Raw and uncensored

Stripping off in the name of art is the ultimate act of consumer rebellion, argues Sarah Kent

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.  

(T.S. Eliot The Waste Land)

 For many years, Spencer Tunick has been photographing groups of naked volunteers in urban and landscape settings. Participants have to arrive in the early hours before anyone else is abroad and are required to remove everything – from clothing, shoes and jewellery to watches and even hair bands – so that, with nothing to indicate differences in wealth, social standing or cultural background, everyone appears to be on an equal footing.

The artist has built up a following of keen supporters willing to travel hundreds of miles to take part in his gatherings despite the fact that, in the early years, they were illegal and participants risked arrest. Now Tunick is sufficiently well established for the authorities to ignore or even condone his exploits and, as a result, his photo-shoots can take place on a much more ambitious scale. In 2007, for instance, he was able to fill with naked people the world’s largest urban square – Zócalo in Mexico City.

Depending on the composition, the mood of the Zócalo photographs varies from the alarming to the celebratory. Standing in regimented rows, participants look like athletes taking part in some grand public ceremony; kneeling with their foreheads to the ground and facing in the same direction, they resemble Muslims deep in prayer. Standing with arms linked or lying in a tight-knit pattern, they look like demonstrators huddled together for strength and solidarity; but seeming to lie where they have fallen, they could be victims of some horrible massacre. The knowledge that the capital of the Aztec kingdom once stood on this spot, and that thousands of captives were regularly sacrificed here to propitiate the gods, possibly colours one’s interpretation of the pictures.

Making people strip brings to mind the degrading tactics used by prison camp guards to humiliate inmates; yet those who take part in Tunick’s projects often describe the experience as a bonding, almost tribal one; divesting themselves of things normally used in our society to demonstrate money, refinement or prestige is experienced not as a loss, but a release.

Overcoming difference and hierarchy for some people seems to satisfy a deep-seated need to blend with the crowd rather than stand out from it, as we are encouraged to do. It is something that interested L.S Lowry, of course; in his paintings he stresses equality and belonging rather than difference. 

Whether going shopping or collecting their kids from school, going to work or attending a football match, the people filling Lowry’s canvases are an integral part of the urban scene. One can tell from the ease with which they inhabit the space that they feel at home among the shops, factories, houses and public buildings that frame their activities; and without them, the streets of his northern towns would seem eerily quiet.

The sense of community celebrated by Lowry may still exist in some small towns but, in most places, it has been eroded by greater mobility and the increased aspirations that have changed the way we live and work. In T.S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, the commuters flooding across London Bridge have come in from the suburbs and will return home at the end of the day, leaving the city empty and lifeless.

His haunting image of a migrant throng sleepwalking their way to work in the early hours is often recapitulated in news bulletins and stories about the city. Typifying the split between work and family life, its a compelling metaphor for the sense of alienation experienced by so many in large cities because of the geographical separation between home and the workplace.

Like Eliot’s office drones, the people in Tunick’s photographs are here on assignment and will leave once the job is done; but they seem even more alien than the hordes of workers who invade the city each day. Clearly, they don’t belong and their naked presence in streets and parks, in buildings and on bridges, is disconcertingly surreal. Who are they and what are they doing?

Far from being wage slaves whose behaviour is predetermined and utterly predictable, they seem to be free spirits; this suspicion adds to the feeling that their presence undermines certain basic assumptions about our relationship to possessions, one another and the environment. By going to extremes, Tunick demonstrates just how inhuman the urban environment can seem. It contains but does not accommodate us.

For the viewer, looking at a sea of naked bodies gives rise to a complex array of thoughts and feelings ­– from surprise and pleasure to dismay and disgust. We may be used to seeing nude and semi-naked people in films and photographs, but they are carefully presented as unique individuals clothed, as it were, in their exemplary beauty and perfection.

The people posing for Tunick are not superhuman specimens, though, but ordinary mortals with imperfect bodies. And nakedness does not conform to aesthetic standards, but comes in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes; whether young or old, male or female, fat or thin, ugly or beautiful, these people have chosen to ignore decorum and to strip off revealing every blemish, bulge and stretch mark.

The sight of all this raw and uncensored flesh is fascinating but also deeply disquieting, perhaps because it arouses subliminal anxieties about our vulnerability and potential anonymity. We are encouraged to believe that our health, beauty, longevity and sexuality are dependent on this or that product and that we need expensive accoutrements to establish ourselves as cultured and discerning individuals. Without these aids, we fear we will become ill, or will be little more than anonymous ciphers in an undifferentiated throng.

After all, in the west we are defined as customers more often than citizens, as though shopping were our primary goal. But Tunick’s people appear to be ignoring this injunction by ridding themselves of all gadgets and props, and to be enjoying the rebellion. Unless, that is, they are outsiders – members of a group that doesn’t even know the rules governing polite society. Worse still, they could be victims of some disaster, such as an earthquake or tsunami, or a genocidal regime bent on their destruction.

Thoughts like these go through one’s mind because, wherever they are, a throng of naked bodies invites explanation and we search our memory banks for possible meanings. Heaped up in the streets of Brugge (2005), their bodies smeared in dark chocolate as though covered in filth, they remind one of the corpses piled up by allied troops in Auschwitz after the camp’s liberation. Standing in the booking hall of Grand Central Station, New York (2003), on the other hand, they could be delegates at a nudist convention. Gazing through the broken windows of a derelict railway terminal in Buffalo, New York (2004), participants seem like prisoners protesting against poor conditions; neatly laid out on a platform beneath a cathedral-like window in the same building, though, they resemble corpses awaiting burial.

Beaches are more neutral environments. A host of naked people standing gazing out to sea on a Spanish beach in San Sebastian (2006) is relatively unremarkable. Plausible explanations spring to mind; for example, they could be nudists or members of a swimming club. But standing with heads bowed against the rain on a beach in Dublin (2008), another group has the defeated air of captives, slaves or migrants awaiting deportation. Sprawled on the sand or lying draped over rocks like flotsam, they look like the drowned victims of a shipwreck or tidal wave. 

There are no answers of course. The power of Tunick’s photographs comes from the fact that they resist interpretation and so remain in one’s mind – encouraging us to question whether being a consumer is the most fulfilling role we can strive for and whether individuality isn’t overrated. Maybe sameness and the sense of belonging have more to offer than we give them credit for.