Richard Prince

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Private Collection, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is in very good condition. There is a pinhead-sized puncture to the canvas with an associated circular area of pigment loss – approximately 1/8" in diameter – located approximately 18 ½" up from the bottom and 13 ¼" in from the right edge. Very close inspection reveals a handful of other pinhead-sized abrasions with minor associated loss located primarily in the lower right quadrant, just to the left of 'hanging', and another between 'hanging' and 'in.' There is an apparent vertical abrasion along the overturned right edge with minor associated pigment loss in areas 5-6" and 8-9 ¼" down from the upper right corner. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is not framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Blunt, absurd and overtly crass, Richard Prince’s Untitled from 1993 expresses the key inflection of cliché humor that permeates the comical lexicon at the core of the artist's iconic Joke paintings. Across a minimalist expanse of coolly unemotive white canvas, an equally neutral font relays to us a fictional and anecdotal story that, in its isolation, highlights the structured predictability of a build-up and punch line. Giving visual form to a typically verbal tradition, Prince abstracts his gag without a context or indication of its source. Floating freely in a blank ethereal space that is also a duplicitously banal mirror of a printed page, the particular syntax and punch-line focused meter is put under intense scrutiny. Punctuated in the center of the excerpted text by a luscious drip of white paint, in this early example Prince subtly emphasizes the painted surface by minimally interrupting the formal precision of the joke with a nod to his chosen medium. As an extension of his longstanding project of appropriation, Prince parodies cheap puns from the popular vernacular, proposing a seemingly irreverent introduction of humor into the resolutely intellectual sphere of fine art. Through this gesture, we come to encounter everything that defines the endlessly alluring ingenuity of the artist: his ability to turn the social conventions of painting on their head and call into question the rigidity of its position within our cultural understanding.

Although widely associated with the Pictures Generation of the 1980s, Richard Prince has always remained an outlier amongst his contemporaries.  Beyond the post-modern penchant for the re-contextualization of found imagery that characterizes his conceptual practice, Prince also places a unique focus on the visual markers of consumer driven aspirations that have come to be associated with the American dream. Fashion, women, sex, cars, gangs, motorbikes and other familiar stereotypes, both quotidian and obscure, have come to form the crux of the artist’s idiosyncratic vocabulary. Following his iconic series of Cowboy photographs from the early 1980s, Prince began to explore an increasingly non-visual turn, examining the idea of American humor embodied in the practice of retelling jokes. Emblematic of the wider series, Untitled particularly appeals to the laughter-inducing awkwardness of bodily taboo. Prince’s selection of jokes aim to either shock, amuse, disturb or disgust; as such they form a conceptual zenith in his exploration of ‘bad taste’ and the irreverent provocation that he enacts by placing instances of ‘vulgarity’ firmly within the deified sphere of fine art.

Prince’s relentless draw to the practice of appropriation is firmly rooted in a fascination with the stereotypes that permeate contemporary American culture. This can be linked to the artist’s early occupation in 1974 when he worked nightshifts for Time-Life magazine in the tear-sheets department. Repetitively dismantling texts from articles and, in the process, being exposed to thousands of recurring advertising motifs equipped the artist to recognize the common patterns inherent in the detritus of American media. Accessibility and the sense of satisfaction which came through disrupting the relative relationship between the value of an artwork and its materials also held great appeal for Prince:  “artists were casting sculptures in bronze, making huge paintings, talking about prices and clothes and cars and spending vast amounts of money. So I wrote jokes on little pieces of paper and sold them for $10 each.” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, 2007, p. 37)

Prince initially appropriated his jokes from cartoon-strips that he copied in hand onto paper, compiling a catalogue of his jokes from 1985 onwards that would inform his first silk screen paintings.  These initially included both the text and the accompanying image from the original cartoon. In 1987, however, Prince enacted his most radical gesture by inaugurating the seminal series of monochrome joke paintings to which the present work belongs. Epitomized most perfectly in the stark minimalism of Untitled, Prince’s detached and quotidian regurgitation of an unauthored joke is presented as wholly antithetical to the highly personal and passion-laden gestures of Neo-Expressionism that dominated the market for painting at this time.  In some Joke paintings Prince elaborates on the graphic potential of words akin to his Pop Art predecessor Ed Ruscha, yet in the present work his dogmatically plain stance elides him with the frank Duchampian impulse towards relocating the familiar to an impersonal and decontextualized realm of cognition. As such, Prince carves out a unique place for himself within the history of art by destabilizing the assumed cultural positions of image and text; as the artist has jibed with typically bewildering whimsy: “the ‘Joke’ paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can’t speak English.” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Richard Prince: Canaries in the Coal Mine, 2006, p. 124)