the construction of meaning and its methods of seduction.
Prince is famous for his wry appropriations and recontextualisations which unite vernacular material with high culture. He rose to prominence during the 1980s as part of the Pictures Generation, a loose affiliation of artists whose imagistic juxtapositions unpacked the linguistics of pictures. Like his peers, Prince is an accumulator of images, particularly those found in advertisements and mass media; as his friend the photographer Craig McDean said, ‘Richard Prince is a fierce collector. If you said that he has elevated collecting to an art form, you would be accurate’ (C. McDean, ‘Richard Prince’, Interview, 23 November 2008). Prince’s first works to reach critical acclaim were the Cowboys, a photographic series for which he re-photographed Marlboro Cigarettes’ print advertisements as a means of questioning notions of authenticity, originality, and authorship.
At first glance, the Joke Paintings appear to suggest a dramatic break from the appropriated media which had thus far dominated Prince’s oeuvre, but like his Marlboro men, the witticisms were also thieved, taken from old books and issues of The New Yorker. Looking at the cartoons, Prince began to think about the joke’s text as its own standalone image: without the illustration, he found that the words were rendered abstract. As the Pictures Generation repeatedly sought to reveal, meaning is only ever contextual. With its zippy pacing and overt bravado, the joke of Untitled gestures to this earlier comedic lineage, but it also illustrates Prince’s larger project: an inquiry into the construction of meaning and its methods of seduction.