| Naked States - not lewd but indeed lurid! | 5 comments |
 2002-12-19 14:26, by Julie Solheim-RoeMing said yesterday "I was watching a documentary on HBO about this artist Spencer Tunick who has been traveling America and the world, photographing nude people in unusual settings and arrangements. Now, what was very refreshing and inspiring about that is that there is nothing lewd or even tintilating about how he does it. It is very normal people, not picked based on any standard of physical beauty, but mainly based on that they're real people that one meets on the street. And there is something very powerful and beautiful that comes from that. Besides being art, and performance art, it is activism. It is activism asking us to look at things a bit differently, and breaking through stupid bourgeois norms for what is proper and expected." I remember watching a documentary about Tunick's work on the ITV last year in the U.K. I would agree that it is very refreshing and radical. That this might indeed be the kind of answer we need to get out and DO: Yes! All size and shapes of nudes for peace, nudes for exposure, nudes for some sort of message and Truth with a capital T. But I wouldn't say this is NOT lewd and tintilating, only in that we denounce being lewd and tintilating for it's own sake. What is lewd? What is tintilating? When it is cut off from the rest of us, then it is crass and lewd. But do you think this art is NOT erotic? I think it includes being erotic by it's Nature. By not seeming to be about the flesh, but by using the flesh, it becomes even MORE about the flesh... about the flesh we hide and deny. But then the perversions is that there is a lewd and lurid obsession with flesh that 'acts out' the parts of us that have been hidden. Tunick is lurid in that he is vivid. He is NOT obscene in that he IS obscene beyond obscenity. To say he is NOT what he IS, is the transcendence of when things are healing on many levels, dealing with where we are split apart whilst we become whole again just to split ourselves up for the sake of it. The settings in which his nudes appear in to me are very exciting and arousing because they embody where we are so split from Nature, and thus, bringing the Nude Nature into the setting, is like some pledge from purgatory that is pleading us back into some purpose and inclusive reality. Therefore it's existential and idealistic at once. I am always for radical expressions that include the beauty and bizarre of our human pain and pleasure. |