FEATURE / REVIEW: Spencer Tunik's Naked Pictures of Me

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 19th July 2010

"Tunick’s naked pictures of me: Thalia Allington-Wood goes to the Lowry to look at herself naked in the Spencer Tunick exhibition"

About two and a half months ago I volunteered for Spencer Tunick’s ‘Everyday People’ at the Lowry.

I queued, I shivered, and I bared all for the camera. It was a great experience. However, when I went to see the exhibition last weekend I came away feeling disappointed.

When Tunick began photographing nudes in public places, he and his models worked against authority; the volunteers risking arrest for their nakedness. These pictures in their very nature were audacious and opinionated. This is inevitably sterilised in his recent work, which is organised, authorised and heavily staged by a troupe of extra hands.

So if no longer making a statement of rebellion, Tunick's work needs to be visually arresting. Yet prints that are two small to create any impact and with dull colours line the Lowry’s walls. The underwhelming delivery seems at odds with the vast amounts of money spent on such a commission.

Though never a massive fan on Tunick’s work, (I took part out of curiosity rather than admiration), I do find some of his work striking, even moving.

His early photographs in Montreal 2001, for example, have a sense of immediacy. Bodies pile up along a street into the distance, the image is grainy; it feels as though the artist has stumbled across the bodies he photographs rather than orchestrating them.

Similarly, I like the images from his series in Dusseldorf 2006, where people pile beneath large oil paintings, their poses responding to the painted figures. They remind one of the background story of a painting, the life models, the studio of the artist.

However, the impact of these works, and others, can be easily lost in the vast sea of his back catalogue. Tunick’s work now has almost a commercial quality to it. Though I’m sure not intentional, their sensationalism, the type of coverage received by the press, means his work can feel like advertising for a location be it Sydney, Mexico or Manchester.

I was aware of this machine-like quality to his work when I signed up, but hoped for an image that made one stop and look at the body in a different manner. I wanted to watch skin stop being skin, in a shape not normally seen, in a setting and composition that was beautiful.

Sadly I did not find this at the Lowry.

I do not regret the nine hours I spent in the freezing cold, absolutely starkers. It was a lot of fun and I’m not a fan of our bodies being pent up, tantalised, and idolised. It was nice for flesh to be flesh and nothing else for a while. I really felt the ‘liberation’ so often voiced by participants.

Tunick does not convey this experience in his photos. Nor necessarily should he. Hunched, wind pinched naked bodies are unlikely to convey jubilance. However art should always say something. It need not be loud. It need not even be clever. But it need be something and something interesting. Looking at these images, even with the bias of seeing myself within them, ultimately I don’t think they have much to say at all.

Everyday People by Spencer Tunick is at The Lowry until the 26th September.

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Arts/Tunicks-naked-pictures-of-me

FEATURE: The Experience of a Spencer Tunik

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 3rd May 2010

"Nude for art, the naked truth: the experience of being naked during Spencer Tunick’s art gatherings in city locations"

In the darkness of Sunday 2 May at 2.30 am, I find myself standing in a long line of strangers waiting to participate in Spencer Tunick’s ‘Everyday People’. Come 11.30 in the morning, nine hours of intermittent nakedness later, I walk home from Piccadilly feeling exhausted but elated.

Becoming naked in front of hundreds is not initially, to most, a desirable thing to do. Yet, and I’m reiterating many previous and fellow participants in Tunick’s installations here, it feels great.

Nakedness and bodies within our society are judged daily. Take everyone’s clothes away and it is remarkable how instantly the memory of social ideals and inhibitions disappear. Rather than make one feel more insecure of personally disliked body parts, seeing the difference in everyone’s bodies and realising that even though you are naked, no one is really looking or caring about your body’s appearance, results in indifference, confidence, even pride in oneself. Being naked in front of other people and other people’s nakedness very quickly becomes mundane, natural, and enjoyable.

So all the clichés of this experience are true (sorry Jonathan Schofield no holocaust references here I’m afraid - see the other Tunick article on the homepage for the reasons behind this comment). Our ice cold, goose pimpled, wind bitten buttocks were indeed ‘liberated’, so to speak, from the confinement of social decorum.

In a society obsessed with the projection and construction of identity, through clothing, jewellery, hairstyles or face book, influenced by the presentation of aesthetic ideals in the media, Tunick’s installations provide rejection of this. Being naked became an experience of anonymity and equality.

Jonathan is right in the comment after his article about viewing as an outsider the Tunick event. There he describes the experience as un-erotic. In society the body is rarely conceived separate to sex. Our bodies are inherently fetishised by their concealment and the titillation revealing clothes embody; nakedness is consigned to the bedroom. However, remove this and place bodies in a sterile, surreal situation and what you are left with is flesh that is utilitarian and banal through normalisation.

Tunick's work is subversive: these bodies are naked in urban environments where nudity is prohibited. This is where any feeling of liberation comes from as a participant.

But Tunick’s work is not about the experiences of his volunteers. Our emotions of freedom, or what have you, are merely a positive bi-product of the situation created in the making of his art. They should not define how his images are viewed.

Beauty, softness, or for that matter, loneliness and fragility is not to my mind the focus of these images. To understand these images in such a manner buys into our social obsession with the individual, the self and the body.

Tunick’s images are not about the individual or identity. Look at the images and you see a sea of nakedness in which each volunteer serves as a shape, creating patterns and formations in the space. In Tunick’s instillations, the human body is a texture, comparative to the concrete and brick of the surroundings.

Despite being whipped by freezing winds at 6am and suffering excessive sleep deprivation; all the participants I spoke too would once again wobble their flesh in fun defiance of social convention. I can't wait to see how the artworks turn out.

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Arts/Nude-for-art-the-naked-truth

NB: Clio Euterpe is a pseudonyme used for this one article.

REVIEW: 'The Walls are Talking' at The Whitworth Art Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 8th February 2010

"The Walls Are Talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture, Thalia Allington-Wood on the Whitworth Art Gallery going to the wall"

Wallpaper is decorative and domestic; it is chosen by a homeowner to alter their private space, to create a specifically desired atmosphere and display their character.

Wallpaper is by no means a neutral medium, and it is its power and poignancy that the artists of the Whitworth’s new exhibition draw upon, manipulating and subverting its connotations of home, comfort and identity.

The show begins in the Whitworth’s South Gallery, which has been plastered with conceptual artist Thomas Demand’s ‘Ivy’ wallpaper. Demand has turned the room into a leafy enclosure; the walls merge into the park that extends outside the large windows flooding the space with winter sun. It feels like entering a secret garden: mischievous, innocent, and playful. Sensations that prove uncomfortable and disturbing when considering the piece is inspired by a child murderer’s lair.

Artist Lisa Hecht uses wallpaper to present the home as a place of imprisonment, with the pattern of an unforgiving metal fence. The viewer would become enclosed within Hecht’s papered space, the sky blue background connoting a freedom beyond the walls denied to those inside.

As well as a possible prison, the home is often depicted through these wallpapers as a place where appearance is a mask covering a darker, more vulnerable reality. Rosemarie Trockel’s wallpaper depicts a photograph of Trockel’s sculptural piece ‘Egg Curtain’, the hanging hollow eggs symbolising the female fertility and birth of children expected within the home, but also the fragility of this celebrated norm, so easily smashed, so often unobtainable.

Catherine Bertola’s subtle and tactile piece ‘Beyond the Looking Glass’ highlights the pretence of ideal domestic life, and the deception that lies behind many a perfect family. Bertola, using ash collected from her own hearth, creates a 19th century floral pattern, in which the flowers peel off the four walls, some scattered on the floor. The title, recalling the sequel book to Alice in Wonderland, suggests functionality. This is a domestic space beginning to fall apart before our very eyes. Similarly, in Erwan Venn’s visual installation, flower patterns fall from the wall to the sound of smashing cutlery.
Virgil Marti, Bullies, 1992-2001Francesco Simeti, Arabian Nights wallpaper, 2003

Other artists, such as Francesco Simeti adopt traditional 18th century designs to highlight modern political issues. ‘Arabian Nights’ inserts photographs of Afghan refugees into romantic painted landscapes, commenting on the many disrupted homes caused by war. In another, a pattern of acorns suggesting birth and growth are contrasted to photographic images of men removing toxic matter in white protective clothing. These images of death, contamination and poison framed by elaborate borders, suggest the pain and disruption that is found behind the façade of many a seemingly perfect domestic situation.

Though this all sounds heavy going, and pain and trauma certainly reside behind the decorative appearance of much of this wallpaper, comedy is also to be found. David Shrigley is a sharply funny as ever, while Sarah Lucas’ ‘Tits in Space’, in which cigarettes are repeatedly coiled into two pert cones, might be a comment on the sexualisation of everyday objects but comes with a healthy pinch of salt.

Many of the pieces would have benefited hugely from covering a larger space; much of the wallpaper is displayed on canvas frames. The truly garish and hallucinogenic effect of Vergil Marti’s luminous flowers and high school bullies would be truly overpowering and oppressive if slathered over an entire enclave; the disorientating nature of Damien Hirst’s kaleidoscopic butterflies impressive rather than just pretty. This highlights the technical problem of wallpaper as art: once plastered onto a wall, the only way to remove wallpaper is to destroy it, and one does not destroy a Warhol lightly.

The range and versatility of the display is impressive. The artists use wallpaper to manipulate domestic spaces of comfort into places of fear and anxiety. Wallpaper becomes a medium for social critique and current motifs of modern thought. Though not many would suit a comfortable living room, the wallpaper to be found at The Whitworth is certainly wallpaper to make you think.

6th Feb-3rd May 2010, Whitworth Art Gallery


LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Arts/The-Walls-Are-Talking-Wallpaper-Art-and-Culture

REVIEW: Facing East and Artist Rooms at Manchester Art Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 4th February 2010

"Facing East and ARTIST ROOMS review: Thalia Allington-Wood recommends the latest Manchester Art Gallery exhibitions but she doesn't love them"

‘Facing East’ is an explosion of vibrant colour and bold artworks that you could dismiss as merely playful. You get pieces such as Takashi Murakami’s manga style mushrooms with wide circular eyes and Chen Lei’s ‘Big Kiss’, a sculpture of a small child, kissing a polar bear that balances from his lips.

Yet under their bright extravagance lies unexpected sincerity and meaning. Yue Minjun’s garish painting which features a group of identical men, skin a luminous pink, laughing uncontrollably. Rather than humorous, this piece is disconcerting. The wide grinning mouths, with rows of identical white teeth and fathomless black interiors, are intimidating. This becomes significant in light of Minjun’s use of Christian Renaissance iconography.

Laughter in the Renaissance was considered a dangerous activity, signaling potential influence from the devil; open body orifices were how the Devil accessed the soul. These men are symbolic of everyman but also demonic, they sport small horns upon their heads, bringing the moral identity of the viewer into question.

Sprawled across the gallery floor lies Bharti Kher’s life-size elephant, whose body is covered with sperm like bindis. Bindis are traditionally worn by Indian women to signal their married status and thus, indirectly, their ability to respectably bear children. The sculpture is thus paradoxical; the elephant’s position suggests it is dead, though the pattern that adorns it signals life and birth. What is first an artwork of death becomes one of hope.

This exhibition does however pose a problem; there is a lack of connection between the artworks. The exhibition’s name places emphasis on location. Yet loose geographical proximity could produce a dangerously colonial generalization or ‘othering’ of these artworks.

To group three countries with such different cultures together in one room under the heading ‘East’, is to fail to provide the viewer with a clear understanding of the cultural background or significance of each. ‘Facing East’ is the exhibition equivalent of a pick ‘n’ mix bag: somewhat random and lacking coherence, but also highly enjoyable.

Walk into the adjoining room and you will find the work of Ron Mueck. Mueck, originally a model maker and puppeteer, produces hyperrealist sculptures of human figures that are technically incredible. Standing above the miniature ‘Spooning Couple’, it is amazing to view the tiny, slightly overgrown, toenails of the woman’s feet, the individual hairs that protrude down the man’s legs, the wrinkles that adorn their eyes.

Mueck’s work, like that of ‘Facing East’, also contains an element of play. Entering the room you are confronted with a giant naked man, sitting in a position that suggests both surprise and fear at your presence; his knuckles white from gripping the edge of his stool, his lips pursed, his body leaning backwards. Mueck’s sculptures create a believable presence, while simultaneously being utterly fantastical. It feels like being surrounded by fairytale characters.

They are also highly emotive on a very guttural and sensual level. The subtle body language of the spooning couple suggests discontent and distance despite their close proximity to one another; the giant man, despite his size, evokes human weakness and vulnerability.

I left, though, uncomfortable, feeling that not much else lay behind these impressively executed sculptures. Mueck’s use of scale manipulates the viewers’ emotional response very specifically, yet there is no apparent imaginative or intellectual meaning, no subversion or argument behind these feelings, other than that these models look remarkably, eerily real. Does this matter? Maybe not.

After all, I liked these sculptures and enjoyed viewing them, and that could be all that really matters.

Facing East: Recent works from China, India and Japan from the Frank Cohen Collection and ARTIST ROOMS Ron Mueck. 4 Feb – 11 April 2010.

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Arts/Facing-East-and-ARTIST-ROOMS-review