RICHARD PRINCE (b. 1949) He Ain't Here Yet.

Provenance
Galerie Thomas Borgmann, Cologne

From approximately 1987 until the end of the 1990s, Richard Prince began his foray into a comedic dialogue with high art culture in his Joke paintings. Prince's Joke paintings have taken many forms: some are handwritten, others silk-screened onto canvas, others include cartoons and captions and some appear as photographic gangs. Yet, undoubtedly, the most fascinating of these works are those in which only the caption of a cartoon or joke is handwritten or silk-screened on a monochromatic canvas, such as the case in the present lot He Ain't Here. It is explained that, "Prince's Jokes aim to disabuse the viewer of this prevailing belief that comedy represents a form of transcendence; a way of bringing lightness to even the weightiest circumstances and events of life. He rejects the notion that cartoons are simply lighthearted fun. In fact, perhaps of all his artworks, the Jokes reveal the space in which the intertwining of lightness and weight is most obvious. As Freud has demonstrated, there is often an element of hostility lurking within, a hidden ambition to demonstrate one's superiority" (R. brooks, J. Rian, L. Sante, Richard Prince, London 2003, p. 47)

In speaking about the Joke paintings, Prince explains their origins, "The jokes are about putting the ball in the hole, and … I didn't want to say I wish I had done that. The jokes came out of drawing the cartoons. I wanted to draw, and I liked the way certain cartoons were drawn. So I decided to redraw the ones I liked. This was in 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 cartoon drawings "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, the ones that get retold, and wrote them out, by hand, on small pieces of paper. Paper and pencil. Pencil on paper" (R. Prince & T. Kawachi, eds., 4 x 4 Richard Prince, Italy 1997, unpaginated).