"No one is making work like this." Anne Wilkes Tucker curator of photography, Museum of Fine Arts Houston

 

I am crying.
 I do not know what this is.
 That is good.
 That’s all.
 Thank you,
 Jerry Saltz Senior art critic New York Magazine

 

"I think Denise's work is exciting and courageous. I have great respect for her work." master photographer Joel-Peter Witkin  

 

“Just a note to let you know that I've been greatly impressed with your recent work. The ‘fashion spreads’ are challenging and insightful, provocative in the best way (which is to say they're meaningful and honest, never cheap or showy). You're so talented, and your empathy elevates you beyond artists who might have comparable technical chops. Everything you do has such singular spirit.” Matt Zoller Seitz, editor in chief of Roger Ebert.com

 

"..That which we commit to memory in the form of statues and community identities ought not be and cannot be subject to rules, as if beauty and freedom are a game. If beauty is exclusive then freedom is occulted by limits and obstacles to the spontaneity essential to beauty and play. Prince’s models hold us captive in the absence of the previous limits and captivated with what was before outside those bounds of beauty. " Charles Merward

 

"Thank you for this.  Provocative, unsettling, and perhaps not in the ways you, the artist, intends, which is the case always as Duchamp taught, the "art coefficient", the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed. I too think art should step further than any knowledge we have about it, to even create anxiety." artist Robert Buck,

 


"THIS IS POWERFUL! I think you managed reflecting the human beauty and grace by dissolving the uneasy layers of perception and comforting biased interpretation.  Most importantly, your approach in this work demonstrates that "emphasis" on portraying of human subject can be diminished, or perhaps even erased, making the perceptual experience free from constraints. REALLY NICE WORK, CONGRATULATIONS!"  Dr Mehmet Candas, The University of Texas at Dallas, Molecular and Cell Biology

 

“You have captured something here of a notion I have been playing with over the last few months: the skin as ever-renewing psychic and physical container; the ego as a constantly evolving narrative, renewing past and future contexts; the resilience of the human subject in times of trauma.

I have been considering the necessity for the human subject OF trauma, as a constitutive psychological element, building resilience, developing self-awareness, challenging imaginary dependencies and fantastical deceptions.” Marie Walshe Appi, psychoanalyst

 

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ANAMNESIA: Captivating, Not Captive

 

To see beauty is to know love but, while the apprehension of beauty is through the eye, it is through the lens’ marriage of light and beauty that the psyche is truly captivated. Light mediates the relationship between physical and intellectual reason, an elegant analogy between enlightenment and illumination, between physical and intellectual vision.

 

We’ve always delivered fire. We’ve always deified light. Plotinus saw a world awash in divine light, infusing matter with spiritual forms. Heraclitus exalted fire as the first principle. Denise Prince sees beauty beyond the veil of ego.

 

Beauty radiates fully formed from Prince’s subjects, infused with divine light as aesthetic objects. It is eyesight on fire, threatening to seer [sic] into one’s soul if one looks directly, scarred by the light of reason and the light of the sun. The dilemma, ought we see, is anamnesis or amnesia.

 

If we perceive beauty it induces anamnesis, a memory of a terrific encounter with the Real, a meaningless traumatic hole. Then one must choose: either captive to trauma or captivated by beauty. If one is captive then one remembers only the anxiety of that esoteric encounter with the Real; but, if one is captivated then one is driven by the desire to know and love, to recollect, to recover Prince’s revelation.

Charles Merward, ψa      clinical philosopher and psychoanalyst

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Denise Prince and Charles Merward fill the space between psycho-analysis’ disclosures and enactments with art, neither illustrative nor semantic but an exemplary meditation on the role of  the body image in the defense against fundamental anxiety. Prince’s images create a conceptual mirrorless camera through which the viewers sees a direct, live view of the specular double before its capture. Unlike the fashion photography with which she began, however, the uncanny doppelgänger forecloses any romantic fantasy and instead retains its traumatic core as raw identification with the other, without any symbolic mediation. Prince’s images demonstrate the enigmatic experience in which one doesn’t know who one is anymore, in which she doubts her own ego and substitutes her reflection with a stranger. Prince’s secret is revealed as her models reflect the viewer’s gaze: I am No One anymore. This artist’s purpose is to unveil the body as a hole, a dismembered space that emancipates the viewer from her image so she is not captive to its auto-eroticism. Ultimately, Prince and Merward offer an exemplary, elegant and brutal experience, Modeling Magritte and Kosuth every bit as much as Missoni.

 

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Screen Test:  The Photographs of Denise Prince
"Whether he poses or is real, no cat/Bothers to say"  Thom Gunn

Much has been concerned, in communities that concern themselves with such things, with 'the gaze': the presumed patriarchal, gendered authority of the viewer of film and photo, and the pose as its symbiotic response; the pose mirroring the desire of the spectator, passive by necessity. Since, the pose has become ubiquitous, influenced by the dominance of celebrity culture (insert Warhol quote) and the maw of social media, the selfie and social narcissism. In photographic portraiture, the pose has evolved from, historically, a sober assertion of social respectability to an understanding of the portrait as performance and theater and---by the inherent presence of an audience, as artifice.  If, indeed, identity is now considered as construct, then the pose is a handy component of its architecture.

The ideology of identity has been of fundamental prominence ---and contention--- in political discourse in the past thirty years, and it may be argued that photography, as the lingua franca of representation, is the most expedient tool of visibility, both individual and community. An endorsement by photography  is an acknowledgment of worth of those that have been marginalized. Throughout photography's history, much of the work that has been most influential has disclosed individuals and identities heretofore unknown to mainstream hetronormative culture, and social media has profoundly accelerated this.

The writer Lynne Tillman has said: "Risking ambiguities, (Diane) Arbus vigorously subverted the subject/object position, shoving the viewer into her soft ground. She interrogated looking, aggressively, and made looking itself controversial." 

A shrewd and gratifying summation of Arbus's legacy; succinct in its understanding of her singular contribution as not just the pathologies of subject (or 'victim' re: Sontag)  but upending the comfort of passivity for culpability, a profound rupture in the history of looking. Arbus, says Tillman, removed the guardrails, undermining our smug alibis and immunities.

This 'soft ground': pliant, uncertain, yielding, bruised; without sensible footwear, vulnerable.

The female figures here, recumbent and supine admist draping swirls of fabric, haloed in turbaned headdress are, of course, a modern odalisque; the familiar clutter of cramped domestic life a substitute for orientalist bric-a-brac; a baroque of busted housewares. Here, a seemingly distant signifier of servitude and colonialism is redeemed and recuperated, an anachronism converting to an agent of empowerment and identity and agency.  Those historically excluded arrive at the portal of beauty and desire; that recently denounced as objectifying becomes privilege, again.

Fashion photography reliably traffics in aspiration and desire, and identity as formed by style, fluid and mercurial,  thus a cunning influencer of cultural taste. Regardless of recent attempts at inclusivity, however, fashion maintains strict taxonomies of beauty and class, renewing a narrow margin of what is considered attractive.

In Denise Prince's photographs, their resemblance to recognizable vocabularies of fashion photography propose the possibility of sharing the tropes of fashion and style to now include those who have been excluded from its privilege, to say nothing of public life itself.  The transaction, this screen test, is rather more complicated, as the meticulous illusion of a fashion spectacle fails deliberately. Along the margins, the unruly debris of place, hard and unforgiving, encrusts the frame; later, the clumsy collaging into the lavish interiors of the ruling class remain on the image surface like a decal, upholding their separation, their otherness. The apparatus of the shoot-the chords, lighting stands, and clamps are revealed, left strewn about, and we see the staging and the back-stage, the makeshift. Sand (and the always handy sand-dune-fence prop) with its reference to holiday, travel, frolic, privilege, is here as sandbox-- indifferent to the demands of visual illusion. The gestures of fiction are undermined by the brutality of fact.

Prince does not comfort, rejecting pictorial devices of romanticism and leitmotifs of fashion imagery; no warm caressing light nor soothing soft focus, and the veneers that surround the figures are without mercy. We are stranded without the reassurance of fashion's stagecraft of  transcendence and youth, the luminous body.

Like much relevant work of our time, the work deeply challenges conventions of beauty, and pointedly, our anxieties that chaperone beauty as a human characteristic. Here beauty is a triumph of ecstatic revelation, clenching and contracting: "Beauty must be convulsive or not at all". It is post-Edenic, in which the expulsion from the Garden does not elicit shame and awkward self-consciousness, but pleasure and play; acceptance.

The emotional tripwire of the work is availability and this moment of flirtation, and discomfort is ours, not theirs.  Not Reggie,  Saidi,  Gail, nor Susie.  Not Zelda nor Jacki. Our gaze is not avoided, and we witness an assertion of themselves as image, vital in their swagger, mirth, glamour or grace, and this gaze, not as violation, judgment and superiority but of ardor.

Stephen Frailey

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Denise Prince is an American artist concentrating in photography and film. Influenced by critical theory at CalArts in Los Angeles, she has worked closely with clinical philosopher and psychoanalyst Charles Merward since 2007. She photographs for publications and exhibits internationally.

 

Prince is known for using the visual syntax of fashion and style photography to explore our relationship to Desire (the memory of the missing thing). Her work redefining beauty predates the current fashion for hypermodern subjects by over a decade.

 

Prince's work has been clarified, confronted, and interpreted by psychoanalyst members of the World Association of Psychoanalysis.