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Chile IndeedMany science fiction filmakers and authors from the mid-20th century envisioned a future where the body would become secondary to the mind. Big-headed, wide-eyed aliens came to represent this fantasy, their feeble bodies merely a tool to support highly evolved, super-powered brains.
Well, the future is here, and the sci-fi progenitors couldn't have been more wrong. In the 21st century, everything is about the body. Much of what is bought, sold and consumed supports making bodies cleaner, prettier, smoother, smaller and more fragrant.
This cultural obsession with the body is certainly part of the appeal of artist Spencer Tunick's work. Tunick, whose exhibition, Manmade and Natural , is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, creates temporary site-related installations and documents them with photography and video. His medium: hundreds, often thousands, of naked human bodies grouped together in distinctive indoor and outdoor environments.
Nudes are nothing new to the history of art. Artists have long depicted unclothed bodies as figure studies, objects of desire, or to honor or remember a lover. Nudes are shown as individuals, and their bodies are often idealized to conform to the standards of beauty of the moment. Rembrandt's etchings of his beloved, full-figured wife, Saskia, may be repugnant to the 21st-century eye, but the images were no doubt quite erotic to the 17th-century artist and his contemporaries.
There is nothing erotic about the bodies in Tunick's photographs. En masse, the bodies lose their individual characteristics, becoming a sea of flesh on a street corner, a city plaza, or on the floor of an interior space. In Melbourne 2 2001, hundreds of (mostly) white bodies crowd into a park. The subjects are positioned in a way that is reminiscent of the Islamic prayer bow. Formally, the work is beautiful, as the subtly different shades of flesh create a kind of abstract painting. However, the piece is disconcerting: by crowding so many bodies together within a fixed space, individuals become nameless and faceless. Melbourne 2 2001 is reminiscent of the crammed human cargo on 17th-century slave trade ships, or mounds of skeletal, lifeless Holocaust victims of World War II.
But not all of Tunick's images conjure such disturbing thoughts. Some of the most compelling pieces portray varying hues of flesh and hair color, as well as diverse facial expressions. Chile 2 (Museo de Arte Contemporaneo) documents an installation of countless Chilean residents. Here, people face the camera as a mass of individuals. Their (mostly) dark hair and varying skin tones are mesmerizing — you want to look at each person to try to read his or her emotional reaction to the moment. Are they uncomfortable, fatigued, disgusted? Do they seem narcissistic? The less controlled poses of the subjects seem to invite deviance, even defiance. In Chile 2 (Museo de Arte Contemporaneo) , one man holds up a camera, pointing it back at the artist, deflecting, or reflecting, the artist's gaze, turning him into one of his own subjects.
Details like the man with the camera, or the various hand symbols that appear in many of the images, allude to the mind of the individual — that which is beyond the physical body. Tunick's work shows that body as a unifying construct; it is something we all share (despite the variances of color, shape and size). But ultimately, the body is a tool of the mind. The masses of bodies in the artist's installations, and ultimately in his photographs, are not sexualized, nor are they trying selling us anything. No individual body stands out among the others; the physical playing field is leveled.
Tunick's MOCA show received a great deal of media attention prior to the opening because of the artist's plans to create an installation in Cleveland in June. And people will be drawn to the exhibition because of this — the idea of hundreds or thousands of naked bodies outdoors in a conservative city like Cleveland is bound to pique the interest of art aficionados and neophytes.
But neither group will find
the bodies in Tunick's images especially erotic. The beauty and allure
of this work is that it is not about bodies as individually shaped constructions.
The bodies seem very ordinary, and the viewer is drawn to the variations
of individual facial expressions or the small acts of defiance. Ultimately,
what is extraordinary is what we do with our bodies, and how our minds
make use of them.