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This Saturday, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people will meet at the 9th Street Pier and shed their clothes to pose for Spencer Tunick. Tunick, whose photographs were exhibited at MOCA in January, has become internationally known for photographing naked bodies in distinctive outdoor environments. Tunick was initially slated to do the shoot during the run of the exhibition, but MOCA's staff was unable to secure an outdoor site; given the harshness of Cleveland winters, this snafu was ultimately a blessing to participants.
While the late June weather will make baring it all more bearable, one wonders what makes people want to be a part of Tunick's project. Not only are participants asked to disrobe among strangers, or even worse, in front of people they know, they are herded like cattle and given orders (via bullhorn) by Tunick and his assistants. If this doesn't seem like an uncomfortable state of affairs, consider that everyone has to be on site by 4:30 a.m.
Naked World , a documentary by Arlene Donnelly Nelson shown at the 2004 Cleveland International Film Festival, charts the artist's trek across all seven continents with the goal of photographing nudes at each location. Naked World provides some insight into why people are so drawn to the project. The film also offers an uncensored glimpse at Tunick, who often behaves like a spoiled, whiny child who needs constant coddling from his girlfriend and his assistant.
Individual stories about the participants make the film compelling; for many of them, their decision to pose is more about personal liberation than it is about assisting in the artist's creative process. For instance, an HIV-positive woman confronts her fears about immortality and her hang-ups over the shape of her body, which has changed significantly due to the drugs she takes to stave off AIDS. Exposing her body among strangers is a way for her to come to terms with her mortality and her physical limitations.
This theme of liberation is also evident among many of the individuals from Greater Cleveland who are primed to pose this week. Forty-two year old Dennis decided to pose because he wants to experience his emotional reaction to being one among many naked bodies. “I have an appreciation of the human body, not as a sexual exploitative object,” he explains. “As a society, we need to dispel all unhealthy notions about nudity.”
Nathan Schaefer, who is 23 years old, looks forward to feeling a sense of freedom in being naked among a throng of people. His only anxiety about being nude in public is that his mother is also going to participate. But his apprehension was quelled by a pact they made, Schaefer explains, “to stay on opposite ends of the crowd so we're sure not to run into each other.”
When 26-year-old Lisa Ellis called her father to tell him about her decision to be a part of Tunick's piece, she was shocked to learn that he had already signed up himself. Even though Ellis describes her family as a “naked family” — that is, they are comfortable walking around their houses unclothed — she, like Schaefer, plans to stay as far away from her parent as possible during the shoot.
Ellis, who is six months pregnant with her first child, is looking forward to incorporating her changing body into Tunick's work. Her attitude about her growing and morphing shape is exemplary; during pregnancy many women feel so out of sorts with their bodies that they even shun wearing swimsuits in public. “While my body feels alien to me, I'm comfortable with it,” she says. “It's still my body, and I like the way I look.”
Jwahir Masani, a 47-year-old artist, is excited to be involved in the art-making process. As a veteran life-drawing model, Masani is used to being naked in public, though she is usually the only naked person in the room. “When you pose for an artist, you are giving your body as a kind of gift,” she says. “I've come to appreciate the energy of my body, and I've continued to love it throughout all of the stages of my life.” Masani is eager to see the variety of body types and to watch how the artist incorporates this diversity into his work.
As a physician, 31-year-old Noah can relate to Tunick's relationship to the human body. “In a clinical setting, the body is depersonalized,” he explains. Noah participated in the artist's spontaneous nude photo shoots in New York in the 1990s. “Being among so many bodies in a Tunick piece is very similar to what you experience in the medical realm where bodies don't seem to reflect individual personalities.”
The bodies in Tunick's photographs appear to morph together, creating abstract fields of flesh colors; individuals are therefore depersonalized. There is a sense of eeriness about the images, as the crowding of so many bodies together within a fixed space evokes the crammed human cargo on 17th-century slave trade ships, or mounds of skeletal, lifeless Holocaust victims of World War II. Naked World shows Tunick to be somewhat cold to his subjects, and most definitely detached. In Melbourne, Australia, 5,000 people turned out to undress for Tunick on a rainy, miserable morning. The artist, who had gained celebrity status in Melbourne, seemed overwhelmed with emotion and especially grateful as the mass of nude bodies streamed by him prior to the shoot. But following the shoot, as individual participants greeted him, he seemed uncomfortable, inaccessible, and at times, impolite.
It seems that the most vital part of Tunick's work is lost on the artist himself. For despite his use of multitudes of naked humans whose “tonalities…make [his art] beautiful” (as he says in Naked World ), it's what's inside those bodies that counts, and that is most beautiful. Many Clevelanders will be getting up at 4 in the morning and disrobing in front of friends, family and strangers for thoughtful, intelligent reasons that have to do more with liberating their mind than their bodies.