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拍品專文
'[Prince's] ghostly cowboys with their raised lariats, his phantom models with the lovely downsweeping curves of their lashes, his sepia-tinted joke collections all point to the beauty and essentially mystic aspect of America, the land of Bugs Bunny and Jonathan Edwards, of Horatio Alger and Moby Dick. The spiritual side of life, to be sure, is diminished by jokes... Humour is the enemy of lyric beauty and sadism (Jean Genet is never funny), but their friend - or at least their willing accomplice - is wan humour, weak jokes, old gags, tired one-liners. The wise-ass will never feel enough about anything to arrive at wisdom, but the failed comic, who bores others and embarrasses himself but can't shut up, is both the Fool and Lear. Prince's bad jokes are the truest expression we have of spiritual America' (E. White, 'Bad Jokes', pp. 74-79, Parkett, December, 1992, p. 79).
Against a large monochrome blue background that is almost turquoise in appearance are a few lines of crisp text containing a story of which the punch-line appears to have been twisted by the mysterious gods of comedy, as the protagonist exclaims: 'I'm in the wrong joke'. The Wrong Joke was painted in 1987 and is therefore one of the earliest of Richard Prince's celebrated monochrome Joke Paintings. In this picture, Prince has amplified the inscrutability of his Joke Paintings by presenting the text in tiny letters that are dwarfed by the expanse of the blue background. They are illegible from a distance, appearing instead as a formal element of the composition, recalling perhaps the zips of Barnett Newman's paintings or the superimposed forms of some of Ellsworth Kelly's works. However, with his customary iconoclasm, Prince has taken the legacy of the monochrome, of Abstract Expressionism, and of so many other schools of painting, and has subverted it, resulting in a picture that appears disarmingly simple and yet is a conceptual booby-trap.
The Joke Paintings developed from an idea that dated to two years earlier than The Wrong Joke, when Prince began copying out cartoons, often from The New Yorker. Gradually, he began to twist and vary them, adding text from other jokes to the images, resulting in discordant and sometimes nonsensical juxtapositions. The captions would often have tenuous connections to the images with which they appeared, but already the crucial key was that they were from the wrong joke. Taking into consideration the textual twist in The Wrong Joke, one wonders if Prince is making an explicit reference to that process.
Prince's jokes are presented in a manner that is beyond deadpan in these pictures. The monochrome is highly controlled, as is the stencilled, crisp text in which the joke appears, appearing as an apparent riposte to the Neo-Expressionism that was gaining ground in the art world when The Wrong Joke was painted. Prince has carried out a complex manoeuvre by invoking comedy and therefore laughter, concepts that involve a momentary and reflex loss of control, yet by doing so through a medium that appears clinical. Even the manner of execution is at odds with the spontaneity often associated with painting, or with the notion of the brushstroke, the making of a mark, the sense of individuality that was so prominent in the pictures of the Action Painters. In this way, Prince provides a cool riposte to anther aspect of the supremacy of American culture in the post-War, baby boomer era. Prince, by presenting an anonymous-seeming script against a blue background, remains deliberately elusive, revealing little about himself, and thereby exploring and disrupting the entire nature of art as a means of communication.
Against a large monochrome blue background that is almost turquoise in appearance are a few lines of crisp text containing a story of which the punch-line appears to have been twisted by the mysterious gods of comedy, as the protagonist exclaims: 'I'm in the wrong joke'. The Wrong Joke was painted in 1987 and is therefore one of the earliest of Richard Prince's celebrated monochrome Joke Paintings. In this picture, Prince has amplified the inscrutability of his Joke Paintings by presenting the text in tiny letters that are dwarfed by the expanse of the blue background. They are illegible from a distance, appearing instead as a formal element of the composition, recalling perhaps the zips of Barnett Newman's paintings or the superimposed forms of some of Ellsworth Kelly's works. However, with his customary iconoclasm, Prince has taken the legacy of the monochrome, of Abstract Expressionism, and of so many other schools of painting, and has subverted it, resulting in a picture that appears disarmingly simple and yet is a conceptual booby-trap.
The Joke Paintings developed from an idea that dated to two years earlier than The Wrong Joke, when Prince began copying out cartoons, often from The New Yorker. Gradually, he began to twist and vary them, adding text from other jokes to the images, resulting in discordant and sometimes nonsensical juxtapositions. The captions would often have tenuous connections to the images with which they appeared, but already the crucial key was that they were from the wrong joke. Taking into consideration the textual twist in The Wrong Joke, one wonders if Prince is making an explicit reference to that process.
Prince's jokes are presented in a manner that is beyond deadpan in these pictures. The monochrome is highly controlled, as is the stencilled, crisp text in which the joke appears, appearing as an apparent riposte to the Neo-Expressionism that was gaining ground in the art world when The Wrong Joke was painted. Prince has carried out a complex manoeuvre by invoking comedy and therefore laughter, concepts that involve a momentary and reflex loss of control, yet by doing so through a medium that appears clinical. Even the manner of execution is at odds with the spontaneity often associated with painting, or with the notion of the brushstroke, the making of a mark, the sense of individuality that was so prominent in the pictures of the Action Painters. In this way, Prince provides a cool riposte to anther aspect of the supremacy of American culture in the post-War, baby boomer era. Prince, by presenting an anonymous-seeming script against a blue background, remains deliberately elusive, revealing little about himself, and thereby exploring and disrupting the entire nature of art as a means of communication.