Really, how impressed should we be that Spencer Tunick managed to persuade 1,700 people to strip off in Newcastle? This has always been a place gagging to get its kit off. Any visitor to the city’s Bigg Market on a Friday night will be familiar with the sight of women clattering in vertiginous heels from bar to bar wearing barely nothing — even in the depths of winter. The tops get more cropped the colder it gets.
Indeed, when the 39-year-old American photographer and artist was looking for participants for his latest mass nude artwork, he was shocked to find “women in short skirts and tight shirts running down the street like zombies, braving the cold in the quest for a good time. I knew I was in the right place.”
At dawn on July 17 last year Tunick’s volunteers thronged Newcastle’s streets and thoroughfares, including the Newcastle/Gateshead quays area. Under his careful direction and totally in the buff they adopted the poses he required for a series of remarkable photographs. A second series of shots was taken with a smaller group of 250 people later the same day.
To see nudity celebrated — and flesh colonise public spaces — on such a grand scale is astonishing. In the Baltic exhibition showcasing Tunick’s work there are the thousand-plus bodies pressed against the exterior of the Sage centre, ten rows deep. There they are filing silently across the Millennium Bridge. A great mass of torsos and legs march down Dean Street.
In another shot, they’re lying on top of one another in a state of karmic repose. Free love, man. Tunick photographs them from a distance and from above, so they are basically anonymous, yet the impression is startling. Here is one of the all-time worst nightmares — finding yourself naked in public — reclaimed and venerated on a grand scale. As well as the photographs, Tunick filmed a video diary of that strange day, which plays alongside the gigantic pictures.
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“The precedent of public performance in art was set here with Antony Gormley’s Domain, where he cast the bodies of 300 people,” Tunick says. His photographs are “quasi-documentary, quasi-conceptual”. He jokes: “These shoots are definitely not sexual or I’d probably do 20 a year, rather than three.”
He was depressed by the Carry On-ish giggling that the project engendered. “In England there is so much humour in being nude. It’s just not taken seriously. But the city councils were great with me.” His tone darkens. “We should never take the body for granted. I could be arrested in 50 states in the US for doing what I do.”
Tunick is adamant: for his purposes the body is a “medium” like paint or clay. “My intention is to make art, and the process of making it, the live installation, while integral, is not the finished product. The pictures and video are the artwork.” Despite all the predictable titillation the project offered, he is rhapsodic about the sight, en masse, of all those bodies. “To see people rising, falling, taking shape, was amazing. It’s sensual. To have so many bodies in one space produces a tension on that space. It gives us a new understanding of how bodies change our notion of what that public space is. It gives new meanings to the streets.”
Even if that meaning extends to “bloody weird”, there’s no denying the raw power of Tunick’s images. It’s such an alien contradiction — the nude body in public — that the sight of so many (fat through to six-pack) really does feel otherworldly. “There’s an element of science fiction, even fantasy, to the pictures,” says Tunick. His inspirations, he says, were such artists as Diane Arbus and Yves Klein, whose work involved “odd, interesting people and a little bit of performance”.
Tunick started photographing nudes in public in New York in the 1990s. He got arrested for the first time when he tried to pose a naked man on top of an 8ft Christmas bauble outside the Rockefeller Centre. Tunick was charged with lewd behaviour, but his lawyer argued successfully that the law did not state that photographing the body naked was illegal. He kept getting arrested until 1999, when the Supreme Court ruled in his favour.
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Tunick’s very proper now. The police in Newcastle actually cordoned off the city centre to protect the participants’ modesty but wouldn’t let him use a megaphone to tell them what to do as it might wake people up. “Of course, having 1,700 nude people going past your window isn’t going to get you out of bed, right?” Tunick cracks.
His volunteers shed their clothes readily, he claims. “They tell me the experience makes them feel equal to others. We’re all different shapes and sizes. There’s such an obsession with what the right body shape is today. There’s a defiance in doing this.” Next, Tunick is off to Caracas, Venezuela, where he’ll pose people against the lush nature of the city’s parks and natural spaces. He always wants the work to be “new”, to challenge himself and not to rely simply on the shock value of the work to garner headlines; to pose his nudes in innovative and interesting ways. As he prepares to hit 40, he vows: “I’ll calm down in my forties, then go buck wild in my fifties.” So, those censorious US states may yet get to see some of Tunick’s barefaced cheek.
Spencer Tunick is at Baltic, Gateshead (0191-478 1810; www.balticmill.com), until March 26
THE POSER
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Amabel Craig, 27
“I posed with my husband, Jim, a clergyman. I’d recently had a baby, and while I was really proud of my body during pregnancy I didn’t feel quite so attractive afterwards. This was a very affirming experience. I hesitated about taking my clothes off at first but as soon as we had all done it, it didn’t seem weird at all. We were equal. It made me think, ‘Why are so we bothered about it?’ It was a bit chilly though. The dawn light makes it seem even eerier. But they’re beautiful, stunning images. If Spencer wanted to do it again, I’d definitely volunteer.”