RICHARD PRINCE | Two Guys Twice

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2003

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter in the original and the illustration fails to convey some of the pink tones in the centre of the composition. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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With the cerebral elision of a complex subtext juxtaposed with prosaic wordplay, Two Guys Twice is a paradigm case of Richard Prince’s Joke Paintings. The iconoclastic enfant terrible of appropriation art, Prince began work on the Joke Paintings following a stint in the cuttings service of Time Life publications, during which he redrew jokes and images from The New Yorker in unexpected combinations. Prince purified this aesthetic in the late 1980s with his revered Monochrome Jokes sub-series: zingy one-liners, found in the joke books and routines of Borscht Belt middle America, were painted by Prince onto pristine backgrounds unaccompanied by images, often in thin blocks of text reminiscent of the ‘zips’ of Barnett Newman’s abstract works. In the displacement of jokes from the holiday duplex or blue-collar New York bar, Prince reveals latent assumptions about class, gender and race active in the jokes' original contexts; the jokes serving as concise metonyms for heavily-prejudiced frameworks of understanding. As apparent in Two Guys Twice and the Joke Paintings of the same period, Prince shines a light on issues of gender: by frequently implicating ‘guys’ and ‘girls’ as his protagonists Prince highlights gender’s performativity through the exaggeration and parody of its tropes. Furthermore, set against a scumbled monochrome background, Two Guys Twice takes on and parodies the minimalist and expressionistic painterly styles that had dominated late twentieth-century art history. Indeed, through the reification of popular objects and tropes into high-concept art, Prince belongs to an eminent group of transformative artists from Marcel Duchamp through to Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and the entire Pictures Generation: artists that redefined the parameters of picture making for the post-modern age. With a tone of wry, deadpan sophistication, Two Guys Twice recounts a found joke whose heavy comedic pivot – the blatant pun – is reflected in the overtly deliberate, capitalised font in which the joke is written. While punctuation is not just respected, but exaggerated by pointed square full stops, the joke’s sentences are broken over multiple lines, and in some cases the letters of individual words are duplicated. Engendered by these formal qualities is an aura of both mechanical, dispassionate documentation irreverent to human grammatical convention, and rising linguistic entropy. Inscribed twice in capital letters, the joke is duplicated; repeated immediately after it is finished, meaning becomes detached from the written word. Delivered without context of origin, the joke is thus utterly devoid of emotion and imbued with a strange sense of the sinister and the inevitable. With this second reading, the ‘joke’ suddenly becomes an empty cipher. Behind the letters – whose monochrome articulation calls to mind Jasper Johns white monochrome US flag – a blotched, dappled canvas of muted beige recalls the walls of the decaying, abandoned Catskills hotels and leisure centres in which this joke could have been delivered by former comedy legends like Alan King or Jack Benny. The joke thus becomes less a lighthearted amusement, and more a kind of anonymous, faded relic: an expression or symptom of a certain part of America’s uniquely turbulent history.

Through his work Prince looks at the found objects of white American working class society with a layered and postmodern mixture of affection, revulsion, and ironic detachment. By turns, Prince’s oeuvre – which famously includes series such as the Cowboys and Girlfriends – appears to indulge in and satirise conventional identities, whilst tantalisingly hinting at autobiography. With Prince, however, there is no autobiography because there is no self; only an empty receptor of attributes, impulses, and signifiers. As curator Nancy Spector puts it, Prince’s work can be read as "an extended self-portrait of a self that cannot be defined" (Nancy Spector in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince,  2007, p. 52). And yet, the Joke Paintings are not without tenderness. With an underlying respect for the communities evoked by this humour, the paintings appear to channel the joke as meal-ticket, social tool, means of survival and coping strategy in a country whose identity is inextricable from the harsh, Lynchian dualities ingrained within American life.