Richard Prince

Jablonka Galerie, Cologne
Private Collection, Belgium
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince, 2007, p. 126, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light handling and wear around the extreme lateral edges. There is a light 2 in. rub mark located approximately 1 1/2 in. from the left and 18 in. from the top. There is evidence of fine and consistent hairline craquelure to the silkscreened lettering, consistent with the medium.
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.
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With his Monochrome Jokes Prince achieved the antimasterpiece - an art object that refuses to behave in a museum or market context that priveleges the notion of greatness... If anything, Prince's Monochrome Jokes represent a skillfully calculated inversion of art's essential value system.
Nancy Spector, Richard Prince, London 2008, p. 67

 

In 1987, Richard Prince began painting his famous Monochrome Joke series of paintings, including the present work. Like his early pirated photographs, the jokes were culled from the popular press, betraying the artist's fascination with those things considered kitschy or low-brow which revealed the inherent assumptions and prejudices underlying prevalent cultural constructs. 

However, unlike the masculine images of the Marlboro Man and the trashy images of anonymous American biker chicks, the focus of the Monochrome Jokes are not on visual signifiers, but textual.  Submitted for publication by unknown authors and selected from thousands of entries by editorial teams, these straightforward jokes often belie sophisticated and well-considered critiques of society at their humorous cores. Indeed, upon entering the public sphere, the jokes begin to reflect a certain collusion of contemporary public taste, desires and discriminations.

Just as publications such as the New Yorker and The New York Times align their cartoons to sync with the tenor of the time, Prince's deceptively simple quips speak volumes about the generation in which they were born. Often vaudevillian and slapstick, the banality of the artist's jokes, emancipated from their original contexts, exposes the barebones essence of the archetypical Anglo-Saxon psyche. 

During the 1980's, which was characterized by "Reaganomic" policies emphasizing deregulation and favoring the ultra-wealthy, American culture experienced a mass commodification and capitalization.  This decade gave birth to a generation of fiscal-minded trendsetters, immortalized in fictional characters such as Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street and Bret Easton Ellis' legendary Patrick Bateman, who measured quality strictly in terms of monetary value and financial success. The conversion of Soho from a poor-artist's district to a haven of high-society, haute couture and expensive art was just one of the side-effects of the new wealth. 

In addition to the physical transformation of certain New York landscapes, the cultural transformation was equally intense. The sudden rise of neo-expressionism, borne from the ashes of the once ubiquitous minimalist pedagogy, lit the art-world like a new born phoenix. The hype surrounding a return to painting and its new physicality was epitomized by the spectacle of, at the time, tremendous asking prices for works by Sandro Chia, David Salle, Julian Schnabel and others.

In contrast, Prince began producing work that was decidedly un-physical, exemplified in the deadpan literalness and banality of the Monochrome Jokes. As the artist has noted, "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... I had a hard time selling them." (Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, 2007, p. 37)

While the prevailing wind of the Soho scene emphasized the artist as autobiographer and artist as storyteller, Prince takes on the identity of the artist as mirror and the artist as philosopher.  As noted previously, through his hand, jokes became much more than simple gags intended to coax cheap laughs; they became reflections of Western man. In You No Tell – I No Tell, one of the earliest Monochrome Jokes, the straight-forward presentation exposes inherent ethnocentric stereotypes and misogynist desires. Consequently, one is forced to ask difficult questions about the dark sources of our humor. In addition, the use of an anonymous joke as the primary subject of a painting excludes the artist from complete ownership of the concept. As such, he questions contemporary notions of authorship and originality that the art world holds sacrosanct.

This multi-layering of subject matter is one reason Prince is unquestionably one of his generation's most important artists. These profound examinations of the Western psyche help us expose the voids in our collective morality and spirituality. As Nancy Spector so eloquently describes, "What is the void that all [Prince's] assumed identities conceal? It is the void that lies at the heart of our spiritual America, a psychic state and dystopic place in which white-trash aesthetics, hippie dreams of freedom, a desperate yearning for meaning, and a burning desire for recognition in any form commingle in a perverse and potentially toxic mix. Prince indulges in its raw, indigenous beauty, but he also knows the dangers inherent in such unadulterated banality." (Ibid., p. 53)