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拍品專文
From a distance, Richard Prince's Untitled (Portrait) could almost be an abstract painting. Stretching three metres across, it appears a painterly expanse of grisaille that resembles the works of Jackson Pollock, probably the most iconic of the Action Painters. This effect is disrupted by two layers of content: superimposed on the surface are stencilled letters, revealing that this is in fact one of Prince's famous Joke paintings; meanwhile, on closer inspection, beneath the dripping paint which adds such texture to the surface of Untitled (Portrait), it becomes clear that the entire background is comprised of images of the supermodel Kate Moss either topless or wearing a bikini top. Untitled (Portrait), then, is a contemporary palimpsest, a conceptual layer cake of imagery which allows Prince to juxtapose a range of seemingly discordant materials in order to play a complex game with the recognisability of celebrities from the art world and indeed the world in general: Pollock, Moss, and of course Prince himself.
Prince's Joke paintings first made an appearance in the mid-1980s, when he had drawn reproductions of cartoons from publications such as The New Yorker, often placing unrelated and incongruous punchlines from other jokes underneath, creating a hand-crafted continuation of the appropriation art that had previously dominated his work. Soon, he realised that the jokes themselves had a visual and conceptual power and often presented them with near-clinical deadpan on monochrome canvases that managed to mimic superficially the appearance of works by Joseph Kosuth and Brice Marden alike, the former through the use of stencilled text and the latter through its linearity. In Untitled (Portrait), he has pushed the Joke further: he has juxtaposed it with the many images of Kate Moss. In one sense, this combination of text and image recalls the origins of the Joke paintings, yet also marks a further evolution of that theme; perhaps there is a link between a joke about hunger and the images of Kate Moss, who attracted controversy because of her waif-like figure when she first appeared on the modelling scene. At the same time, her presence in a work entitled Untitled (Portrait) clearly begs us to consider the entire nature of portraiture. Kate Moss has been a muse to a number of artists, including Lucian Freud, Alex Katz and Chuck Close. Prince himself photographed her in 2003, in one portrait showing her dressed in a nurses uniform next to one of his own Nurse paintings and in another wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with one of his Jokes. In Untitled (Portrait), by contrast, he has subverted the entire nature of portraiture by showing the supermodel in tiny, tessera-like images which are juxtaposed with the Abstract Expressionist overall effect of the picture and the joke that dominates the composition.
Sourcing slightly outmoded witticisms such as the one in Untitled (Portrait), Prince has entered a complex game of sleight-of-hand, playing with notions of identity and authorship. He has appropriated jokes that have themselves taken on a life of their own, having been repeated and reinvented by comedians and by casual raconteurs alike. This dialogue regarding the nature of authorship, which is so crucial to the history of art and which has underpinned Prince's entire oeuvre, is extended to the appearance of the picture because of its clear visual echo of Pollock's works. Untitled (Portrait) was created in 2007, the same year that Prince's now famous de Kooning series of works was made. In those pictures, he spliced pornographic images with painterly passages derived from de Kooning's pictures. This collision of content is paralleled in Untitled (Portrait) by the contrast between the background, made up of the mosaic-like accumulation of printed images of Kate Moss, and the Abstract Expressionist effect that the overall composition deliberately apes. A similar strategy would result in his 2009 artist's book, Bettie Kline, in which paintings by Franz Kline with their calligraphic, emphatic black and white compositions were shown next to black and white images of vintage centrefold girl Bettie Page; in those photographs, her body, her gloves and her stockings echoed Kline's compositions.
In each of these works, Prince has deliberately carried out a gleefully irreverent assault on the venerated fathers of American post-War art by puncturing the bubble of earnestness that surrounds their manly exertions. The machismo so often associated with the Cedar Tavern gang, with the hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-painting figures such as Kline, Pollock and de Kooning, has been tied to various levels of titillating imagery, be they the overt pornography of the de Kooning pictures, the vintage fetishism of Bettie Page or the more glamorous photographs of Kate Moss. In Untitled (Portrait), the lofty concepts that underpinned Pollock's theories of abstraction have been tauntingly anchored in stencilled letters and printed photographs that are the very opposite of the Abstract Expressionist's famous credo, 'I am Nature.' The painterly dripping that covers the canvas is a final layer of playful denigration of the painter who created such a shift in twentieth-century art. Prince has openly appropriated the style and, in the drips, the techniques of Pollock in order to create a picture which - despite its title, Untitled (Portrait) - enacts several removals, allowing Prince to act as a conceptual cuckoo and place his own stamp on the techniques used by others. He infiltrates the language and appearance of his artistic predecessors and deliberately and revels in deflating it, thereby subverting the entire notion of exposure and information usually associated with portraiture and indeed with picture making. Prince plays with the concepts of recognisability associated with 'celebrity', be it in the face of Kate Moss or the brushwork of Jackson Pollock, creating a picture that appears to include their DNA yet which is immediately recognisable as his own work. In this way, Untitled (Portrait) remains a tantalising cipher whose only revelation regarding the artist's own personality is of his status as a master strategist.
Prince's Joke paintings first made an appearance in the mid-1980s, when he had drawn reproductions of cartoons from publications such as The New Yorker, often placing unrelated and incongruous punchlines from other jokes underneath, creating a hand-crafted continuation of the appropriation art that had previously dominated his work. Soon, he realised that the jokes themselves had a visual and conceptual power and often presented them with near-clinical deadpan on monochrome canvases that managed to mimic superficially the appearance of works by Joseph Kosuth and Brice Marden alike, the former through the use of stencilled text and the latter through its linearity. In Untitled (Portrait), he has pushed the Joke further: he has juxtaposed it with the many images of Kate Moss. In one sense, this combination of text and image recalls the origins of the Joke paintings, yet also marks a further evolution of that theme; perhaps there is a link between a joke about hunger and the images of Kate Moss, who attracted controversy because of her waif-like figure when she first appeared on the modelling scene. At the same time, her presence in a work entitled Untitled (Portrait) clearly begs us to consider the entire nature of portraiture. Kate Moss has been a muse to a number of artists, including Lucian Freud, Alex Katz and Chuck Close. Prince himself photographed her in 2003, in one portrait showing her dressed in a nurses uniform next to one of his own Nurse paintings and in another wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with one of his Jokes. In Untitled (Portrait), by contrast, he has subverted the entire nature of portraiture by showing the supermodel in tiny, tessera-like images which are juxtaposed with the Abstract Expressionist overall effect of the picture and the joke that dominates the composition.
Sourcing slightly outmoded witticisms such as the one in Untitled (Portrait), Prince has entered a complex game of sleight-of-hand, playing with notions of identity and authorship. He has appropriated jokes that have themselves taken on a life of their own, having been repeated and reinvented by comedians and by casual raconteurs alike. This dialogue regarding the nature of authorship, which is so crucial to the history of art and which has underpinned Prince's entire oeuvre, is extended to the appearance of the picture because of its clear visual echo of Pollock's works. Untitled (Portrait) was created in 2007, the same year that Prince's now famous de Kooning series of works was made. In those pictures, he spliced pornographic images with painterly passages derived from de Kooning's pictures. This collision of content is paralleled in Untitled (Portrait) by the contrast between the background, made up of the mosaic-like accumulation of printed images of Kate Moss, and the Abstract Expressionist effect that the overall composition deliberately apes. A similar strategy would result in his 2009 artist's book, Bettie Kline, in which paintings by Franz Kline with their calligraphic, emphatic black and white compositions were shown next to black and white images of vintage centrefold girl Bettie Page; in those photographs, her body, her gloves and her stockings echoed Kline's compositions.
In each of these works, Prince has deliberately carried out a gleefully irreverent assault on the venerated fathers of American post-War art by puncturing the bubble of earnestness that surrounds their manly exertions. The machismo so often associated with the Cedar Tavern gang, with the hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-painting figures such as Kline, Pollock and de Kooning, has been tied to various levels of titillating imagery, be they the overt pornography of the de Kooning pictures, the vintage fetishism of Bettie Page or the more glamorous photographs of Kate Moss. In Untitled (Portrait), the lofty concepts that underpinned Pollock's theories of abstraction have been tauntingly anchored in stencilled letters and printed photographs that are the very opposite of the Abstract Expressionist's famous credo, 'I am Nature.' The painterly dripping that covers the canvas is a final layer of playful denigration of the painter who created such a shift in twentieth-century art. Prince has openly appropriated the style and, in the drips, the techniques of Pollock in order to create a picture which - despite its title, Untitled (Portrait) - enacts several removals, allowing Prince to act as a conceptual cuckoo and place his own stamp on the techniques used by others. He infiltrates the language and appearance of his artistic predecessors and deliberately and revels in deflating it, thereby subverting the entire notion of exposure and information usually associated with portraiture and indeed with picture making. Prince plays with the concepts of recognisability associated with 'celebrity', be it in the face of Kate Moss or the brushwork of Jackson Pollock, creating a picture that appears to include their DNA yet which is immediately recognisable as his own work. In this way, Untitled (Portrait) remains a tantalising cipher whose only revelation regarding the artist's own personality is of his status as a master strategist.