I didn’t get the psychiatrist joke for a long time, to tell you the truth. Also, with a joke, it’s funny where you locate yourself. In the psychiatrist joke, I realized that I identified with
the psychiatrist. I identify with the person who says, ‘Tell me.’ I don’t identify with the “I” or the pronoun. Now it’s as if I have 15 jokes, a routine, and every once in a while I incorporate another into the act.
RICHARD PRINCE
(Richard Prince, Interview by M. Heiferman, “Richard Prince” BOMB, issue 24, Summer 1988).
Prince’s practice is largely associated with the appropriation of imagery, most commonly re-contextualizing objects and images from the advertising world through re-photographing. In the present lot, Untitled (Protest Painting), 1989-1992, Prince continues to borrow object form, text, and imagery from popular culture; in this case, mining from an old joke book, top 40 style music and the form of a picket sign– the context of which evokes the aesthetic revolution and political upheavel of the 1960s. Extending from the joke series, Richard Prince began his Protest paintings in 1986; the artist’s earlier paintings from this series feature comedic phrases silkscreened onto monochromatic backgrounds or repeated onto motif-like backgrounds.
In the present lot, three pieces of canvas make up the composition: two monochromatic canvases flank and frame the central canvas, which, if observed as a separate component, takes the form of a protest sign. The title of the piece, Untitled (Protest Painting), 1989-1992, illuminates the form of the object within the painting as much as it alludes to freedom of expression. Here, hand-written and seemingly stenciled jokes are interspersed between a rant about Andy Warhol’s unwarranted fame, eroticized text and chorus lyrics from popular song by the band War, as well as a phone number scrawled repeatedly– as though inviting interaction or confrontation. The more prominent joke that appears in Untitled (Protest Painting), 1989-1992, is one that Prince has admittedly repeated over fifteen times throughout his joke series: “I went to see a psychiatrist. He said, ‘tell me everything.’ I did and now he’s doing my act.” The somewhat subtle punch line here is that Prince identifies with the psychiatrist, ultimately appropriating a joke about appropriation.