Richard Prince

When Richard Prince exhibited a series of captioned cartoons from The New Yorker magazine several seasons ago, the gallery context rendered the class-bound codes on which they were predicated distracting enough to disarm them as jokes. We laughed not at the jokes themselves, but at the patrician mores that motivate and delimit them. Recently, Prince has turned to bawdier material: here he exhibited a series of common jokes silk-screened onto monochromatic canvases, along with several “gangs”—his own term for the photographic grouping he has favored for the past several seasons. Perhaps because

print October 1988

Michael Corris

Michael Corris’ typographic compositions have shown up regularly in group shows over the past several seasons. Operating as witty mnemonics, his arrangements often took on polemical resonance in relation to the seamless field of new objects against which they were presented. Like the acerbic friend you can’t take anywhere but do, despite your better judgment, these works couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Corris’ graphically elegant manipulations of appropriated and original texts persistently veered in the direction of complexity, tactlessly drawing attention to the historical evasions that