Sunday, May 13, 2007

All the Nudes, fit to print

Not since William Blake and Kahil Gibran made illustrations of countless naked humans ascending, descending, and swirling, has there been such a grand portrayal of human nudity. Spencer Tunick's (click) latest study of 20,000 bare souls in the heart of Mexico is a dream, a vision of humanity transcending the barriers and the rules that keep us apart and deny our common being. Tunick gives us pure spirit on a canvas of flesh.

Scroll down past the article for a slideshow from Cleveland.


Spencer Tunick Goes to Iceland





Spencer Tunick, NewcastleGateshead 4 (BALTIC Centre of
Contemporary Art) 2005.

REYKJAVIK.- I8 presents Spencer Tunick, on view through
June 23.
Spencer Tunick comes to Iceland straight from Mexico city where
he conducted one of his biggest installations to date. Spencer will be
exhibiting large group photos and also pictures of individuals from
his stay in Iceland last year.

Spencer Tunick was born in 1967 and currently lives in New York.
He has been documenting the live nude figure in public since 1992
and has created installations around the world in spectacular locations
including Belgium, Australia, Canada, USA and Brazil, gathering thousands
of people at one time. His temporary site-specific installations in the past
have been commissioned by the Vienna Kunsthalle (1999), Institut Cultura, Barcelona (2003), XXV Biennial de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2002); The Saatchi
Gallery 2003); MOCA Cleveland (2004) and BALTIC, Newcastle Gateshead,
UK; UNAM Mexico City (2007), among others.

Creating temporary site-specific landscapes involving many nude figures arranged in public places, Tunick’s installations follow on the tradition of
land art. Working directly in the landscape, the artist 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.

Tunick’s work, poetic and challenging, questions the relationship between
art and urban space. To settle the installations, a large number of bodies
are undressed, set all together, until they form a new common shape. They
take place in an environment as a new material, drawing a totally abstract
form, out of all sexual connotation and sometimes nearly close to mineral. Referring to land art, Tunick’s work also underlines the difficulties one can
find to exhibit everlasting or ephemeral art into public space.

The poetic whole resulting from individual bodies arranged in a sculptural
way in an urban setting, challenges traditionally held views on nudity and
privacy as well as social and political issues surrounding art in the public
sphere.

On first sight Tunick’s work generates a strong feeling of abolishment
of any social, cultural, racial, economical and political difference. By
mixing all backgrounds and origins of the bodies Tunick enhances the
moment of the work, making it unique and collective. Showing bodies
that no longer hide their sexuality raise the questions of how our
ontemporary society can question nudity, and how it receives it from
nowadays medias : Tunick’s work isn’t about pornography nor
voyeurism.

It is universal, out of all the contemporary disguises. Close to ecosophy
it makes men closer to the essential in a relative modesty. The
spontaneous way in which the participants take place in this collective
« here and now » event can be seen as a way back to a certain number
of values or questions such as ethic and its place in our postmodern life.

Making the artist work with a given environment, enhancing our vision on
nudity and intimacy, raising a reflexion on the way art can create a link
between things and human being, social or cultural, here are some of the questions that emerge from Spencer Tunick’s work. Out of any aesthetic
and pictorial sensation, or on confrontation of mankind toward Nature
and social points, out of the gesture of creation and the artist’s role
(being out of the group and its representation), Tunick’s work essentially questions our relationship to the world.

And from Mexico City:

Finalmente, Tunick retrató a 20 mil personas desnudas



Spencer Tunick El Zocalo Mexico






Slide show: Naked Cleveland




Take it all off:

JAMESON



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