Richard Prince, Untitled (2019-2020), via Sadie Coles HQ
On this month in London, artist Richard Prince marks his seventh solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, bringing forth a new iteration and expansion of his iconic Joke Paintings. The artist, who has long mined the linguistic flows, political temperatures and structural modes of American pop culture, here finds new ground to explore in these modes for the show, titled Everyday.
Richard Prince, Untitled (2020), via Sadie Coles HQ
Here, Prince replicates the jokes of Rodney Dangerfield, the renowned American stand-up comedian best known for disarming one-liners that captured an everyman humor in the banal or a self-deprecating loss of face. Prince, known for his collection of counter-cultural material, acquired an index of the comic’s jokes.” Just my luck I was at the airport when my ship came in” is the joke repeated in many of the exhibition works, retraced verbatim across several paintings. Prince knowingly subjects the joke to scrutiny, the repetition adding to its hopeless melancholy. In other paintings, the roster of one-liners and throwaway gags at first sight deliver their intended punch. Yet reframed in abstract perpetuity on canvas the impact, like a joke repeated, inevitably wanes, in turn drawing into focus the latent clichés and inflections of society’s aspirations, deceptions, bigotries, sexism and inequalities.
Richard Prince, Untitled (2020), via Sadie Coles HQ
First conceived in the early 1980s, the artist’s Joke Paintings are lifted from magazines such as The New Yorker and Playboy, books and comedy sketches, redrawn in multifarious styles: from economical monochromatic or dichromatic text on canvas that riff on the ascetic formal language of minimalism, Pop Art or commercial signage, to bold lettering effusively layered with collages and drawings. Throughout the Joke Paintings series, Prince stages an irreverent play on his own use of appropriation and challenge to conventional concepts of authorship; the best jokes succeed in their retelling by others, passing by word of mouth until their origins are ultimately obscured.
Richard Prince, Untitled (2020), via Sadie Coles HQ
Made during the pandemic, between 2019-2021, these works restage Dangerfield’s jokes in boldly-applied oil stick lettering across the cacophonous back catalogue of the comic’s stage notes from his later years: ‘a black and blue ballpoint pen psychotropic scrawl of automatic writing’. In recalibrating the notes as readymade collages, Prince draws into relief Dangerfield’s short-hand observations on contemporary life, both exposing and parodying received cultural associations and norms. Prince here continues his interpretations and interpolations of captured material as a jumping off point for any number of investigations: calligraphic studies, sociolinguistic breakdowns, text painting, each of these notes mingle together here, with the artist allowing the varied approaches to his material to give the words new life. Much like a truly great joke, Prince once again emphasizes that the art is in the telling.
The show closes May 5th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Richard Prince: Everyday [Exhibition Site]
