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Re-viewing the nude
Art Journal, Spring, 1999 by Leslie Bostrom, Marlene Malik
To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word 'nude,' on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed.
- Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form
A student recently described an experience that illustrates some of the dichotomies in the use of the nude model. In his computer graphics class, the instructor asked the students to use their mouse to draw a naked female model. The model was posed on a platform placed among the terminals. Suddenly she said to the instructor, "People are looking at me." The instructor gave her a puzzled look, because of course people were looking at her. "No," she said. "People are looking at me." Then the instructor turned toward the door and saw what she meant. People on their lunch break from the courthouse across the street had wandered into the building and were peeping through the window in the door to the classroom. When the instructor noticed them, they scattered and left. This story not only illustrates the difference between the peeper and the observer, it also exemplifies how the use of a naked model is so completely routine that even when the technology changes, the subject matter of the traditional drawing exercise does not.
To look at the naked body of a stranger is both privileged and peculiar. The tradition of life drawing features the unclothed figure in a room filled with clothed observers. Most drawing instructors ignore the tangle of political, sensual, erotic, and critical issues created by this scenario. The unspoken expectation is that art students observe the naked body scientifically and objectively, without eroticism or other feelings. Life drawing is one of the few areas of art making left that depends on the myth of observation.
To suppress the erotic and to maintain control and propriety in this unusual situation, the nude and the naked have been separated. In the computer class, the model was nude, because of a complex set of agreements between the model, the classroom, and the society. The people peeping through the door were not party to that agreement and to them she was naked.
Professors using the nude follow a tightly scripted set of rules, because they want to avoid potentially embarrassing situations, but because the forms and philosophy of life drawing have not changed much since the nineteenth century. Everyone is familiar with the "Matisse" set-up, for example. The female model is posed on an ancient over-stuffed chair surrounded by patterned draperies and dressed in a large floppy hat and high-heeled slippers. For the male models there is the action pose, with the model holding a rope or pole or standing on a ladder. As artists and educators, we must reexamine the implications of this phenomenon, and look at how we can strategize and perhaps reconstruct and rerepresent the figure.
We propose to critique the defective vision of aesthetic distance in viewing the nude. Aesthetic distance refers here to the tradition of seeing the nude as unnaked, as an arrangement of formal elements. Aesthetic distance is a device used to convince us that unclothed bodies, used in the classroom, are neither sexual, social, nor political; they are exempt from common human behavior.
Our goal is not to dismiss or eliminate the study of the body. The bareness of the naked body can sum up everything to which we aspire and everything we most fear. The body is the source of our deepest pleasures and traumas; our experience of the world is set by the way we experience our bodies. To be naked can mean humiliation, discomfort, or exposure, but it can also satisfy some of our most profound narcissistic and intimate needs. To see another person naked can reassure or alarm, satisfy curiosity or provoke guilt, arouse desire or disgust or both. The body preserves the memories of lost wholesomeness and carries the seeds of our death. Some of the most affecting works of contemporary art, by artists such as Kiki Smith or Robert Gober [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], for example, focus on the naked body as the site of an expression liberated from the form of the nude. To deobjectify the body in the classroom could allow for the revival of the figure as an abject subject, fully explored and critically examined.
Certain books have influenced thinking about the nude in the twentieth century. These include Kenneth Clark's The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form and drawing books such as Kimon Nicolaides's The Natural Way to Draw. In Clark's book the male body is the representative human animal. He is the original nude, developed according to the rules of mathematics. In his chapter "Apollo," Clark describes in rapt prose the sources of this ideal form: "Greek athletes wore no clothes, although that is of real importance, but because of two emotions that dominated Greek games . . . religious dedication and love. These gave to the cult of physical perfection a solemnity and a rapture that have not been experienced since."(1) After this he describes a fundamental change in the handling of the "hips, abdomen, and thorax" so that "the legs and divisions of the torso flow together with the same full and fruitful rhythm."(2) (Another article could be written on the homo-erotic inferences in Clark's descriptions of the male nude and idealizations of Greek athletes.)
