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拍品專文
Probing ideas around authenticity and ownership, Richard Prince’s 2005 to 2006 work, I’m in a Limousine (following a hearse), applies his understanding of the complex transactions of representation to art making. With its seeming nonsensical title and puzzling medium, the work typifies Prince’s planned mutation attributed to both his own hand and the appropriation of printed media. Investigating a sense of sameness amidst difference, I’m in a Limousine is a pivotal example of the role of humor, text, and medium in Prince’s oeuvre.
While appearing an abstract, monochromatic expanse of pastel purple, I’m in a Limousine features a background composed entirely of cancelled checks. The checks add to the composition’s material quality, coaxing viewers to consider the dynamics of American consumer desire. While Prince has been known to source checks from famous icons such as Andy Warhol and Jack Kerouac, he also used his own cancelled checks, giving audiences a humorous glimpse into the his own life. Almost expressionist in gesture, colorful brushstrokes are painted over the checks, obscuring their true identity and creating a unique surface upon which Prince constructs his narrative.
Stenciled letters atop the abstracted background spell out a joke. Hovering on the verge of illegibility, Prince recounts the joke in what appears to be a massive, repeating run-on sentence. A tension exists between the typeface’s serious appearance and the text’s crass content. Unfolding the narrative of a man who takes a girl to the Chatterbox Hotel, the joke functions as both image and text, blurring the boundary between so-called “high” and “low” culture in a conceptually nuanced work. Viewers are forced to mentally fill in the gap, visualizing the scenario and completing the narrative in their own heads. In doing so, Prince repurposes and appropriates images, objects, and words within the confines of the painted canvas to question the psychology of pop culture.
Executed between 2005 and 2006, I’m in a Limousine is a seminal example of Prince’s exploration of cancelled checks as a medium. The work was included in Skin Fruit—Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, an exhibition at the New Museum curated by Jeff Koons in 2010. Whereas the artist’s earlier check paintings only feature a handful of discernable cancelled checks embedded on canvas, this particular work is created on a massive canvas covered entirely in the new medium. Created in the same year as his major exhibition of check paintings at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverley Hills, I’m in a Limousine typifies Prince’s dedication to the medium, transcending its visual and conceptual boundaries.
The present work is part of Prince’s larger Joke series that first made its debut in the mid-1980s. Exploring the visual and conceptual power of incongruous punchlines layered atop New Yorker and Playboy magazine pictures, Prince forayed into comedy by recycling a number of well-worn jokes by Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman into his iconoclastic paintings. Though spanning various mediums, the Joke paintings encapsulate Prince’s artistic interest in the seductiveness of mass culture. As curator Nancy Spector remarked, “With his joke series, Prince achieved the anti-masterpiece—an art object that refuses to behave in a museum or market context that privileges the notion of greatness. How, for instance, does one distinguish between the paintings? By color (background vary from ocher to purple)? Or by joke—do you prefer the one about the rabbi, the farmer, the businessman, the drowned husband, or the two-pants suit?” (N. Spector, Richard Prince, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 39)
As a pioneer of the Pictures Generation movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Prince created assemblage paintings along the same vein as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. By appropriating advertisements from media, Prince blurred the line between appreciation and critique. Though inspired by Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, Prince distanced himself from such icons. At times juxtaposing male pornography with jokes and painterly passages derived from de Kooning’s Women paintings, Prince pushed back against the machismo often associated with action-based painting. Instead, he revealed a sense of self-awareness as an artist within a wider cultural ecosystem, highlighting a critical view of gender polarities in the canon of art history.
As Rosetta Brooks said, “The suggestion is that Prince is also reclaiming his own identity in these works, taking it back from the manipulators whose presentation of reality he, like everyone else, almost fell for. Of course, due to the muteness of intent… it would be wrong to set store by anything Prince may say about his work. His reluctance to specify his intentions is also our freedom to travel through the work” (R. Brooks, J. Rian & L. Sante, eds., Richard Prince, London 2003, p 38-39).
A perceptive chronicler of American subcultures and vernaculars, Prince’s oeuvre attempts to demonstrate how the American identity is constructed. By probing the depths of racism, sexism, and psychosis within mainstream humor, Prince explores post-modern simulacra. As highlighted by I’m in a Limousine, Prince magnifies the notion that there is no true originality in art. Rather, he probes the boundaries of a society built on oral tradition where legends become history, history become stories, and stories become rumors or jokes.
While appearing an abstract, monochromatic expanse of pastel purple, I’m in a Limousine features a background composed entirely of cancelled checks. The checks add to the composition’s material quality, coaxing viewers to consider the dynamics of American consumer desire. While Prince has been known to source checks from famous icons such as Andy Warhol and Jack Kerouac, he also used his own cancelled checks, giving audiences a humorous glimpse into the his own life. Almost expressionist in gesture, colorful brushstrokes are painted over the checks, obscuring their true identity and creating a unique surface upon which Prince constructs his narrative.
Stenciled letters atop the abstracted background spell out a joke. Hovering on the verge of illegibility, Prince recounts the joke in what appears to be a massive, repeating run-on sentence. A tension exists between the typeface’s serious appearance and the text’s crass content. Unfolding the narrative of a man who takes a girl to the Chatterbox Hotel, the joke functions as both image and text, blurring the boundary between so-called “high” and “low” culture in a conceptually nuanced work. Viewers are forced to mentally fill in the gap, visualizing the scenario and completing the narrative in their own heads. In doing so, Prince repurposes and appropriates images, objects, and words within the confines of the painted canvas to question the psychology of pop culture.
Executed between 2005 and 2006, I’m in a Limousine is a seminal example of Prince’s exploration of cancelled checks as a medium. The work was included in Skin Fruit—Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, an exhibition at the New Museum curated by Jeff Koons in 2010. Whereas the artist’s earlier check paintings only feature a handful of discernable cancelled checks embedded on canvas, this particular work is created on a massive canvas covered entirely in the new medium. Created in the same year as his major exhibition of check paintings at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverley Hills, I’m in a Limousine typifies Prince’s dedication to the medium, transcending its visual and conceptual boundaries.
The present work is part of Prince’s larger Joke series that first made its debut in the mid-1980s. Exploring the visual and conceptual power of incongruous punchlines layered atop New Yorker and Playboy magazine pictures, Prince forayed into comedy by recycling a number of well-worn jokes by Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman into his iconoclastic paintings. Though spanning various mediums, the Joke paintings encapsulate Prince’s artistic interest in the seductiveness of mass culture. As curator Nancy Spector remarked, “With his joke series, Prince achieved the anti-masterpiece—an art object that refuses to behave in a museum or market context that privileges the notion of greatness. How, for instance, does one distinguish between the paintings? By color (background vary from ocher to purple)? Or by joke—do you prefer the one about the rabbi, the farmer, the businessman, the drowned husband, or the two-pants suit?” (N. Spector, Richard Prince, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 39)
As a pioneer of the Pictures Generation movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Prince created assemblage paintings along the same vein as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. By appropriating advertisements from media, Prince blurred the line between appreciation and critique. Though inspired by Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, Prince distanced himself from such icons. At times juxtaposing male pornography with jokes and painterly passages derived from de Kooning’s Women paintings, Prince pushed back against the machismo often associated with action-based painting. Instead, he revealed a sense of self-awareness as an artist within a wider cultural ecosystem, highlighting a critical view of gender polarities in the canon of art history.
As Rosetta Brooks said, “The suggestion is that Prince is also reclaiming his own identity in these works, taking it back from the manipulators whose presentation of reality he, like everyone else, almost fell for. Of course, due to the muteness of intent… it would be wrong to set store by anything Prince may say about his work. His reluctance to specify his intentions is also our freedom to travel through the work” (R. Brooks, J. Rian & L. Sante, eds., Richard Prince, London 2003, p 38-39).
A perceptive chronicler of American subcultures and vernaculars, Prince’s oeuvre attempts to demonstrate how the American identity is constructed. By probing the depths of racism, sexism, and psychosis within mainstream humor, Prince explores post-modern simulacra. As highlighted by I’m in a Limousine, Prince magnifies the notion that there is no true originality in art. Rather, he probes the boundaries of a society built on oral tradition where legends become history, history become stories, and stories become rumors or jokes.