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拍品专文
“While I was browsing for autographed photographs, I noticed that memorabilia websites also sell cancelled checks. I started thinking about how much information there is on a personal check. Most fans collect them just for the signature, but I really like the way they’re presented on a plaque, with the cancelled check under the person’s photo. That looked kind of nice. I bought Jack Kerouac’s cancelled check made out for ten dollars to Nunzio’s Wine and Liquor. It’s all about whom you choose. I wouldn’t buy Richard Nixon’s cancelled check. I would much rather find one from Lee Harvey Oswald or Rod Serling.” – Richard Prince
The aspirational allure of fantasy and fame has long played a key role in Richard Prince’s art. His early photographic works slyly weaponize the visual language of commercial advertisement by turning it against itself. By removing any branded content which would otherwise allow the audience to swiftly identify the image as a coercive ad, Prince coaxes his audience into considering the dynamics of desire—specifically American consumer desire—constantly at play in popular culture. An advertisement that can no longer promote acquisitiveness becomes unmoored, destabilized and conspicuous. The same kind of subversion is deployed against the image (or the idea) of celebrity in Prince’s publicity series, which consists of promotional photographs of famous people, most often women, framed alongside various signed memorabilia. These works are uncanny records of otherwise fleeting emotional transactions, such as the simple gesture of signing an autograph. Prince’s clinical appropriation of these objects suggests a fascination with the aura of celebrity, a force which can imbue such superficial ephemera with what almost amounts to pathos.
Prince first exhibited his check paintings in 2005 at Gagosian Gallery’s Los Angeles outpost, situated in the heart of Beverly Hills and a stone’s throw from Hollywood. Considered in the context of Prince’s enduring experimentation with the residue of popular culture, this location would seem fitting for a series of paintings which rely on the potency of the artist’s own celebrity, rather than someone else’s, to propel them to meaning. As Prince explains the collectible attraction of checks, “It’s all about whom you choose.” The check paintings are executed on canvas, with a strict grid of the artist’s personal checks masquerading as an abstract ground. Over this, Prince sometimes stencils jokes, a recurring theme since 1988 when he began reproducing jokes via silkscreen on monochromatic canvases. In the present work, the joke reads: “I accidentally shot my mother-in-law while deer hunting. It was an honest mistake. I came out of the tent in the morning and thought I saw a deer in an orange vest making coffee.” The joke begins to repeat itself but is cut short by the right vertical edge of the painting. Because the letters of the joke are rendered in subtle outlines over the riotous field of checks and confetti-colored paint, it becomes camouflaged, legible only with vaguely focused effort. This is important because the attention that Prince draws to the joke is undermined by its latently misogynistic, blatantly crass content. A friction develops between three aspects of the painting: its objectively pleasant overall aesthetic, the crudity of the almost-transparent joke, and the sheer fact that the painting exists on a foundation of Richard Prince’s personal checks, each decorated with the beloved children’s cartoon character Sponge Bob. Like all of Prince’s best work, the painting poses questions with unclear or potentially disconcerting, if obvious, answers: who is the painting’s audience and is it the same audience as for the joke contained in it? Is the joke funny? Who is Richard Prince and why do we care about his checks?
With the check paintings, Prince carries out a gleeful and irreverent assault on the venerated forefathers of American post-war art by puncturing the bubble of earnestness surrounding their manly exertions. Here, the machismo associated with Abstract Expressionism and the Cedar Tavern gang, with the hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-painting figures such as Kline, Pollock and de Kooning, is siphoned of its heroism and reduced to mere decoration, which is then defaced with a crude joke. Prince toys with the ways in which a famous artist’s individual aesthetic may mimic the mechanics of celebrity, creating a conceptual bridge between Kate Moss’s cheek bones and the brushwork of Jackson Pollock. The resulting picture appears to include the DNA from a more virulent strand of painting, yet is ultimately Prince’s own work. In this way, Untitled (Check Painting) remains a tantalizing cipher.
The aspirational allure of fantasy and fame has long played a key role in Richard Prince’s art. His early photographic works slyly weaponize the visual language of commercial advertisement by turning it against itself. By removing any branded content which would otherwise allow the audience to swiftly identify the image as a coercive ad, Prince coaxes his audience into considering the dynamics of desire—specifically American consumer desire—constantly at play in popular culture. An advertisement that can no longer promote acquisitiveness becomes unmoored, destabilized and conspicuous. The same kind of subversion is deployed against the image (or the idea) of celebrity in Prince’s publicity series, which consists of promotional photographs of famous people, most often women, framed alongside various signed memorabilia. These works are uncanny records of otherwise fleeting emotional transactions, such as the simple gesture of signing an autograph. Prince’s clinical appropriation of these objects suggests a fascination with the aura of celebrity, a force which can imbue such superficial ephemera with what almost amounts to pathos.
Prince first exhibited his check paintings in 2005 at Gagosian Gallery’s Los Angeles outpost, situated in the heart of Beverly Hills and a stone’s throw from Hollywood. Considered in the context of Prince’s enduring experimentation with the residue of popular culture, this location would seem fitting for a series of paintings which rely on the potency of the artist’s own celebrity, rather than someone else’s, to propel them to meaning. As Prince explains the collectible attraction of checks, “It’s all about whom you choose.” The check paintings are executed on canvas, with a strict grid of the artist’s personal checks masquerading as an abstract ground. Over this, Prince sometimes stencils jokes, a recurring theme since 1988 when he began reproducing jokes via silkscreen on monochromatic canvases. In the present work, the joke reads: “I accidentally shot my mother-in-law while deer hunting. It was an honest mistake. I came out of the tent in the morning and thought I saw a deer in an orange vest making coffee.” The joke begins to repeat itself but is cut short by the right vertical edge of the painting. Because the letters of the joke are rendered in subtle outlines over the riotous field of checks and confetti-colored paint, it becomes camouflaged, legible only with vaguely focused effort. This is important because the attention that Prince draws to the joke is undermined by its latently misogynistic, blatantly crass content. A friction develops between three aspects of the painting: its objectively pleasant overall aesthetic, the crudity of the almost-transparent joke, and the sheer fact that the painting exists on a foundation of Richard Prince’s personal checks, each decorated with the beloved children’s cartoon character Sponge Bob. Like all of Prince’s best work, the painting poses questions with unclear or potentially disconcerting, if obvious, answers: who is the painting’s audience and is it the same audience as for the joke contained in it? Is the joke funny? Who is Richard Prince and why do we care about his checks?
With the check paintings, Prince carries out a gleeful and irreverent assault on the venerated forefathers of American post-war art by puncturing the bubble of earnestness surrounding their manly exertions. Here, the machismo associated with Abstract Expressionism and the Cedar Tavern gang, with the hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-painting figures such as Kline, Pollock and de Kooning, is siphoned of its heroism and reduced to mere decoration, which is then defaced with a crude joke. Prince toys with the ways in which a famous artist’s individual aesthetic may mimic the mechanics of celebrity, creating a conceptual bridge between Kate Moss’s cheek bones and the brushwork of Jackson Pollock. The resulting picture appears to include the DNA from a more virulent strand of painting, yet is ultimately Prince’s own work. In this way, Untitled (Check Painting) remains a tantalizing cipher.