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拍品专文
“Like a joke, art is something you get or don’t get. Art and jokes instigate the recognition of a shared point of view, an acknowledgement of a punch line”—Glenn O’Brien
(G. O’Brien, “The Joke of the New,” in Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 114).
Most recognized for his early acts of appropriation and his fusion of conceptual ideas with painting and photography, Richard Prince came to the fore as a member of the Pictures Generation alongside other rising stars of the 1980s such as Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Barbara Kruger. His continued questioning of consumer culture and mass media has made Prince a standout among his peers and protégés alike. Executed in 2009, two years after Prince's Guggenheim retrospective, I Never Had a Penny to My Name combines repurposed photographs with text in one of the artist’s much-celebrated ‘joke paintings.’ Unlike some of his earlier pieces in this series that rely on simple words atop a monochrome background, this work recalls Conceptual art’s investigation of text and image relations through a lens that is signature Prince. With a well-seasoned understanding of visual tropes and societal structures, the artist flips popular culture back on itself for a much-needed look in the mirror.
Part of a series that extended Prince’s notorious joke paintings in a new direction, works like I Never Had a Penny to My Name rely on the visual confusion provided by painted text overlaid on a variety of printed photographs. At first glance, the nearly seven-foot canvas reads like an abstract painting of the mid-20th century. This is no mistake as Prince has been reacting in various ways to the works of the Abstract Expressionists for years. However, as one takes in the composition more fully, the bold words of a one-liner joke come into focus over the myriad portraits. A multi-faceted grid of silver, white and blue gradually reveals celebrity headshots of model Kate Moss and late member of the Sex Pistols: Sid Vicious. Each photograph repeats throughout the composition multiple times as an undulating pattern of images emerges beneath swipes of acrylic paint. Moss appears in various poses, sometimes topless, all appropriated straight from advertisements and printed media. Vicious’s images originate from press photographs and tabloids showing him drinking, smoking and posing for fans. However, the most pressing subject in Prince’s work is a simple sentence rendered in outlined block letters that reads, “I NEVER HAD A PENNY TO MY NAME SO I CHANGED MY N NAME.” This pithy one-liner sits atop the background’s visual cacophony but affords the viewer a chance to both look at it and look through it by virtue of its outlined nature. Nancy Spector, the curator of Prince’s 2007 Guggenheim retrospective, notes: “When Prince hijacks photographs and off-color jokes from their circulation in mass culture and re-presents them as his own, he injects his copies [in the artist’s words] ‘with the element of imagination and thus destabilize[s]’ our sense of reality. He takes what we already know–commercial advertising, snapshots of girlfriends, one-liners, celebrity head-shots, pulp-fiction covers–and gives it back relatively unaltered, but forever changed” (N. Spector, “Nowhere Man,” Richard Prince, exh. cat., Guggenheim, New York, 2007, p. 23). Even the repetition of the letter ‘N’ in the piece’s text creates a disjointed reading that forces the words to be studied as more than just their literal meaning.
Prince has often recycled his jokes in various pieces throughout the years, and this particular joke was utilized multiple times, including as a silkscreen print on canvas in a work named Untitled (Joke - I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name...) (1987). This earlier piece relies on a textual element out of place on a blank field. Like a caption removed from a cartoon, which Prince has also experimented with, the joke has its own meaning but is free of any context that would help to explain its humor or purpose. With the 2009 version, the artist is able to rework the words to play with issues of translucency so that both the meaning and structure inherent to written language can be observed at the same time.
Central to Prince’s practice is a conversation about authorship and its tenuous importance in the wake of Modernism. Instead of focusing on the artist’s hand or an indication of particular style and vision found in traditional art forms, Prince has crafted a selective process that culls from a variety of sources. This wide net has often encountered issues of copyright, most recently with Prince’s reproduction of photos from the social media platform Instagram in the 2014 exhibition ‘New Portraits’ at Gagosian. Complete with his own comments posted on the accounts themselves, these so-called ‘portraits’ have a precedent in his earlier rephotographing of extant photographs like Untitled (cowboy) (1989), which set the stage for a larger discussion about appropriation. Some critics have been reticent to agree with Prince’s tactics, but Glenn O’Brien argues: “Like a joke, art is something you get or don’t get. Art and jokes instigate the recognition of a shared point of view, an acknowledgement of a punch line” (G. O’Brien, “The Joke of the New,” in Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 114). Thus, the joke paintings act as a makeshift key to Prince’s larger oeuvre by alluding to a communal nod of awareness. I Never Had a Penny to My Name brings this idea full circle by incorporating both appropriated photographs and the artist’s textual antics into one cohesive composition.
(G. O’Brien, “The Joke of the New,” in Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 114).
Most recognized for his early acts of appropriation and his fusion of conceptual ideas with painting and photography, Richard Prince came to the fore as a member of the Pictures Generation alongside other rising stars of the 1980s such as Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Barbara Kruger. His continued questioning of consumer culture and mass media has made Prince a standout among his peers and protégés alike. Executed in 2009, two years after Prince's Guggenheim retrospective, I Never Had a Penny to My Name combines repurposed photographs with text in one of the artist’s much-celebrated ‘joke paintings.’ Unlike some of his earlier pieces in this series that rely on simple words atop a monochrome background, this work recalls Conceptual art’s investigation of text and image relations through a lens that is signature Prince. With a well-seasoned understanding of visual tropes and societal structures, the artist flips popular culture back on itself for a much-needed look in the mirror.
Part of a series that extended Prince’s notorious joke paintings in a new direction, works like I Never Had a Penny to My Name rely on the visual confusion provided by painted text overlaid on a variety of printed photographs. At first glance, the nearly seven-foot canvas reads like an abstract painting of the mid-20th century. This is no mistake as Prince has been reacting in various ways to the works of the Abstract Expressionists for years. However, as one takes in the composition more fully, the bold words of a one-liner joke come into focus over the myriad portraits. A multi-faceted grid of silver, white and blue gradually reveals celebrity headshots of model Kate Moss and late member of the Sex Pistols: Sid Vicious. Each photograph repeats throughout the composition multiple times as an undulating pattern of images emerges beneath swipes of acrylic paint. Moss appears in various poses, sometimes topless, all appropriated straight from advertisements and printed media. Vicious’s images originate from press photographs and tabloids showing him drinking, smoking and posing for fans. However, the most pressing subject in Prince’s work is a simple sentence rendered in outlined block letters that reads, “I NEVER HAD A PENNY TO MY NAME SO I CHANGED MY N NAME.” This pithy one-liner sits atop the background’s visual cacophony but affords the viewer a chance to both look at it and look through it by virtue of its outlined nature. Nancy Spector, the curator of Prince’s 2007 Guggenheim retrospective, notes: “When Prince hijacks photographs and off-color jokes from their circulation in mass culture and re-presents them as his own, he injects his copies [in the artist’s words] ‘with the element of imagination and thus destabilize[s]’ our sense of reality. He takes what we already know–commercial advertising, snapshots of girlfriends, one-liners, celebrity head-shots, pulp-fiction covers–and gives it back relatively unaltered, but forever changed” (N. Spector, “Nowhere Man,” Richard Prince, exh. cat., Guggenheim, New York, 2007, p. 23). Even the repetition of the letter ‘N’ in the piece’s text creates a disjointed reading that forces the words to be studied as more than just their literal meaning.
Prince has often recycled his jokes in various pieces throughout the years, and this particular joke was utilized multiple times, including as a silkscreen print on canvas in a work named Untitled (Joke - I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name...) (1987). This earlier piece relies on a textual element out of place on a blank field. Like a caption removed from a cartoon, which Prince has also experimented with, the joke has its own meaning but is free of any context that would help to explain its humor or purpose. With the 2009 version, the artist is able to rework the words to play with issues of translucency so that both the meaning and structure inherent to written language can be observed at the same time.
Central to Prince’s practice is a conversation about authorship and its tenuous importance in the wake of Modernism. Instead of focusing on the artist’s hand or an indication of particular style and vision found in traditional art forms, Prince has crafted a selective process that culls from a variety of sources. This wide net has often encountered issues of copyright, most recently with Prince’s reproduction of photos from the social media platform Instagram in the 2014 exhibition ‘New Portraits’ at Gagosian. Complete with his own comments posted on the accounts themselves, these so-called ‘portraits’ have a precedent in his earlier rephotographing of extant photographs like Untitled (cowboy) (1989), which set the stage for a larger discussion about appropriation. Some critics have been reticent to agree with Prince’s tactics, but Glenn O’Brien argues: “Like a joke, art is something you get or don’t get. Art and jokes instigate the recognition of a shared point of view, an acknowledgement of a punch line” (G. O’Brien, “The Joke of the New,” in Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 114). Thus, the joke paintings act as a makeshift key to Prince’s larger oeuvre by alluding to a communal nod of awareness. I Never Had a Penny to My Name brings this idea full circle by incorporating both appropriated photographs and the artist’s textual antics into one cohesive composition.