Richard Prince

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York

Sale: Phillips de Pury and Company, New York, Contemporary Art Part II, 11 November 2005, Lot 280

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although fail to convey the pencil handwriting. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a fine tension crack to the extreme overturn top edge. There are two circular cracks, one towards the centre of the left edge and one towards the upper centre of the right edge and a small network of cracks towards the centre of the left edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra violet light.
"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. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Executed in luxuriant yellows and whites, Richard Prince’s The Song 2120 South Michigan Avenue is a brilliant and early example from the important sub series of Joke works, the White Paintings, which the artist first started in the late 1980s. Emblazoned across the bottom of the piece are the words ‘The Song 2120 South Michigan Avenue’ – the address of the infamous home of Chess Records where the Rolling Stones recorded many of their early songs. So important was this location to the Rolling Stones that they ended up releasing an eponymous instrumental in 1964. The title’s reproduction here, as in the very best of the Prince’s satirical Joke paintings, can be seen as an ironic comment on the mass-production of culture. Representing his inspired amalgamation of postmodern conceptual strategies and abstract painting with a resolutely Pop art twist, The Song 2120 South Michigan Avenue epitomises Prince’s celebrated text paintings.

A pioneer amongst the appropriation artists of the 1980s, Prince’s work stood out for its characteristic coolness. Though aligned with other artists of his generation whose art was 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 humour. 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. Much like the sources appropriated for his photographs, the artist lifted jokes from cartoon-strips. As Prince explained, “I’d been working 10 years and I still wasn’t known. So I wrote a joke in pencil on a piece of paper, and I’d invite people over and ask them, ‘Will you give me $10 for this?’ I knew I was onto something – if someone else had done it I would have been jealous. You couldn’t speculate about it. So much of art depends on the critic as the umpire. With a joke there’s nothing to interpret” (Richard Prince quoted in: Steven Daly, ‘Richard Prince’s Outside Streak’, Vanity Fair, December 2007, online resource).

With his very first Joke paintings in 1985, Prince started by meticulously hand writing jokes across the surface of his canvases. Then, as is demonstrated in the present work, he began to combine jokes and cartoons by silkscreening the images onto varying supports – white backgrounds (White Paintings), Protest Paintings (stretchers that were shaped into that of protest signs) and also on more unusual and overtly commercial sites such as t-shirts and buttons. Prince’s White Paintings, to which The Song 2120 South Michigan Avenue belongs, are spirited and energetic in comparison to the more straightforward Monochromatic Jokes that he began to create at the same time as the present work. In the White Paintings, handwritten and printed jokes are conflated with raw, gestural marks, graphics and silkscreened imagery on a painterly white backdrop. In this pivotal sub-series, Prince employs appropriation in an entirely different fashion, echoing as he does the work of the great Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and more recently the distinctive erasure of Christopher Wool. 

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. Despite this conceptual strategy, Prince nonetheless considered these works first and foremost as abstract paintings. As he jokingly remarked, “the Joke paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can’t speak English” (Richard Prince quoted in: Exhibition Cataogue, Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Richard Prince: Canaries in the Coal Mine, 2006, p. 124). Wittingly appropriating jokes and titles from popular culture, in The Song 2120 South Michigan Avenue Prince innovatively incorporates and elevates the low art form of humour to a resolutely intellectual and serious artistic practice.