Spencer Tunick is an American photographer who makes a livelihood heaping naked people in piles or artful arrangements in public settings.
Recently he visited the city of Lyon, where the good citizens were invited to strip off and reveal the treasures of France as part of the Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon 2005. Public nudity is no big thing in a nation where national leaders have also appeared as au naturel leaders.
LYON, France, September 11, 2005 (AFP) - Men and women of all ages turned up in the early hours to obey Tunick's orders as he snapped them in various positions in this eastern French city's river port."I really wanted to do this, just for the pleasure of running naked on the grass in the middle of Lyon, this city that is supposed to be so bourgeois and so uptight," said one young man.
Mr. Tunick rechristens his public exhibitionists an installation, notching everything up to the airy precincts of art.
C’est la beauté inhérente à tous les êtres humains qui prévaut.
Yes. Well, no need to avert the eyes. Unless your idea of beauty has no room for common lipodystrophy: the pillowy midriff, the meatless fanny, the colloped thigh, the wasted bosom. Or if your aesthetic cannot embrace great expanses of eczema, body dandruff, the pimpled bum, the hairy backside, the ungroomed fork. Or if you are averse to the manifest workings of gravity: sags, wrinkles, uneven breasts, the droopy paunch. Now any one or more of these you may accept in yourself or find endearing in an intimate, but Mr. Tunick asks that you spend your small store of private affections for something grander. For the pleasure of art. In this case, an art that turns the intimate into the common, and the common into the bizarre.
(If you are starkers because you are taking it to the man, then things notch up to the yet airier heights, the airest, of recreational righteousness.)
PFFT (What is this?): Credentialed municipal exhibitionism 4 | Rayonnement français 0
