Before last month, I had never interviewed anyone who had seen me naked.
According to the criteria of
That changed when I went to an art fair that invites with a “Get naked to draw yourself” to New Yorkers. In front of seven artists, I placed my bare thighs on the floor. The next day I interviewed two of them. Nor had I ever interviewed anyone whom I had touched naked. But that same weekend I traced the contours of a stranger’s collarbone with my finger in a gallery and then interviewed her.
At the Other Art Fair Brooklyn, where I posed, and at “Yves Klein and the Tangible World” at the Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery in Manhattan, where a performance artist in a box He invited strangers to touch his naked bodyI set out to experience nudity to see if it had any shock power left in it.
I got my first jolt with “Desnúdate,” now in its tenth edition.
Mike Perry and Josh Cochran started the project to bring more play to the traditionally serious process of figure drawing. They started in 2011. In the first year “we had no idea what we were doing,” Perry said, adding that they were looking for practice hours that could be more experimental with figure studies. “We just wanted an excuse to draw for a weekend.”
The models are 30 minutes long and have three to five poses; in exchange, they can choose their favorite works of art to take home. The rest sell for $150 each. The artists produce around 1,300 nudes over the weekend.
I got naked. Seven artists, including Perry and Cochran, sat across from me. For my first pose, I sat on the floor and curled up in a ball, knees bent, keeping almost everything “private”…private. The timer was set for five minutes. I immediately scolded myself: What kind of naked pose was this? I wasn’t nervous, but my limbs insisted on staying together.
“That’s what we really respond to,” Cochran said. “The discomfort, the different feelings that people bring to the experiment.”
These are artists, I told myself to calm myself. They feel comfortable with bodies.
At the Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery, where “Yves Klein and the Tangible World” was on display, I saw works by the visionary French conceptual artist featuring nude models. But what interested me most was the second part of the installation: “Tactile Sculpture”, a box measuring 1.40 meters by half a meter with a live model inside and a hole through which to reach it.
I reached in, beyond a black curtain. I submerged my arm beyond the elbow until I reached the skin: I felt the edge of a forearm give way to a wrist. How familiar, how sensual, how normal. I stopped trying to guess how she was sitting and gave in to the sensation, feeling this delicate creature.
Klein conceived the idea for “Tactile Sculpture” in 1957. But gallery co-owner Dominique Lévy said Klein feared the world was not ready for this exhibition. He died before his vision came true.
When Lévy Gorvy Dayan remade the box as a complete work of art in 2014, at the Independent Art Fair, “There were all these very intellectual conversations about the role of performance,” Lévy said. “Now the reactions are much more visceral and emotional.”
I heard several participants describe the experience as “unusual,” “invasive,” and “too much.” Most people I observed flinched upon contact with the model, instantly retracting their arms. To my surprise, many were too afraid to enter. But almost everyone who did it came out with a small conspiratorial smile on their faces.
Inside the box was Dominica Greene, 29, a conceptual artist dedicated to exploring the body. “Every time it’s deeply moving for me,” she said.
#hour #naked #model #real #modern #art #scene #York