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拍品專文
‘The Joke paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can’t speak English.’
—RICHARD PRINCE
A modishly minimal grid of variegated stencilled lettering that stands out against a gleaming background of white, My Mother-in-Law (2005) by Richard Prince daringly stretches the generic boundaries of what is acceptable in ‘high’ art, while excavating the banalities of American culture with the artist’s trademark wit and conceptual sophistication. One of the artist’s seminal ‘joke paintings’, Prince takes a typical ‘Borscht Belt’ mother-in-law joke told by commercial comedians at holiday camps and on light entertainment television shows and writes it large, silkscreened onto the canvas in pastel blues and yellows that bleed across the words. A popular form deeply embedded in American culture, the joke takes on a new life inside the frame, as Prince’s striking composition and richly coloured text bestow it with an impressive aesthetic aura.
Unlike his first ‘joke’ works of the 1980s, in My Mother-in-Law Prince begins to play impishly with the components of the text itself, subtly distorting its syntactical structure and undermining its communication: the joke seems to stutter, interrupting itself at the end of each line instead of smoothly transitioning to the next word. As the viewer struggles from line to line, this stammering rhythm ruins the delivery of the joke, wrecking its comic potential – a process that is both ironically comical in itself, but that also divorces us from the meaning of the joke’s words. As the viewer continues to look at the painting, Prince’s disruption of the textual content of the joke begins to denature its letters into an almost non-verbal presence; with the classic sans-serif font filling the space of the canvas, Prince uses his text as form, transforming the natural arrangement of the words into an elegant grid structure that organises the work’s composition, something Prince himself has drawn attention to in typically droll fashion: ‘The Joke paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can't speak English’ (R. Prince, ‘Richard Prince Talks to Steve Lafreniere, Art Forum, March 2003).
This abstraction reflects the way in which the joke has become encrusted in cliché in American society, losing its human, humorous edge by virtue of its overwhelming familiarity; as the text stumbles on the canvas, it seems to be the product of a printing error, a kind of technological failure that reflects the mechanical quality of the joke as it is today – indeed, the joke begins again in the text’s final line, the painting unthinkingly ‘programmed’ to repeat it ad nauseam. As Prince said about his joke-telling, ‘I never really started telling. I started telling them over’ (R. Prince, ‘Like a Beautiful Scar on your Head’, Modern Painters, Special American Issue, Autumn 2002, Volume 15, Number 3). However, in establishing the repetitive ‘joke’ as a model for a kind of abstract painting, Prince continues to use his series to laugh at what he believes to be the misplaced self-seriousness and high-mindedness of more painterly art. Beginning the series in the late 1980s, in the midst of Neo-Expressionism and the art market boom, Prince’s paintings were a radical departure from the grandiose canvases and bronze sculptures that were commanding astronomical prices and turning artists into celebrities; exhibiting them while still reasonably unknown, his laconic, deadpan jokes laughingly refused to play the contemporary game of romantic, authentic self-expression. As he has developed them, playing with the way in which the joke is told, Prince’s reinventions and retellings have only strengthened his case: deriving abstraction from cliché or the familiarly kitsch, Prince undermines pretensions to profundity and questions the cult of authenticity, demonstrating instead the way in which art and identity are built out of the impacted, composite cultural remains of everything – high- and lowbrow – has gone before.
—RICHARD PRINCE
A modishly minimal grid of variegated stencilled lettering that stands out against a gleaming background of white, My Mother-in-Law (2005) by Richard Prince daringly stretches the generic boundaries of what is acceptable in ‘high’ art, while excavating the banalities of American culture with the artist’s trademark wit and conceptual sophistication. One of the artist’s seminal ‘joke paintings’, Prince takes a typical ‘Borscht Belt’ mother-in-law joke told by commercial comedians at holiday camps and on light entertainment television shows and writes it large, silkscreened onto the canvas in pastel blues and yellows that bleed across the words. A popular form deeply embedded in American culture, the joke takes on a new life inside the frame, as Prince’s striking composition and richly coloured text bestow it with an impressive aesthetic aura.
Unlike his first ‘joke’ works of the 1980s, in My Mother-in-Law Prince begins to play impishly with the components of the text itself, subtly distorting its syntactical structure and undermining its communication: the joke seems to stutter, interrupting itself at the end of each line instead of smoothly transitioning to the next word. As the viewer struggles from line to line, this stammering rhythm ruins the delivery of the joke, wrecking its comic potential – a process that is both ironically comical in itself, but that also divorces us from the meaning of the joke’s words. As the viewer continues to look at the painting, Prince’s disruption of the textual content of the joke begins to denature its letters into an almost non-verbal presence; with the classic sans-serif font filling the space of the canvas, Prince uses his text as form, transforming the natural arrangement of the words into an elegant grid structure that organises the work’s composition, something Prince himself has drawn attention to in typically droll fashion: ‘The Joke paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can't speak English’ (R. Prince, ‘Richard Prince Talks to Steve Lafreniere, Art Forum, March 2003).
This abstraction reflects the way in which the joke has become encrusted in cliché in American society, losing its human, humorous edge by virtue of its overwhelming familiarity; as the text stumbles on the canvas, it seems to be the product of a printing error, a kind of technological failure that reflects the mechanical quality of the joke as it is today – indeed, the joke begins again in the text’s final line, the painting unthinkingly ‘programmed’ to repeat it ad nauseam. As Prince said about his joke-telling, ‘I never really started telling. I started telling them over’ (R. Prince, ‘Like a Beautiful Scar on your Head’, Modern Painters, Special American Issue, Autumn 2002, Volume 15, Number 3). However, in establishing the repetitive ‘joke’ as a model for a kind of abstract painting, Prince continues to use his series to laugh at what he believes to be the misplaced self-seriousness and high-mindedness of more painterly art. Beginning the series in the late 1980s, in the midst of Neo-Expressionism and the art market boom, Prince’s paintings were a radical departure from the grandiose canvases and bronze sculptures that were commanding astronomical prices and turning artists into celebrities; exhibiting them while still reasonably unknown, his laconic, deadpan jokes laughingly refused to play the contemporary game of romantic, authentic self-expression. As he has developed them, playing with the way in which the joke is told, Prince’s reinventions and retellings have only strengthened his case: deriving abstraction from cliché or the familiarly kitsch, Prince undermines pretensions to profundity and questions the cult of authenticity, demonstrating instead the way in which art and identity are built out of the impacted, composite cultural remains of everything – high- and lowbrow – has gone before.