Painted in 2001, What Can You Do? is a largescale joke painting rendered on a smooth, powdery surface. Combining different modern traditions and techniques, such as silk-screening processes and monochrome canvases, Richard Prince’s jokes stand in between the comical and disbelief, continually questioning definitions of art and of authorship.
The pastel hues employed in the present lot shy away from Prince’s more stark, monochromatic paintings from earlier in his career. Yet, this time, the artist seems to have chosen this yellowish background in accordance with the joke based on colour-matching humour.
The joke itself is stencilled in black in a narrow band across the width of the canvas. The strong design of the work, in its symmetry and the detailed composition, echo Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. Richard Prince’s first joke paintings date back to the mid 1980s when, after having posted up a small handwritten joke on a piece of paper, he started imagining how it would have looked on a gallery wall. At first handwritten, his jokes developed in time into more substantial works in which the same joke is repeated on monochrome canvases of different colours. Prince is part of the Pictures Generation – alongside Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, David Salle, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine – who came to prominence in the 1970s and were known for their appropriation of images drawn from the mass media. Just as his earlier Cowboys and Nurse Paintings series, Prince’s jokes are therefore a further ‘variation’ on this method.
“I have never thought making anything new. I make it again. I am very much against trying to make anything new in a modernist approach. I think you can do only something for yourself.” (Richard Prince in Vincent Pécoil, ‘Richard Prince, Writer’, in Richard Prince, Canaries in the Coal Mine, exh. cat, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2006, p.128) The true meaning of the joke paintings is still a matter of discussion. From a distance, they could even be read as abstract works. But viewed closely, their formal simplicity and their repetition seem to set them in the tradition of conceptualism. All in all, Prince’s works are loaded with references to Structuralism and Post-modernist theories. Repetition deprives the joke of its humour thus reducing it to a mere text in which the signifier takes over on the signified. After this, what is left?