Richard Prince is perhaps best known for the different series of mixed media paintings and prints that he has created during his career. These include, but are not limited to, his appropriated prints, nurse paintings, gangs, and joke paintings. Oftentimes two or more of these series overlap in one single piece. In the lexicon of Prince’s work, a “gang” consists of a series of prints brought together collectively in one image. While the individual images do not touch, their presentation together in one artwork challenges the viewer’s holistic perception of the piece and the interrelatedness of its fragments.

These gang pieces are typically made up of appropriated elements, another of Prince’s main artistic tactics, one that he began in 1977 as an artist working in New York’s then thriving downtown art scene by re-photographing an already existing photograph. (1)

Untitled (Joke) from 1986, combines elements from both the gang and the joke paintings. This piece features an appropriation of a cartoon from The New Yorker, which features two suited businessmen drinking at a bar. The caption to the original image reads “I’m missing and presumed dead,” but as one is able to see, Prince has dismantled the original image in such a way that the joke is no longer legible. Prince has also includes the signature of the cartoonist – Stan Hunt – blown up in the middle column of the bottom row. This inclusion of the original artist’s signature as appropriated by Prince brings up questions of authorship in the image, a theme that runs throughout the course of Prince’s oeuvre.

In the essay “People Keep Asking: An Introduction,” from the monograph Richard Prince, Lisa Phillips addresses the issue of authorship in this work: “Untitled (Joke) is a self-portrait – a joke on himself [Prince], on appropriation, and on the idea of art as a personal expression. It mocks a critical system wherein one group was complaining about his (and other appropriators’) lack of imagination, lack of transformation, and lack of invention, while another was insisting that he fulfilled Walter Benjamin’s prophecy of the ‘death of the author’.” (2)

1. Nancy Spector, “Nowhere Man,” Richard Prince. Ed., Nancy Spector. (New York: Hatje Cantz Verlag in collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2007), 23.
2. Lisa Phillips, “People Keep Asking: An Introduction,” Richard Prince. Ed., Lisa Phillips. (New York: Whitney Museum of Art in collaboration with Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 38.