Freeze Your Butt Off for an Installation Artist
Monday May 23, 2005
On 17 July 2005 the artist Spencer Tunick will once again persuade oodles of volunteers to shed their clothes and pose while his piece of "site-specific landscape art" is being photographed. Join in and you too could find yourself hunting your butt in the photos of a live "Where's Wally" art installation.
Okay, so you probably won't really freeze your butt off, but this is NewcastleGateshead in the UK in July we're talking about. A country that some years just doesn't have a summer. And what better event to make the weather turn cool than a collective undressing for an artist who "uses the nude body as raw material to intervene and transform a chosen site, documenting the installations with photography and video which he then exhibits in a gallery context."
You need to be 18 or older to participate (and produce a copy of some form of photo id to prove this). You get a limited edition print for participating; quite what the total limit is doesn't seem to have been specified, but previous events have involved "several thousand nude figures".
You can increase your seconds of fame by volunteering to participate in the BBC program being made about the event. Even if you don't, you have to agree that it's okay that "The BBC footage will show images of the groups as a whole and may also include close ups that could identify the participants." So if your Mum's easily shocked, you'd best warn her before she sits down to the evening news.
Of course there's some high 'art-speak' involved in all this too. Spend a few moments unpacking this from the Baltic art centre's website: "The poetic whole resulting from individual bodies arranged in a sculptural way in an urban setting, challenge traditionally held views on nudity and privacy as well as social and political issues surrounding art in the public sphere."
The art critic David Cohen has described Tunick as "an action painter in the tradition of Jackson Pollock" who "uses naked people as his medium and city streets as his support." More fun to read is an account of what it's like to participate in a Tunick nude event by Simon Wilson in the Royal Academy of Arts Magazine (especially the paragraph about where his head was resting...). Overall he describes the state the participants were in as "a kind of mental eroticism, an erethism of the mind, akin to that inwardly directed state of arousal achieved by adepts of Tantric yoga." Mmmm, really?!!
• Introduction to the Tunick Project at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
• FAQ on Participating (The question of privacy seems a bit redundant; would you participate if this was a concern?)
• Registration form to participate
• Spencer Tunick's website
Okay, so you probably won't really freeze your butt off, but this is NewcastleGateshead in the UK in July we're talking about. A country that some years just doesn't have a summer. And what better event to make the weather turn cool than a collective undressing for an artist who "uses the nude body as raw material to intervene and transform a chosen site, documenting the installations with photography and video which he then exhibits in a gallery context."
You need to be 18 or older to participate (and produce a copy of some form of photo id to prove this). You get a limited edition print for participating; quite what the total limit is doesn't seem to have been specified, but previous events have involved "several thousand nude figures".
You can increase your seconds of fame by volunteering to participate in the BBC program being made about the event. Even if you don't, you have to agree that it's okay that "The BBC footage will show images of the groups as a whole and may also include close ups that could identify the participants." So if your Mum's easily shocked, you'd best warn her before she sits down to the evening news.
Of course there's some high 'art-speak' involved in all this too. Spend a few moments unpacking this from the Baltic art centre's website: "The poetic whole resulting from individual bodies arranged in a sculptural way in an urban setting, challenge traditionally held views on nudity and privacy as well as social and political issues surrounding art in the public sphere."
The art critic David Cohen has described Tunick as "an action painter in the tradition of Jackson Pollock" who "uses naked people as his medium and city streets as his support." More fun to read is an account of what it's like to participate in a Tunick nude event by Simon Wilson in the Royal Academy of Arts Magazine (especially the paragraph about where his head was resting...). Overall he describes the state the participants were in as "a kind of mental eroticism, an erethism of the mind, akin to that inwardly directed state of arousal achieved by adepts of Tantric yoga." Mmmm, really?!!
• Introduction to the Tunick Project at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
• FAQ on Participating (The question of privacy seems a bit redundant; would you participate if this was a concern?)
• Registration form to participate
• Spencer Tunick's website
Comments
No comments yet. Leave a Comment