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拍品專文
“When I went to look at my jokes hanging in a gallery I saw people laugh out loud. They weren’t thinking about color or form or content. For a second, all that was there was there.” Richard Prince
(R. Prince, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 10 May 2016, p. 294).
Richard Prince’s Untitled (A Set of 3) places three of the artist’s iconic joke paintings side by side. Sauntering across the triptych like a comedian’s nightclub set, the three jokes lampoon the financial practicality of prostitution, the slog of a loveless of marriage and a father’s transnational quest for alcohol. Forming a powerful, cohesive painting, Untitled (A Set of 3) finds the legendary appropriation artist at his sharpest, channeling a rude vernacular by way of Minimalist painting. Epitomizing the cool, self-referencing irony for which his generation of artists is best known, Untitled (A Set of 3) is quintessential Prince, hailing from a high point in his distinguished and varied career.
The leftmost panel records a satisfied man’s thought as he leaves “a house of questionable repute.” Marveling at the limitless potential for profit, the man thinks, “You got it, you sell it, and you still got it.” Perhaps a sly nod to the act of appropriation or artistic production more broadly, Prince implicitly relates the selling of a person’s body to a non-expendable commodity like, for example, a joke or an image. Painted in light tan against a slightly darker camel background, the joke nearly blends in with the richly colored background, creating a flesh-toned expanse in keeping with the theme of the joke.
The second panel describes a conversation between a frustrated wife and her neighbor. “’It was driving me crazy’ she said ‘I didn’t know where he spent his evenings. One night I went home, and there he was.’” Reversing the trope of the absentee, unfaithful husband, the middle panel adopts a first person perspective, with the narrator delivering the joke directly to the viewer. Painted on a light forest green in the same tan color as the leftmost panel, the two neighboring jokes work with one another visually and thematically. Both dealing with questions of sex and gender dynamics, the panels diverge in the specific sources of their respective humor. Prince, recognizing the thematic connection between the two jokes, constructs a visual connection to further the relationship between language’s content and its appearance.
Diverging from the first two visually and thematically, the third joke, on the far right panel, takes the teller’s alcoholic father as its subject matter. Describing the man’s northward quest for booze, the teller recalls his father’s misunderstanding of a ginger ale advertisement. “DRINK CANADA DRY”, the sign read, “so he went up there.” Beginning with a sense of bleakness, the teller briefly describes his father as frequently absent. Slightly darker in tone than the other two jokes while verbally punchier and briefer, the rightmost joke also sports the liveliest coloration of the three panels. Painted on a misty turquoise-grey with light pink text, the airiness of the colors underscores the cutting, quick pithiness of the play on words.
Prince’s jokes, at-once immediately relatable and delicately subversive, accomplish one of painting’s primary goals: establishing an intimate relationship with the viewer. As though placing an arm on the viewer’s shoulder and drawing him or her in, Untitled (A Set of 3) shares something typically reserved for close company, blurring the line between the public and private sides of the medium. “He takes what we already know—commercial advertising, snapshots of girlfriends, one-liners, celebrity head-shots, pulp fiction covers—and gives it back to us relatively unaltered, but forever changed,” writes Nancy Spector. “Prince’s deliberate redundancy, an incessant return of the same, wreaks havoc on our sense of reality” (N. Spector, "Nowhere Man," in Richard Prince, New York, 2007, p. 23). For Spector, Prince’s artistic power lies in his ability to tease out artifice and the inherent insincerities in our visual and vernacular culture.
Widely hailed as one of the leading American artists of his generation, Prince has been a constant fixture in the international art world since his emergence as part of the Pictures Generation of the late 1970s. Appropriating source material from photographs and paintings to physical objects and written texts, Prince combines the probing wit of Pop Art with the cool theoretical rationale of Dada and the Duchampian readymade. Arriving on the heels of a successful career marked by direct appropriation of advertising material, Prince debuted his Joke paintings around 1986. Moving the needle of appropriation from advertising to something as ubiquitous and informal as the humble joke, Prince dove deeper into the American psyche, appropriating collective conscience as opposed to collective imagery. Untitled (A Set of 3) hails from this early moment, when the Joke paintings were at their freshest and most radical. As immediate in impact as they are subtle in composition and loaded in content, Prince’s Joke paintings made an indelible mark on art of the last decade of the 20th century, paving the way for more radical, exploratory takes on appropriation that would help define art of the subsequent decades.
(R. Prince, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 10 May 2016, p. 294).
Richard Prince’s Untitled (A Set of 3) places three of the artist’s iconic joke paintings side by side. Sauntering across the triptych like a comedian’s nightclub set, the three jokes lampoon the financial practicality of prostitution, the slog of a loveless of marriage and a father’s transnational quest for alcohol. Forming a powerful, cohesive painting, Untitled (A Set of 3) finds the legendary appropriation artist at his sharpest, channeling a rude vernacular by way of Minimalist painting. Epitomizing the cool, self-referencing irony for which his generation of artists is best known, Untitled (A Set of 3) is quintessential Prince, hailing from a high point in his distinguished and varied career.
The leftmost panel records a satisfied man’s thought as he leaves “a house of questionable repute.” Marveling at the limitless potential for profit, the man thinks, “You got it, you sell it, and you still got it.” Perhaps a sly nod to the act of appropriation or artistic production more broadly, Prince implicitly relates the selling of a person’s body to a non-expendable commodity like, for example, a joke or an image. Painted in light tan against a slightly darker camel background, the joke nearly blends in with the richly colored background, creating a flesh-toned expanse in keeping with the theme of the joke.
The second panel describes a conversation between a frustrated wife and her neighbor. “’It was driving me crazy’ she said ‘I didn’t know where he spent his evenings. One night I went home, and there he was.’” Reversing the trope of the absentee, unfaithful husband, the middle panel adopts a first person perspective, with the narrator delivering the joke directly to the viewer. Painted on a light forest green in the same tan color as the leftmost panel, the two neighboring jokes work with one another visually and thematically. Both dealing with questions of sex and gender dynamics, the panels diverge in the specific sources of their respective humor. Prince, recognizing the thematic connection between the two jokes, constructs a visual connection to further the relationship between language’s content and its appearance.
Diverging from the first two visually and thematically, the third joke, on the far right panel, takes the teller’s alcoholic father as its subject matter. Describing the man’s northward quest for booze, the teller recalls his father’s misunderstanding of a ginger ale advertisement. “DRINK CANADA DRY”, the sign read, “so he went up there.” Beginning with a sense of bleakness, the teller briefly describes his father as frequently absent. Slightly darker in tone than the other two jokes while verbally punchier and briefer, the rightmost joke also sports the liveliest coloration of the three panels. Painted on a misty turquoise-grey with light pink text, the airiness of the colors underscores the cutting, quick pithiness of the play on words.
Prince’s jokes, at-once immediately relatable and delicately subversive, accomplish one of painting’s primary goals: establishing an intimate relationship with the viewer. As though placing an arm on the viewer’s shoulder and drawing him or her in, Untitled (A Set of 3) shares something typically reserved for close company, blurring the line between the public and private sides of the medium. “He takes what we already know—commercial advertising, snapshots of girlfriends, one-liners, celebrity head-shots, pulp fiction covers—and gives it back to us relatively unaltered, but forever changed,” writes Nancy Spector. “Prince’s deliberate redundancy, an incessant return of the same, wreaks havoc on our sense of reality” (N. Spector, "Nowhere Man," in Richard Prince, New York, 2007, p. 23). For Spector, Prince’s artistic power lies in his ability to tease out artifice and the inherent insincerities in our visual and vernacular culture.
Widely hailed as one of the leading American artists of his generation, Prince has been a constant fixture in the international art world since his emergence as part of the Pictures Generation of the late 1970s. Appropriating source material from photographs and paintings to physical objects and written texts, Prince combines the probing wit of Pop Art with the cool theoretical rationale of Dada and the Duchampian readymade. Arriving on the heels of a successful career marked by direct appropriation of advertising material, Prince debuted his Joke paintings around 1986. Moving the needle of appropriation from advertising to something as ubiquitous and informal as the humble joke, Prince dove deeper into the American psyche, appropriating collective conscience as opposed to collective imagery. Untitled (A Set of 3) hails from this early moment, when the Joke paintings were at their freshest and most radical. As immediate in impact as they are subtle in composition and loaded in content, Prince’s Joke paintings made an indelible mark on art of the last decade of the 20th century, paving the way for more radical, exploratory takes on appropriation that would help define art of the subsequent decades.