Beschreibung:

Richard Prince Joke 1993 oil on silkscreen on canvas 56 x 48 in. (142.2 x 121.9 cm)
Provenance Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York Salon 94, New York Catalogue Essay "I realized the cartoon drawings were not 'jokes.' They were cartoons. It occurred to me that if I was to call them 'jokes' then I would need to get rid of the illustration and concentrate on the punch line. So that’s what I did." Richard Prince 2005 Richard Prince has managed to make an equally large impact upon the world of art with every new series he undertakes. Yet the essence of Prince’s distinctive hand is in the filtering and appropriation of culture, specifically popular culture, as we see in his Cowboys, Nurse Paintings, and, of course, his Joke Paintings. In the latter, he engages a singular facet of American culture—that of the verbal quip, exposing it to an unfamiliar visual setting. The unrivalled simplicity and aesthetic excellence of his early Joke Paintings from the late 1980s through early 1990s, including the present lot, 1993’s Joke, allowed Prince to isolate the physicality of the language itself, giving what is normally an insignificant bit of cultural milieu the spotlight. In Joke, 1993, we witness the birth of Prince’s later forays into multi-chromatic and multimedia joke collages, here in its first and purest iteration. The marvelous variation among Prince’s joke paintings that we have witnessed in the past twenty-five years is like watching a flower blossoming in slow motion. Beginning with simple hand-written jokes on scraps of paper, Prince later employed both silk-screen techniques and simple fonts to achieve the isolation and glorification of his selected text. Vincent Pecoil describes the wide array of textual variation in Prince’s work: “Some jokes are hand-written, others are silk-screened; the letters follow each other on a straight line or on a wavy line, are centered or placed at the bottom of the image, like captions, repeated, superimposed…Sometimes, the jokes are looped, as though they were told one after the other, as in stand-up comedy, and linked to one another with a simple ‘one more’, ‘another one’ or ’okay’. At other times, a malfunction seems to occur, like a broken record, and the same joke is repeated twice on the same painting. In general, the same jokes are repeated from new series to the next on all possible supports.”(V. Pécoil, Richard Prince Canaries in the Coal Mine, Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 128) In this regard, Prince has developed a particular fondness for specific jokes in his work, favoring not only those that have a particular resonance in American culture, but also those at which one might groan due to his overexposure to the punch line. It is in this way that Prince derives his signature cultural appropriation, preying upon the ability of the joke to be recognizable, and, hopefully, overly familiar to the viewer. Unlike some of the later Joke paintings, in this early example, Prince approaches the canvas not with caution, but with great vigor. While seemingly pristine from a distance, upon close inspection the surface bares the marks of his artistic process. Wisps and dashes of paint jazz across the canvas, marking the clean surface with intentional and vigorous imperfections. The dollops of paint are infused with the motions of Twombly scripture, as they move and dance across the picture. Upon even closer examination, beneath a veil of white wash lies a preliminary joke. Only the outline of black lettering is evident, the joke itself has vanished, leaving merely a silhouette of its once witty pun. The contrast of jet black text upon the white surface evokes the starkness of newsprint or typewritten notes from decades past. The crammed text also alludes to a cinematic scroll, reminiscent of Ruscha’s brilliant treatment and celebration of text, as seen in The End, 1991. Joke, 1993 possesses, as opposed to a great deal of visual art, the uncommon distinction of appearing to be simple black and rounded text upon a white wash background. This obsession with mo