Richard Prince

Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2008

Bologna, Museo Mambo, Cara Domani: Opere dalla Collezione Ernesto Esposito, 2012, p. 20, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is richer and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. All collaged elements are stable. Some of the edges of the lower row of sheets are irregularly torn and have short tears, which is likely inherent to the artist's choice of medium and working process.
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Set against a background of collaged book covers that inform Richard Prince’s famous Nurse paintings, What To Do also features another of the artist’s signature themes, the appropriated joke, thus amalgamating two of the artist’s most famous bodies of work in a powerful statement about contemporary culture. Fashion, women, sex, cars, film and any other blue-collar, consumer driven imagery are all inspiration for Richard Prince’s signature visual vocabulary. In 1974 the artist was working the nightshift for Time-Life magazines and clipping editorials to assist the staff-writer’s research. While dismantling text from thousands of advertisements, he noticed the endless patterns inherent in the detritus of American media. In What To Do, Prince replicates such patterns through his appropriation of the covers of pulp romance novellas, here repeated in a grid over the canvas and, like the single Nurse paintings, covered with gestural washes of paint. Both in technique and subject-matter, What To Do is based on the classic Prince strategies of appropriation and vernacular American mythology: the cowboys, girlfriends, gangs and nurses are all representations of familiar stereotypes - the mechanics of which Prince, and the Pictures Generation as a whole, have continuously attempt to reveal.

The real subject of Richard Prince's oeuvre, beyond the stereotypes of middle-class America, is the simulacrum: the state in which representation starts to inform our understanding of reality. Like Andy Warhol, Prince compels his viewers to consider the mechanics behind an increasingly image-dominated culture: our relationship to specific typologies, stereotypes, idealized notions of the everyday and our relationship to pictures themselves. What To Do also draws on Prince's unlikely introduction of low-brow jokes into high art - an anomaly that is often, as in the present work, emphasised by its juxtaposition with the serious language of gestural abstract painting. With a Duchampian impulse towards relocating the familiar, Prince de-contextualizes the joke and blows it up to a scale that makes the words hardly legible. There is a tension here between reading and seeing; it's almost impossible to decipher the joke itself; the text instead becomes a sort of glyph, something strange and pictorial.

Combining two classic Richard Prince motives in a powerful reflection on contemporary culture, What To Do offers a great insight into his signature artistic strategies, combining appropriated imagery from popular culture to comment on the construction of stereotypes in society, whilst also including a complex set of references to literature, abstract painting and low-brow popular humour.