“It is interesting how people who were once fairly radical can become, later in life, kind of conservative, and not just in terms of politics -- how, if you’re an artist, you can start out being somewhat avant-garde and then end up doing landscapes.” - Richard Prince

Richard Prince is one of the most original and controversial artists of our time, transforming art through a myriad of styles and modes of expression, including sculpture photography, graphic design, and writing. His innovative and hard-hitting works played an instrumental role in influencing such artists as Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, and Barbara Kruger.

Prince’s Joke Painting series began in the late 1980s, when he wrote his first handwritten joke on a piece of paper and hung it up, realizing that he would have been envious if another artist had beaten him to it. His early works, all handwritten, grew into more substantial pieces when he began to incorporate the jokes with bold text, colour, and images, often without any connection one to the other. Prince’s jokes, which tend to meld seeming banality with satire, often poke fun at family, religion, and his relationships with women. The humor of these once cartoonish jokes seems to have all but disappeared in their new guise as conceptual art. “Some jokes are hand-written, others are silk-screened; the letters follow each other on a straight line or on a wavy line, are centred or placed at the bottom of the image, like captions, repeated, superimposed…Sometimes, the jokes are looped, as though they were told one after the other, as in stand-up comedy, and linked to one another with a simple ‘one more’, ’another one’ or ’okay’. At other times, a malfunction seems to occur, like a broken record, and the same joke is repeated twice on the same painting. In general, the same jokes are repeated from new series to the next on all possible supports.” (V. Pécoil, Richard Prince: Canaries in the Coal Mine, Oslo: Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 128).

My Life as a Weapon, 2007, consists of a text on a collage of soft-porn photographs of women lying in seductive poses, the illusory crudeness both mitigated and enhanced by specks of pink, blue, and yellow paint. “The painted, as against the photographic, world of Richard Prince is neither preconceived nor harmonious, linear, stable or continuous. Instead, it is a place of discrepancy and displacement, of contradictions and misunderstandings (much like reality in general). We could even speak of the absurdity of these works, the zone where irreconcilable elements on the pictorial surface initiate the signification. Herein, the spectator is confronted by a confusing and enigmatic frame of reference. Indeed, Prince's figurative paintings are about reconstructing reality, or fabricating parallel realities.” (Introduction to the exhibition Richard Prince: Canaries in the Coal Mine, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 20 January–29 April 2007)

From a distance, viewers are unable to perceive the background's detail, leaving them with the impression that it is nothing more than one colour washing into another. Upon closer inspection, however, the audience is able to make the invited connection between the repeated line of “My wife is turning into a nun. I get none in the morning, none in the afternoon, and none at nite” and the come-hither background. Prince once again turns things on their head, given that the risqué, in advertising and elsewhere, is always in the forefront. With the images decontextualised, isolated and cropped, the artist imbues them with a new significance, their grouping becoming more important than their individual representations.

My Life as a Weapon is an iconic example from the oeuvre of this cutting-edge artist. It particularly represents the artist’s shifted interest from appropriated images to text. This challenging of traditional notions of originality and authorship in relation to works of art, places the artist at the forefront of postmodernist practice. Throughout his creative development, Prince has investigated the oblique position of sexism, racism and psychosis in American subcultures and mass media and their role in the construction of American identity; reflecting upon the mythical status of cowboys, bikers and celebrities; and most recently, the satirical allure of pulp fiction. These works force the viewer to confront the mythology of the American Dream, the commodification of the individual and the stereotypical characterisation of the female subject. His ambiguous engagement with a range of taboo subjects has consistently provoked debate about the degree to which he is criticizing or collaborating with the material to which he refers. The autobiographical tone of this particular lot takes it to another level, revealing attitudes and tensions that are usually kept buried beneath the surface of social interactions.