Richard Prince What Can You Do? 2001 acrylic on canvas 75 x 115 7/8 in. (190.5 x 294.3 cm) Signed, titled and dated "R. Prince 2001 What Can You Do?" along the overlap.
Provenance Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York Private Collection Exhibited Chicago, The University of Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Watery, Domestic, November 17 - December 22, 2002 Catalogue Essay “Artists were casting sculptures in bronze, making huge paintings, talking about prices and clothes and cars and spending vast amounts of money. So I wrote jokes on little pieces of paper and sold them for $10 each.” Richard Prince 2007 Painted in 2001, What Can You Do? is a large-scale 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 comical and disbelief, continually questioning definitions of art and of authorship. 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 which, in its particularly buttermilk yellow background, seems to have been chosen as a visual pun on the color-based punch line of the joke. The joke itself is stenciled in black in a narrow band across the width of the canvas. 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 colors. 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. “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.” (R. Prince in V. Pécoil, “Richard Prince, Writer”, in Richard Prince Canaries in the Coal Mine, exh. cat, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2006, p.128) What Can You Do? presents the viewer with a strangely puzzling juxtaposition of a minimalist canvas and painted words. Although this can be interpreted as a reference to postmodern linguistic theory, the work also points to two quintessentially American features: hard-edge abstraction and popular humor. Cleverly subverting the clean and serious language of abstract painting, the jokes' amalgamation of low and high culture characterizes Prince’s most iconic work. This intelligent fusion of conceptual strategies with popular cultural references, which has been the driving force throughout Richard Prince’s influential practice, is perfectly merged in What Can You Do?. Wittingly parodying the uncomplicated jokes from vernacular literature, the artist has found a way of incorporating a difficult subject-matter – humor – into a deeply serious artistic practice. Read More Artist Bio Richard Prince American • 1947 While some artists are known for a signature style, Richard Prince is most closely associated with his subject matter: for instance, Cowboys, his series of the Marlboro man magnified between 1980 and 1994; Nurses, sinister yet seductive, all copies from pulp novel covers; joke text paintings, simple block lettering of his own or appropriated jokes. Often labelled an artist of the Pictures Generation alongside Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo Prince has been said to be the contemporary artist who most understands the depth and influence of mass media over life in the 20th and 21st centuries. In whichever medium Prince chooses to work, he stays within the realm of appropriation. Of course Prince is not met without controversy, and he has been on the losin
Richard Prince What Can You Do? 2001 acrylic on canvas 75 x 115 7/8 in. (190.5 x 294.3 cm) Signed, titled and dated "R. Prince 2001 What Can You Do?" along the overlap.
Provenance Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York Private Collection Exhibited Chicago, The University of Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Watery, Domestic, November 17 - December 22, 2002 Catalogue Essay “Artists were casting sculptures in bronze, making huge paintings, talking about prices and clothes and cars and spending vast amounts of money. So I wrote jokes on little pieces of paper and sold them for $10 each.” Richard Prince 2007 Painted in 2001, What Can You Do? is a large-scale 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 comical and disbelief, continually questioning definitions of art and of authorship. 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 which, in its particularly buttermilk yellow background, seems to have been chosen as a visual pun on the color-based punch line of the joke. The joke itself is stenciled in black in a narrow band across the width of the canvas. 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 colors. 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. “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.” (R. Prince in V. Pécoil, “Richard Prince, Writer”, in Richard Prince Canaries in the Coal Mine, exh. cat, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2006, p.128) What Can You Do? presents the viewer with a strangely puzzling juxtaposition of a minimalist canvas and painted words. Although this can be interpreted as a reference to postmodern linguistic theory, the work also points to two quintessentially American features: hard-edge abstraction and popular humor. Cleverly subverting the clean and serious language of abstract painting, the jokes' amalgamation of low and high culture characterizes Prince’s most iconic work. This intelligent fusion of conceptual strategies with popular cultural references, which has been the driving force throughout Richard Prince’s influential practice, is perfectly merged in What Can You Do?. Wittingly parodying the uncomplicated jokes from vernacular literature, the artist has found a way of incorporating a difficult subject-matter – humor – into a deeply serious artistic practice. Read More Artist Bio Richard Prince American • 1947 While some artists are known for a signature style, Richard Prince is most closely associated with his subject matter: for instance, Cowboys, his series of the Marlboro man magnified between 1980 and 1994; Nurses, sinister yet seductive, all copies from pulp novel covers; joke text paintings, simple block lettering of his own or appropriated jokes. Often labelled an artist of the Pictures Generation alongside Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo Prince has been said to be the contemporary artist who most understands the depth and influence of mass media over life in the 20th and 21st centuries. In whichever medium Prince chooses to work, he stays within the realm of appropriation. Of course Prince is not met without controversy, and he has been on the losin
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.jpg "Source: Christie's")
.jpg "Source: Christie's")
