Christopher Wool Richard Prince Joke Painting

Christopher Wool & Richard Prince, My Act, 1988, 80×60 in., enamel and flashe on aluminum and steel, image: maxhetzler.com

While looking around at early Christopher Wool text paintings, I just saw this. Maybe Wool’s collab with Felix Gonzalez-Torres just looms too large, but I can’t say I’ve ever really thought about his collaboration with Richard Prince.

In a 1997 interview quoted on Max Hetzler Gallery’s site, Wool makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world:

That was actually before he’d even made the jokes into paintings. He had just done the written, he would write me on paper. And, he proposed this collaboration. I know I’m really impressed with someone’s work, when I have that feeling, “Oh I wish I had done that.” And with the jokes that was really the case, I thought that was quite an exciting thing to be working on. So he gave me his repertoire and I made a couple of paintings, and that was our collaboration. I ended up doing “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name,” actually I chose the ones that fit into a painting the easiest, because it was really hard for me at the time to figure out how to make them. But they were all about change of identity, so it was kind of great. I titled it “My Name” and I felt like I was Richard Prince for a day. The other one was the psychiatrist one: “I went to see a psychiatrist. He said ‘Tell me everything.’ Now he’s doing my act.” I titled that one “My Act”. So it was like I was doing Richard’s act. 

I know the feeling.