Grassy Knoll

Beginning with his introduction to the art world as part of the Pictures Generation in the 1970s, Richard Prince has built a career out of turning the conventions of art back on themselves to examine aspects of contemporary culture. Grassy Knoll is a classic example of Richard Prince’s Joke paintings, which emerged in 1985, when Prince was living in the back room of New York’s 303 Gallery. The jokes derived from newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, or joke books. Dryly presented with a deadpan sensibility, the Joke paintings consist of visual expressions of humour that are disarmingly immediate and resonant, yet abstract in their presentation.
In Grassy Knoll, layered and juxtaposed silkscreened images of various plants are set amongst sinuous lines of type and decorative patterns that break up the composition. These tell a fragment of a joke about a visit to a psychiatrist—one of Prince’s favoured subjects. In the curious arrangement of content Prince’s Joke paintings are related to the work of his good friend Christopher Wool. While Wool’s work contains less explicit subject matter than Prince’s, there is a similar ambiguity around exact meaning, and a refusal of any easy, centralized narrative. Prince’s works also hark back to the Pop-inflected conceptualism of Ed Ruscha’s use of language in his word paintings, and John Baldessari’s text and image paintings, which sometimes strike a similar note in terms of humour, if using aesthetic and art historical terminology rather than the mass cultural material Prince favours.