Yes, but is it Art?

Last Sunday, Housemate, Boyfriend and I were up and about at the ungodly hour of 3a.m. to participate in a large scaled installation piece in the centre of Amsterdam. The reasonably well-known artist Spencer Tunick had chosen the background of an inner-city parking garage to stage about 1500 people and create his idea about an artful installation.
The word that wasn’t used anywhere in that last little paragraph but that paradoxically was used in our house and almost all conversations and news-items about the installation was “naked”.

And naked we had to be, we three and ALL the other 1500 people participating. This takes some mental adjusting. Nobody in our house has any real issues body-wise, it comes from being well attractive and all that, but still, there is a good difference between not minding if a towel slips in front of the significant other and just stepping out of your clothes in front of not only 1500 strangers but also every cabdriver in town that happens to pass the parking garage. The fact it is to my knowledge the only 24-hour shop in the vicinity only served to make the situation a tad more interesting.

Anyways, in town by three, in the garage by half past three, and the waiting began. First all the people signing in, then the waiting for the photographer and volunteers.
I think it was about 5 in the morning, dawn already breaking across the country, when we finally had a remarkably convoluted explanation of what we were supposed to do. But really, convoluted. I think we had about 25 minutes of explanation for the in total 5 different configurations, and they were not explained in a nice “first we do this, then this, then we go there, and do this” sort of way, but more like a high school kid improvising his show-and-tell bit.
At one point the man actually went “And then for the second part, I am going to select 17 people, and I will give you all slips of paper, and that will tell you what to do for the fourth part, but I might select more than 17, like if I want to have two groups, but then it might be for the second installation, so it could be that these 30 people need me to tell them to wait, and they should, because, well, after the first I need all the men downstairs.” Euh…. Right. Next year, make a plan and get someone who can actually string words together in a cohesive sentence to explain it to the peeps.

After all this less than perfect explanation, we were counted off in groups, more or less pushed towards our locations at the edge of the building, told to find a spot, and to disrobe on command.
And then the nerves obviously start kicking in. I am not really a naked person, by nature. In fact, I think I am, of the three in the house, the least naked as a rule. Housemate has a tendency to dry up after a shower in front of her compute, Boyfriend spends time naked whenever he is in a bedroom. I prefer to be shirtless but boxered, so to speak. But I had signed up for this thing, so naked I had to get.
And I did, and it was surprisingly easy at that. The fact everybody is to conscious of themselves to really pay attention to other people helped, obviously, and the direct and somewhat expected anonymity of being just a little pink blob in a sea of little pink blobs.

Naked and well, we went through the least interesting part of the day, the actual shooting. Well, least interesting, we had to perch on small folding chairs on the edge of a 6 story high car-park, and lean out somewhat across the ledge of the building. It was precarious to say the least, and damn uncomfortable to say somewhat more.
Pictures made, we went back inside, put some clothes on, went to the second location, disrobed and went through the whole positioning again, which basically ended the day for Boyfriend and me.
Housemate was sort of selected to participate in another installation, a tremendously cool one, so we decided to hang around and see if she was “used” by the artist. As it turned out, she wasn’t, but it was still cool to sort of see the inner workings of a creative mind be expressed through the use of other people’s bodies.
After a reasonable breakfast, Housemate went home, Boyfriend and I went to catch a couple of movies, aided by copious amounts of energy drinks to keep us awake. I ended the weekend with a slight red bull addiction, which is thankfully receding already.

So far for the actual events of the situation, now on to the observations.

Was it art? Well, yes and no. Art is totally subjective, and as such can’t really be judged, and there certainly were some very interesting images created by the combination of skin and concrete.
But really, the nudity is somewhat juvenile in my opinion, and it has already been done. Installations like these aren’t shocking or really confrontational anymore, and therefore lose a little bit of their poignancy.
Is this a problem for me? No. Tunick is a revered artist at the moment and the chance to participate in a project like this is not something that should be waved away just because it looks like a student prank gone demon-boil. But the artist’s idea that he’ll be doing this till he is 90 years old to me sounds like a bold claim, after all, being a one joke puppy never really served anybody well since the villagers of the alpine town had decided that they now understood how the elephants were a smart plan.

Nudity, though natural and functional and sometimes even beautiful, really has no place in a parking garage or petrol station. For one thing, grime gets literally everywhere, and is difficult to dislodge.

Nudity, though natural and functional and sometimes even beautiful, is not ALWAYS beautiful. And it is certainly not beautiful when a group of naked men are asked to kneel down and the man in front of you takes a step backwards before he kneels giving the term “brown-nosing” and all too literal feel. I was barely missed, and happily so.

The chance to ogle was off course taken up by almost everybody, some a little more surreptitious then others, but I know for a fact there was one small Asian gentlemen that was constantly about 2 inches away from being decked by Boyfriend, something much appreciated by myself, as I had no glasses on and could not really see that well who was impinging on my honour. I did decide the diminutive lech was after Boyfriend, but he disagrees.

All in all, a good experience, very interesting, and something that just “needs to be done” but not something I’d swiftly do again without knowing what the installation would be well in advance. I have no problem with the nudity, I do have some issues with the lack of organisation.
Anyways, the project is called Dream Amsterdam, and the website lives at http://www.dreamamsterdam.nl The pictures will be displayed on the streets of Amsterdam from the end of June onward.

For now,

Stripes at “yeah my shoes are somewhere in my bag, over there, with the rest of my clothes”

Kevin