Can a joke be a painting? More to the point, can a painting be a joke? Richard Prince has spent the better part of the last two decades trying to answer these questions, engaging in a voyage to the center of painting’s very own heart of darkness. Starting his journey in 1987, Prince broadened his aesthetic strategies beyond the realm of photographic appropriation and into the body, if not the soul, of painterly expression. As he moved in this painterly direction, was Prince the equivalent of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in Francis Ford Copppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now, disappearing up the river into Camboida in an attempt to take post war painting practices to their excessive logical conclusions? Or was he more akin to Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard, setting out on a classified recon mission with orders to exterminate painting with extreme prejudice? In the end, perhaps he is more like the comedian Bob Hope singing his theme song “Thanks for the Memories” on a USO tour in Saigon because at the core of his painting agenda rests the repetitious, twisted structural logic of the joke, a staple of old school stand up comedy.
D. Fogle “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Joke (Painting),” Parkett 72, New York/Zurich 2004, p. 108
Oh Henry, completed in 2003, is a large-scale joke painting Richard Prince rendered on a smooth, powdery surface. The plush pastel hues shy away from his more stark, monochromatic paintings from earlier on in his career. The present lot embodies an advanced take on his joke theme, employing a wider range of color that ultimately presents a composition more in tune with his painterly Nurse series and most recent de Kooning-esque Women series, where vivid colors and imagery coalesce. The joke itself, written large across the entire width of the canvas of the left canvas and fading into the t-shirt covered right panel, is stenciled in place with a conviction for design; Prince’s large yellow Helvetica type breaks the canvas in two, yet simultaneously appears to meld each visual reference taking place before your eyes in a highly stylized and provocative manner.
Mr. Prince has devoted his career to this surface unreality, attempting to collect, count and order its ways. He has said that his goal is a ‘virtuoso real’, something beyond real that is patently fake. But his art is inherently corrosive; it eats through things. His specialty is a carefully constructed hybrid that is also some kind of joke, charged by conflicting notions of high, low and lower... [Borscht belt jokes] are a signature staple…appearing on modernist monochromes, on fields of checks and as arbitrary punch lines for postwar New Yorker or Playboy cartoons. These examples of a better class of humor are variously whole, fragmented, steeped in white or piled into colorful, nearly abstract patterns yet still retain their familiarity. The same jokes occur in different works, alternately write big or little, sharp or fading, straight or rippled as if spoken by someone on a bender.
R. Smith, “Pilfering From a culture Out of Joint”, The New York Times, September 28, 2007
Prince started telling jokes, or rather retelling jokes, in the 1980s when he began to reproduce illustrations from The New Yorker in graphite on an intimate scale. His attraction to the humor in the cheap joke is perfectly in tune with his interest in low cultural forms. These works soon evolved away from the cartoons to the purer text of lone jokes on canvas, such as the present lot. The artist explains, “It occurred to me that if I was to call them ‘jokes’ then I would need to get rid of the illustration and focus on the punch line” (Richard Prince in B. Appel www.rovetv.net (online content)).
By separating a cartoon from its caption and adding a non sequitur of a joke, Prince creates strange, hybrid emblems that offer mutable narratives. What emerges from these disjunctions of image and text is a transgressive perversity, an uninhibited play of meaning in which attraction, deceit, failure, sex, and death intermingle to produce work that is at once erotic, humorous, and macabre. Through this deliberate confusion of discursive systems, Prince brings to the surface the hostility, fear, and shame fueling much American humor. What began as a fairly abstract exercise, according to the artist, ‘gradually became tragic in a quite unexpected way.’
N. Spector, Richard Prince, New York, 2008, p
Mining the lowbrow Borscht-Belt humor, a comedic genre developed in the Catskills by comedians like Jack Benny, Sid Ceasar and Rodney Dangerfield, Prince appropriates one-liners that can be both straight forward funny and also have layers of subtext. In the present lot, the joke reads: “Oh Henry let’s not park here, Oh Henry let’s not park, Oh Henry let’s not. Oh Henry let’s. Oh Henry. Oh. Another One, Oh Henry Let’s”
This Borscht Belt classic, part of the Prince repertory or ‘act’ if you like, is a ‘prime’ example of the “joke” paintings the artist began back in 1987 (after 10 years of working within the photographic appropriation/re-photography mode) which mines the underlying character of 50s style, middle American humor. Confronting issues of sexual identity, fantasy and frustration as well as class and social acceptability, the brilliant use of the t-shirt in the second panel of the diptych painting—an ‘actual’ Blue Collar staple of costume and rebellion—adds a three dimensional, visual cue to the “yuk-proven” efficacy of the joke.
B. Appel, “Richard Prince,” artcritical.com (online content), July 2005