“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,” George Orwell once stated. If we were to transform his words and put them into the context of art, the quote would mean: Censoring consists in hiding what people want to see.
For centuries, conservative societies have tried to censor sex; they occasionally have succeeded, a fact that only reflects people’s obsession with it.
There are two kinds of censorship: The first one comes from an authority, and the second one is built by us around culture. It is almost impossible to pin point the exact moment when society decided sex and naked bodies needed to be hidden away, but the idea has prevailed up to these days. People avoid talking about it in public and come up with euphemisms for body parts to avoid feeling uncomfortable.
Gustave Coubert got tired of avoiding the subject and defied the social customs of his time by painting L’ Origin Du Monde (Origins of the World). His realistic portrait of a vagina in 1886 ruffled the feathers of French society.
Living in this modern era should allow us to be more tolerant and open minded about sexuality; nevertheless, censorship continues to affect us and artistic production. It is in this context of contradiction that the visual artist Richard Prince created a photo series where the women posing for his camera remain cover with a DVD label or a piece of paper.
Richard Prince carefully and sarcastically hides what people most want to see. The provocative posture of the woman is evoking the deepest of passions. Nevertheless, the places where the eyes would immediately be drawn to are interrupted by a label of Sonic Youth.
If the purpose of the image is to take us to a world of lust, we can’t help but question Prince’s reasons to hide her breasts. More than a hundred years have passed since Coubert’s work; then, why would Richard Prince go back in time and cover up his model?
Prince is a photographer-painter whose work has been characterized by its simple technique; however, his success is based on provocation. For example, his piece, Untitled Cowboy was the first picture of an existing picture to be sold for millions of dollars. The execution of the piece was simple: Prince only took the photo of an already existing picture and censored it.
His success at shocking the art world plunged him into controversy. From that moment onwards he has tried to break the rules of the conventional and sell it as art. He is the artist who dared to censor his own work. He is aware of the power of sex, he knows his viewers are expecting to see a naked body to fulfill their desires. In turn he has only chosen to deny them the pleasure.
Richard is aware of the fact that today’s society is more open about nudity, and he knows he’s free to show us the naked bodies of his models. However, he seeks to provoke and upset us. He simply refuses to please us.
By using absurd censorship, Prince sparks natural curiosity in his viewers. As a result, they question their desire. “Why do I feel upset for not being able to watch that pair of breast or that vagina?” is what Richard wants us to question.
This is the way Richard has chosen to break the rules and disrupt society’s order. We get mad, and wish to peal off those labels, in order to see what arouses us, even if we were told to deny lust.
Back in the nineteenth century, Gustave Courbet raised controversy, irritated the purists, and confronted men and women against their own desires. He portrayed what the world wanted to see, but not as an act of fear; he wanted to exposed a raw reality.
In this era, representing a penis or a vagina in a series of photographs or in a painting no longer surprises us. However, the best way to shock an audience consists of doing the opposite of what they expect to see.
Richard’s own censorship puts him in a position where we either hate or love him. Nevertheless, we should ask: “Do we hate him, or do we hate our own unfulfilled desire?” As long as he continues to be in the center of controversy, he will prevail as a world renowned artist.
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All photos are credited to Richard Prince. You can check more about his work here
