Richard Prince's Black and White Joke paintings from 2002 represent a significant phase in the artist's exploration of humor, identity, and authorship through the medium of painting. This body of work, which was featured in an exhibition at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery from May 11 to June 21, 2002, includes handpainted jokes that are fragmented, incomplete, repeated, and layered, akin to the stuttering delivery of an amateur comedian. The paintings incorporate schematic figures and bold, abstract "cartoon" faces, with sizes ranging from five to nearly seventeen feet in length.
Prince's engagement with jokes in his art began in the mid-1980s, evolving from redrawing captioned cartoons from magazines to reworking and repeating these jokes across various formats. This process not only addresses themes of identity, authenticity, and authorship but also serves as a critique and homage to Abstract Expressionism, intertwining textual jokes with painterly drips and splatters across large canvases (Gladstone Gallery).
Richard Prince's earlier engagements with joke paintings can be traced back to 1984 when he started assembling one-line gag cartoons and jokes, which he initially redrew onto small pieces of paper. This transitioned into a more radical approach in 1987, where Prince began mechanically reproducing these gags onto flat, monochrome canvases. This method subverted the expressive, gestural painting prevalent in the 1980s, marrying high and low culture through a combination of block text and contrasting backgrounds. These monochromatic joke paintings often mimic the composition of Color Field painters of the 1950s and 60s, with Prince using the juxtaposition of text and color to enhance the visual impact of the words. The exhibition showcased at Skarstedt Gallery in London from June 26 to August 3, 2018, highlighted these early works, providing insight into Prince's process of using humor as a lens to critique and reflect on American pop culture, authorship, and the myth of the artist (Skarstedt) (Artlyst).
Prince's work in this domain is characterized by its exploration of the boundaries between appropriated content and original creation, employing humor as a tool to probe societal norms and the constructs of identity and creativity. His Joke paintings, including the black and white series from 2002, exemplify this inquiry, using the framework of visual art to interrogate the mechanics of joke-telling and the cultural significance embedded within these seemingly simple narratives. Through these works, Prince not only engages with the tradition of abstract painting but also comments on the cyclical nature of art, humor, and meaning, making these pieces a crucial part of his broader artistic oeuvre.