“…when you’re making a work of art or you’re looking at a work of art, it’s this thing about lives. People’s lives. My life, your life. My friend’s life. The lives of people I don’t know and the lives of dead people. You know you’re looking at something…done with a certain kind of energy that is essentially positive.” - Richard Prince
Combining a sardonic wit with a sharp eye towards both contemporary culture and satire, Richard Prince has established himself as the preeminent pictorial commentator of the 20th and 21st centuries. His appropriation of found imagery, reconstituted and realigned, served to readjust the concept of what could be or was art in the late ʼ70s and ʼ80s. Prince’s oeuvre consistently manifests the artist’s particularly American aesthetic and sense of humor coupled with a keen understanding of the art historical precedent which he sought to upend. His ability to confound the viewer by distorting both the source material and his own artistic position disallows a strictly superficial reading of the work.
Going Going Going is a searching composition in two parts – the bottom canvas, painted a relatively uniform white over which the text of the joke has been painted, anchors the composition which is completed by a canvas on which Prince has depicted a wild sort of parallel universe. Caught somewhere between Bosch-ian perversion and a Paul Klee-like landscape scene, Going Going Going is an exercise in Prince’s specific compositional genius. The joke, which reads “I was going/ I was going going to commit suicide by drowning. But I must not have been serious because I brought a beach towel,” is juxtaposed with a composition in which stick figures exist in a perspective-less realm, rendered in almost abstract expressionistic like frenzy, engaging in all sorts of depravity and inanity.
“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” (Gunnar B. Kvaran, “Richard Prince, Painter of Fiction”, in Richard Prince: Canaries in the Coal Mine, exh. cat., Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2006, p.62).
