unofficial advertisement for Chanel Nº5
from Captivating,
Not Captive
portfolio three
ΠΑΡΑΤΥΠΩΣΙΣ
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, violently revealing the παρατυπωσις —
paratuposis, an illusory representation.
Prince is indifferent to the rote muscle memory of
pop culture’s canned aesthetic intuitions. Beauty radiates fully formed from
Prince’s subject’s, 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. Even though
Prince appears to blind us with The Real, she in fact burns away our bias and
banal blindness. 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
This project is supported in part by the Cultural
Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department
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