Debate: Naked Brooke Shields photo is an image for which you must write your own commentary
Richard Prince realised the image, displayed in Tate Modern's Pop Life exhibition, featuring a naked 10-year-old Brooke Shields was uncomfortable in all sorts of ways when he first presented it
The room is dark red and womb like. On one wall hangs a photograph, fairly small, surrounded by a wide, white mount inside a tacky gilt frame. You have to get close to really see the image. This is where the complications begin.
Head to one side, the model stares back at the viewer. It is a knowing, adult look, though the naked body appears much younger, as if it is a montage.
An uncomfortable image in all sorts of ways, as Richard Prince realised when he first presented it in an otherwise empty gallery in New York in 1983. He borrowed the title, Spiritual America, from a 1923 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, depicting the nether regions of a gelded workhorse. The disjunction between the images and the title they share is extremely powerful.
Throughout his career Prince has borrowed images, from Marlboro Man ads to New Yorker cartoons. It would be too simple to say he is commenting on the American psyche; in fact, he leaves much of the commentary to us.
If Spiritual America is a comment on the commodification and premature sexualisation of Brooke Shields, who was complicit in turning her into a 10-year-old sex object? Not Prince. That had happened almost a decade before he re-used the image.
There is something horrible about the photo. I feel uncomfortable.
Prince compounds our unease by not providing a hand-wringing commentary.
If doubt remains about whether this is a comment and corrective, or a symptom of social malaise, it is clear Prince took responsibility when he borrowed Gary Gross's photo, and knew exactly what he was doing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/30/art-tate-modern
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