Richard Prince

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Per Skarstedt Fine Art, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2000

Grenoble, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Le Magasin, Richard Prince, September - November 1988

This work is in excellent condition. Very close inspection shows an extremely faint and soft arcing scuff, located 17-20 3/4" from the right edge and 22" from the bottom. There is unobtrusive soiling from handling primarily in the center of the edges, as well as two short linear marks of soling, 1" and ½" long, located within an inch of the bottom edge in the lower left corner. There are also a few faint scattered traces of olive green pigment transfer, most likely occurring in the studio. The drying traction cracks throughout the lettering are secure, and this is inherent to the artist's process and consistent with other joke paintings. Under ultraviolet light, there are no apparent restorations. This painting is not framed.
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Brilliantly executed in bright orange and instantly alluring in its witty content, Richard Prince’s Driving Me Crazy is an exceptional work from the seminal series of monochrome joke paintings that the artist produced between 1987 and 1989. Representing his inspired amalgamation of conceptual strategies and abstract painting with a Pop art twist, Driving Me Crazy epitomizes one of Prince’s most celebrated bodies of work.

Emerging amongst the appropriation artists of the 1980s, Richard Prince stood out for the distinctive coolness of his work. Whilst many of the re-photographers of his generation were inspired by postmodern theories on authenticity and originality, Prince’s work simultaneously reflected a decidedly American cultural influence through his fascination with cowboys, bikers, cars and lowbrow American humor. After his iconic series of cowboy photographs in the early 1980s, in which Prince explored his signature conceptual strategy of appropriating imagery from advertising whilst referring to archetypes of the American dream, he became intrigued by the incorporation of jokes into his works. Like the found sources that he used for his photographs, the artist appropriated the jokes from cartoon-strips, which he initially turned into hand-drawn copies on paper. Prince explained, “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)

Following these initial hand-written jokes and subsequent works in which the cartoon images were silkscreened onto canvas, Prince soon embarked on a more radical approach in which all illustrations were entirely abolished. Daring anyone to take a one-liner for a serious work of art, Prince had started to assemble his jokes in a catalogue in 1985, which would ultimately lead to his iconic paintings. If the artist’s decision to start painting was not radical enough after his earlier photographic work, Prince’s painted jokes – detached, witty and matter-of-fact – were also the complete antithesis of the neo-expressionist painting that dominated the art world in the 1980s. Instead of the expressive, gestural application of paint that was so fashionable, Richard Prince silkscreened his jokes onto a flat, monochrome canvas. Similar to his re-photography of existing images, this approach removed the artist’s hand from the work. Despite this conceptual strategy, Prince nonetheless considered these works first and foremost as paintings. As he jokingly remarked, “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)

The series of monochrome joke paintings, of which Driving Me Crazy is an outstanding example, presents the viewer with a strangely puzzling juxtaposition of a minimalist canvas and painted words. Although this can be interpreted as a reference to postmodern linguistic theory, the work also points to two quintessentially American features: hard-edge abstraction and popular humor. Cleverly subverting the clean and serious language of abstract painting, the jokes' amalgamation of low and high culture characterizes Prince’s most iconic work. This intelligent fusion of conceptual strategies with popular cultural references, which has been the driving force throughout Richard Prince’s influential practice, is perfectly merged in Driving Me Crazy. Wittingly parodying the uncomplicated jokes from vernacular literature, the artist has found a way of incorporating a difficult subject-matter – humor – into a deeply serious artistic practice.