In Fashion

On Josephine Pryde

Alex Kitnick

Josephine Pryde, “Therapie Thank You,” Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, April 11– May 16, 2010.

A woman haunted Josephine Pryde’s recent exhibition, “Therapie Thank You.” Three photographs displaying amorphous, undulating fabrics functioned as a kind of veil behind which she seemed to move. Comprised of two oversize prints each, these works were big enough to confront the viewer’s body. In one, a colorful abstract pattern twists and turns while in the other two gold and black swatches of cloth fan in and out like the body of an anemone 1. (One can imagine these photographs in a fashion advertisement about privacy and secrets, the slogan of which might be, “Cover Yourself.”) In addition to these works, a pair of smaller pictures, artier, in thick white matting, depict pink ruffles hovering over something strapped in black 2. Underneath a person is intimated, but it’s difficult to say where. A pregnant belly seems to slouch in one photograph3. Elsewhere, a sloping breast is suggested, though this might just be the material taking on a life of its own. Fashion looked like camouflage here, offering something to hide behind, and yet the opposite is also true: as an index of both the body and the social, it reveals its wearer even as it conceals her. In one photograph, holes punched in black fabric form the numerals “1998.” The skin (?) underneath is framed, marked, and dated, even if the person who it belongs to cannot be called by name.

If a phantom presence animates these works, it might also have stood in front of them, for in making these photographs Pryde attempted to picture a portion of her audience. “For this exhibition,” the press release stated, “Ms. Pryde tried to imagine who might be guardians and who supporters for the ‘tender expressions,’ which are her art. In doing so, “she pictured a creative lady, tough because responsive, who might fit the bill.” In making work that acted simultaneously as a representation of, and an offering to, an ideal, imagined viewer, Pryde created a kind of feedback loop, a form of therapy in which a subject is confronted with an externalized version of herself for internalization. Ideally, in this situation, one has to deal with oneself—stare oneself down in the mirror so to speak—and yet, despite this emphasis on the interchange between surface and depth, therapy by definition does not treat the heart of problems. If it stirs up inner feelings, its ultimate goal is to be palliative and comforting—to create a workable exterior presence. (It tries to still the symptoms of deeper troubles, and make life bearable.) Art, the press release suggests, might be one form of therapy, helping one to circulate in social spheres. Fashion, though, might be another 4. In the distance it creates between wearer and world, however, it functions more often than not as wound and remedy in one.

Recently, Michael Fried has argued that the invention, in the late 1970s, of large-scale, wall-mounted photography changed the medium’s ontological conditions, bringing it into line with the terms of painting and beholding and thus allowing for the possibility of a viewing subject’s absorption within it 5. For Fried, the disembodiment that absorption makes possible is the antidote to the bad dream that is the theatrical impulse of contemporary life and the subject positions that it incessantly demands from us. (For Fried, then, art too might be a kind of therapy—a temporary reprieve.) Though many of Pryde’s prints, like the work of the artists Fried champions (Gursky, Struth, Wall, etc.), similarly make use of photography’s new proportions, something different happens within, and in front of, them. Her photographs possess little depth of surface—indeed, they are shallow—and though they are often enlargements of much smaller things, details are not particularly amplified within them 6. This lack of detail, as well as the absence of a model of spectatorship within these photographs, forms a block to absorption. The works function more as screens and barriers. As a result, one does not lose oneself in looking at these photographs; they do not take one in. Closer to backdrops, they bind together, like Fried’s favored tableaux, forms of viewing with ways of being, albeit in a changed fashion.

People have not always beheld paintings, however, and many of us fail to do so today. Some people pose in front of them. In 1951, Cecil Beaton staged a fashion shoot for Vogue magazine with Jackson Pollock’s paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery, setting models in black and white dresses in front of the artist’s mural-like canvases, full of drips and swirls 7. If Abstract Expressionism was understood as an angst-ridden externalization of an inner self (often imagined itself as a kind of therapy, a wrestling with demons), in Beaton’s photographs it was transformed into a kind of moody decoration and made comfortably a part of the commercial world. Pryde’s oversize prints, relatives of Pollock’s paintings but also cousins of commercial photography, invoke this tradition of a woman set off on a decorative background, but only to go beyond it. Rather than juxtapose the two, Pryde’s photographs have absorbed fashionable figures into themselves, awkwardly suturing body and image together in such a way as to foreclose the possibility of their own viewing. It might not be a stretch, in fact, to say that one cannot stand in front of Pryde’s photographs (even with one’s back to them) precisely because they have already collapsed figure and ground into one. The result of such a binding is the ever-modulating, embodied, surface that constitutes these photographs. Though a subject might live behind them, nothing bleeds through. Psychic wounds have been cauterized. Fashion, and here, art, appear less as camouflage than they do as armor.

Armor, though, can also be dented and banged. Some years ago, in the first issue of the London publication Hard Mag, a certain Jay Pride contributed a series called “Cubicles” in response to a request for work about “frustration, pain, humiliation, difficulty, failure, paranoia, low self-worth, and how the shop/shopping force is felt, refused, surrendered to, oppressing, denied and resolved.” As a reply, the artist smuggled sea creatures into a department store changing room and photographed them amongst a sundry assortment of clothes: a denim crotch shot with mini octopi beneath, a very stupid-looking cuttlefish languid next to an orange blouse. Is everything alright in there? one can almost hear the attendant asking. Snap, snap. Bad jokes come to mind quickly, and in the crudity of these photographs, a host of mixed-up feelings about the body and fashion issue forth. Allure and repulsion mix together. Vulnerability and exposure reign supreme. Significantly, the creatures featured here are all viscous, acephalous polyp. Lacking shell, they are vulnerable from the outside. Out of water, they are dead or about to die. None of these clothes will fit them. The store doesn’t carry their size. These photographs are one part comedy mixed with two parts tragedy. Life is so weird. Really absurd! Totally awkward. In “Therapie”, however, a lot of these feelings seem to have been lost. Outfitted and out of the dressing room, the subject here is ready for the world and knows how to deal with it. She has become elusive enough to manage it.

Setting off the photographs, four hanging and scarcely spinning “sculptures” made of meat hooks and frayed wicker baskets latched onto one another fall from the ceiling like a perverse display at Williams Sonoma, offering some antidote to the protective opacity of the former in their violent and pathetic coming undone 8.

1 These works actually consist of two prints mounted next to one another, creating a disjunctive effect.

2 The photographs clash, do not match, would make a bad outfit.

3 Do You Want Children (2010). Questions of reproduction figure prominently in Pryde’s recent work, as can be seen in the series of Adoption pictures in the artist’s recent show, La Vie d’Artiste, at Richard Telles Fine Art in Los Angeles.

4 Retail therapy is perhaps another, though its emphasis on compulsion and the quick fix make it a degraded form. Talk is the most traditional one.

5 See Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters Today as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

6 We are far here from the dense visual information of Wall’s Destroyed Room or the deep materiality of James Welling’s images of aluminum, wood, velvet, and filo.

7 Just as the scale of photography expanded greatly in the late 1970s, so did that of painting in the late 1940s. One of Abstract Expressionism’s primary advances, in fact, was to have done away with the dimensions of the easel picture. For more on this topic, including the Beaton photographs, posing, and art and fashion in general, see Thomas Crow, “Fashioning the New York School,” Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

8 These works evoke Pryde’s sculpture, Chains (2004), which itself refers to Eva Hesse’s Untitled (Rope Piece) (1970).

Image (left) : The Hour as a Dream, 2010, two c-prints mounted on aluminum, framed, 57 1/2" X 78"

Image (right) :  The Mystery of Artistic Work III, 2010 (detail.) 1998, 2010, c-print 18 1/2" X 14 1/2"

(Installation shots: Farzad Owrang)