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Lot Essay
Roll drums, cue laughter - understated to the extreme, the cool stencilled letters of Richard Prince's 'Joke painting' It Was Driving Me Crazy are the artistic equivalent of deadpan delivery. Both the joke and the presentation are worthy heirs of the consummate American comedians such as Bob Hope, Jackie Mason, Henry 'Henny' Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield from whom Prince often culled his source jokes. But at the same time, there is an engaging disparity between the cool, clinical presentation of these letters, marooned in the centre of a large monochrome surface, and the humour that they invoke. It Was Driving Me Crazy combines a sense of humour that has one foot in the world of blue-collar humour, and the other in the world of Pop. The old, homely American humour of It Was Driving Me Crazy has a scent of the United States of yesteryear, a hint of nostalgia rather than the domestic discord implied by the joke itself.
For many years, the large part of Prince's artistic oeuvre consisted of appropriated photographs. As a former picture researcher, he had an infallible eye. Many of these images were from advertising, for instance his famous images of the Marlboro Man. However, he decontextualised all these photographs, removing the slogans and logos, and presenting the adverts as pictures, or artworks, in their own rights. During the 1980s, he began to indulge in creating images by hand, rather than relying on photography. He would take cartoons and other images and usually reproduced them with discordant jokes and captions beneath. Prince traces the evolution of his deadpan Joke Paintings to this period:
'I wanted to draw and I liked the way certain cartoons were drawn. So I decided to redraw the ones I liked. This was 1985. I was living in Los Angeles. I drew a lot of Whitney Darrow cartoons. He was actually a friend of Jackson Pollock. I started calling these cartoons 'jokes' and realized I was calling them wrong. So I started to forget about the cartoon image and just think about the text or punch line. I checked out joke telling books. I picked out about a dozen jokes... ones that were familiar, ones that get retold, and wrote them out, by hand, on small pieces of paper' (Prince, quoted in L. Clark, 'Interview', pp. 129-36, in L. Phillips, Richard Prince, exh. cat., New York 1992, p. 131).
It had in fact taken time for Prince to begin writing the jokes without images, and it was only in 1987, the year before It Was Driving Me Crazy was executed, that he began to create the silkscreen Joke Paintings that now rank amongst his best-known works. Where formerly he had appropriated advertising images and pictures from magazines, now he was appropriating the old classic jokes and witticisms of an older generation, incorporating them into his idiosyncratic repertoire.
Prince's expert sense of aesthetics adapted immediately to the draw of the cool monochrome of his silkscreens, and it was in these pictures that the Jokes found their truest form. He loved the contrast between the conservative medium of his Joke Paintings and their contents, explaining that the jokes, 'needed a traditional medium. Stretchers, canvas, paint. The most traditional. Nothing fancy or clever or loud. The subject was already that. So the medium had to cut into the craziness. Make it more normal. Normalize the subject' (Prince, quoted in R. Rian, 'Interview', pp. 6-24, in R. Brooks, J. Rian & L. Sante, Richard Prince, London 2003, p. 20).
The joke does not look crazy or loud, especially in It Was Driving Me Crazy where the words are dwarfed by their scale relative to the canvas. But of course this idea of a joke as art is crazy, and all the more so in the modern world, where contemporary art is often denigrated and is itself accused of being a joke. It Was Driving Me Crazy confronts this in several ways. As well as condensing the narrative matter of a picture into the incongruous form of a written joke, Prince also takes a chance to parody the monochrome or near-monochrome paintings of Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Brice Marden, Barnett Newman et al. His joke is a seemingly respectable, teacherly act of graffiti across the legacy of so many of the Abstract Expressionists.
This challenge to the hegemony of other artists functions both on this witty, superficial level, but also involves far deeper investigations into the nature of art itself. There is a well-judged whiff of post-structuralism to Prince's disassembly of painting, and indeed of communication. By using words instead of images (or even brushstrokes), he invokes a more exact and uniform means of communication than much art, but also provokes human reactions in a strong sense: people cannot help but read the joke. It is a mental reflex to read words that are presented before us. We do not judge the calligraphy, but instead the content, Prince deftly and cynically manipulating his viewers and transforming them into readers, be they reluctant or not. In this way, Prince forces the viewer to consider the function of art. This is a narrative painting for the children of Man Ray or Duchamp. But here it is all the more potent because the sleight of hand is within the mental processes of the human brain, and in the fact that, old hat or not, this is a joke that entertains us. It Was Driving Me Crazy is therefore a picture that entertains us.
The absolute control that Prince exerts on the uncluttered surface of his painting allows him to limit the subjectivity with which It Was Driving Me Crazy can be interpreted. He controls our reading and our reaction to what we have read. Some critics attempt to see autobiographical content showing through, as if by X-Ray, in the recurring sexual or psychiatric content of the jokes. However, the written words are themselves impenetrable, prompting a reaction but telling us little. They are not even his words, but have mostly been highjacked from the routines of old, outdated but legendary comedians. They are designed to invoke an almost uniform sensation in their viewers, or readers. This interest in subjectivity, and ultimately in the impossibility of true communication, is one of the key themes underlying all of Prince's works in various ways: 'It's strange,' he has said on this subject:
'I've been in rooms where something has happened and later I've read about that something and the reading or report is nothing like what happened in that room. The public version. The translation. What's generally known. For people as a whole. What you have to learn is to live with the public version and forget about the private one. What happened in the room is what they can take away. The public version is history. The private one is wild history' (Prince, quoted in Clark, op.cit., 1992, p. 136).
It Was Driving Me Crazy is the public version, but its very inscrutability forces the viewer to contemplate the hidden and infinite depths of the wild history of experiences, both our own and others'.
For many years, the large part of Prince's artistic oeuvre consisted of appropriated photographs. As a former picture researcher, he had an infallible eye. Many of these images were from advertising, for instance his famous images of the Marlboro Man. However, he decontextualised all these photographs, removing the slogans and logos, and presenting the adverts as pictures, or artworks, in their own rights. During the 1980s, he began to indulge in creating images by hand, rather than relying on photography. He would take cartoons and other images and usually reproduced them with discordant jokes and captions beneath. Prince traces the evolution of his deadpan Joke Paintings to this period:
'I wanted to draw and I liked the way certain cartoons were drawn. So I decided to redraw the ones I liked. This was 1985. I was living in Los Angeles. I drew a lot of Whitney Darrow cartoons. He was actually a friend of Jackson Pollock. I started calling these cartoons 'jokes' and realized I was calling them wrong. So I started to forget about the cartoon image and just think about the text or punch line. I checked out joke telling books. I picked out about a dozen jokes... ones that were familiar, ones that get retold, and wrote them out, by hand, on small pieces of paper' (Prince, quoted in L. Clark, 'Interview', pp. 129-36, in L. Phillips, Richard Prince, exh. cat., New York 1992, p. 131).
It had in fact taken time for Prince to begin writing the jokes without images, and it was only in 1987, the year before It Was Driving Me Crazy was executed, that he began to create the silkscreen Joke Paintings that now rank amongst his best-known works. Where formerly he had appropriated advertising images and pictures from magazines, now he was appropriating the old classic jokes and witticisms of an older generation, incorporating them into his idiosyncratic repertoire.
Prince's expert sense of aesthetics adapted immediately to the draw of the cool monochrome of his silkscreens, and it was in these pictures that the Jokes found their truest form. He loved the contrast between the conservative medium of his Joke Paintings and their contents, explaining that the jokes, 'needed a traditional medium. Stretchers, canvas, paint. The most traditional. Nothing fancy or clever or loud. The subject was already that. So the medium had to cut into the craziness. Make it more normal. Normalize the subject' (Prince, quoted in R. Rian, 'Interview', pp. 6-24, in R. Brooks, J. Rian & L. Sante, Richard Prince, London 2003, p. 20).
The joke does not look crazy or loud, especially in It Was Driving Me Crazy where the words are dwarfed by their scale relative to the canvas. But of course this idea of a joke as art is crazy, and all the more so in the modern world, where contemporary art is often denigrated and is itself accused of being a joke. It Was Driving Me Crazy confronts this in several ways. As well as condensing the narrative matter of a picture into the incongruous form of a written joke, Prince also takes a chance to parody the monochrome or near-monochrome paintings of Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Brice Marden, Barnett Newman et al. His joke is a seemingly respectable, teacherly act of graffiti across the legacy of so many of the Abstract Expressionists.
This challenge to the hegemony of other artists functions both on this witty, superficial level, but also involves far deeper investigations into the nature of art itself. There is a well-judged whiff of post-structuralism to Prince's disassembly of painting, and indeed of communication. By using words instead of images (or even brushstrokes), he invokes a more exact and uniform means of communication than much art, but also provokes human reactions in a strong sense: people cannot help but read the joke. It is a mental reflex to read words that are presented before us. We do not judge the calligraphy, but instead the content, Prince deftly and cynically manipulating his viewers and transforming them into readers, be they reluctant or not. In this way, Prince forces the viewer to consider the function of art. This is a narrative painting for the children of Man Ray or Duchamp. But here it is all the more potent because the sleight of hand is within the mental processes of the human brain, and in the fact that, old hat or not, this is a joke that entertains us. It Was Driving Me Crazy is therefore a picture that entertains us.
The absolute control that Prince exerts on the uncluttered surface of his painting allows him to limit the subjectivity with which It Was Driving Me Crazy can be interpreted. He controls our reading and our reaction to what we have read. Some critics attempt to see autobiographical content showing through, as if by X-Ray, in the recurring sexual or psychiatric content of the jokes. However, the written words are themselves impenetrable, prompting a reaction but telling us little. They are not even his words, but have mostly been highjacked from the routines of old, outdated but legendary comedians. They are designed to invoke an almost uniform sensation in their viewers, or readers. This interest in subjectivity, and ultimately in the impossibility of true communication, is one of the key themes underlying all of Prince's works in various ways: 'It's strange,' he has said on this subject:
'I've been in rooms where something has happened and later I've read about that something and the reading or report is nothing like what happened in that room. The public version. The translation. What's generally known. For people as a whole. What you have to learn is to live with the public version and forget about the private one. What happened in the room is what they can take away. The public version is history. The private one is wild history' (Prince, quoted in Clark, op.cit., 1992, p. 136).
It Was Driving Me Crazy is the public version, but its very inscrutability forces the viewer to contemplate the hidden and infinite depths of the wild history of experiences, both our own and others'.