“Jokes and cartoons are part of any mainstream magazine. Especially magazines like the New Yorker or Playboy. They're right up there with the editorial and advertisements and table of contents and letters to the editors. They're part of the layout, part of the "sights" and "gags." Sometimes they're political, sometimes they just make fun of everyday life. Once in a while they drive people to protest.”
Executed in 2010, Untitled belongs to Richard Prince’s seminal series of Joke Paintings. Sparking heated dialogue about the limits of appropriations, Prince reproduces images in the mainstream media to capture America’s idiosyncrasies while highlighting the media’s derivative nature and pervasiveness. He shows that all images are reiterations of each other, but by being positioned in new contexts, they become their own redefined entities. Influenced by Pop Art, Prince embraces the brash world of common culture, advertising, and mass media to present new images imbued with irony which serve to critique society. A provocateur, Prince forces us to question the building blocks of the contemporary society's identity.
Prince emerged in the early 1980s as a key figure of the Pictures Generation and as a pioneering appropriation artist. He first turned towards jokes in 1985 and their visual presentation has since undertaken a noticeable evolution that first simplified the composition to its most basic form and then re-introduced imagery known from the artist's other series, such as the Nurse Paintings, as exemplified by the present composition.
Inspired and appropriated from the titles and front covers of pulp romance novellas from the 1950s to 1980s, of which Prince has compiled an avid personal collection, the Nurse Paintings take as their subject the trope of the passive female nurse embroiled in an impossible love affair, which was popularized in American dime-store paperbacks from the mid to late twentieth century. Offering a transgressive scrutiny of such idealized modes of feminine portrayal, Prince’s Nurse Paintings simultaneously explore, exploit and contest the erotic stereotype and gender construct of the iconic blonde bombshell, which had previously been elevated to the realms of high-art by artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. In the present work, Prince combines the Joke Paintings and the appropriation of found imagery used in his renowned Nurse Paintings to create a unique, witty composition that highlights the contrast between his chosen punchline and the appropriated imagery crafted into a distinct background.
“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 Joke Paintings act both as a commentary and representation of fifties-style middle America, blue collar and Borscht-Belt humour that directly addressed issues of sexual identity, class and race and social acceptability. Often likened to the definition of humour proposed by Freud, Prince’s Joke Paintings create pleasure in spite, or perhaps because, of the painful effects that disturb it: the “liberating effect of humour.” While on the surface it is their fantastical and humours appearance that distinguishes them from the artist’s Nurse Paintings or Cowboy Paintings, these three renowned series are in fact intimately connected through the equally firm roots they each take in the core ethos of Prince’s highly conceptual and pioneer practice. The pop appropriation that constitutes the essence of the Cowboy corpus is critical to the conception and execution of the Nurses; with his Joke Paintings, these works share a dependence on borrowed text and kitsch humour. What is added in the present work, to brilliant effect and with true bravado, is Prince’s riposte to Abstract Expressionism. Enlivened with heady brushstrokes, drips and splatters behind the painted text, the present Untitled pays homage to the techniques pioneered by the legendary group of Abstract Expressionist artists working to redefine the contemporary landscape.