Thousands of people will pose naked in Mexico City.
It won’t be about wronged teachers or demonstrating farmers, the event will not have the usual political tinge. The characters in this massive nude on Sunday, May 6, will be volunteers from all different races, ideologies, and sexual preferences that will join, solely, to be immortalized by the eye of artist Spencer Tunick.
Born in New York in 1967, Tunick began his career photographing individual nudes in the city streets. His idea was about using the figure to juxtapose the anonymity of public space and the vulnerability of the human form. In 1994, he does his first group nude or “installation”; 28 people posed for him in front of the “United Nations” building in Manhattan, (See interview) beginning a project which he still works on, up to date. One that has granted him -as well as several arrests in his native country- the chance to use the world as his workspace.
Tunick’s images can be disturbing. At first glance, they evoke inevitable reminders of the Holocaust and huge mass murdering, reminders of History. To then, propose us with the complete opposite: a world without taboos or prejudice, war or dead, living in total freedom of expression.
In his photography, bodies seem a great human herd without racial or social differences. The collective nude makes the individual lose its “clothes-less person” quality, turning all into a long and beautiful organic sequence. Tunick liberates us from that excess baggage we carry when we’re dressed, the one used to define who we are, how we want to be and be seen.
“I am forming organic extensions of the landscape with people,” says the artist about his work.
The opportunity of being in a large group of naked people –for an artistic purpose and without being life threatening- is so exceptional, that sensations can be unpredictable. Maybe feeling like Adam and Eve at the height of banishment from paradise can be transcended by a feeling of simple humanity.
The exact locations of his installations are a secret the artist prefers to keep. Notifying his previously registered volunteers via e-mail a few days prior to them. He often uses big urban spaces as scenery. Like “Grand Central Station” in New York, where movement, action and haste are its primal adjectives. Everybody running anonymously -barely looking at each other- a normal image in our every day life. Whereas in Tunick’s work, seeing the same spaces with thousands of people naked and still, an ancestral chord is inevitably touched, raising the unsettling questions: Why so fast? Where are we going?
Spencer Tunick has followed his project “Naked World” traveling around many cities, gathering volunteers wanting to plunge into this, for many others, bizarre experience.
Different from countries like Holland and France, with an vast nudist tradition, or from avant-garde Spain -where Tunick achieved his record number of 7000 people- in Mexico, it will be very interesting to observe how appealing can an event of this nature be. If we consider that for Mexicans, it’s easier to undress their soul at a party, rather than taking their clothes off.
Modesty is part of our heritage, art included. Even in mayor pictorial works, feminine “full frontal nude” has been little explored, models usually appearing three quarters or backwards.
This exhibition of naked bodies could be a turning point of what has been a long time thought about Mexicans and their intimate relationship with their modesties.
We might have a big surprise that Sunday in Mexico, finding a new society, young and open to changes, ready to strip before the whole world for art’s sake.
This article is property of Newsweek Latin America. Photos courtesy of Spencer Tunick
