I do love a midsummer morning’s sex comedy.
This June, New York contemporary artist Spencer Tunick will assemble an as yet unspecified number of naked Irish persons in Cork and Dublin for the purposes of photographing one of his live installations. Tunick has done this sort of thing since the mid-‘80s, when he first snapped a nude at a London bus stop. Over the years, he’s co-ordinated ambitious assemblies of naked bodies – 7,000 in Barcelona in 2003, a mind-bending 18,000 in the Zocalo, Mexico City last May (the resulting photograph looked like a Soviet Propaganda poster photoshopped by Luis Bunuel).
Prospective participants in the Irish kit-off Olympics taking place at Cork’s Midsummer Festival on June 17 and Dublin’s Docklands on the 21 should register at www.spencertunickireland.ie. According to the blurb, “Tunick’s installations are handled in a respectful and professional manner, with participants organised and directed collectively throughout the duration of the installation. Participants will be noted in advance via email of the specific time and location and, once there, will shed their clothing in a secure area and will be organised into the compositions by the artist, in as brief a time as possible.”
Will anyone show? I hope so. Here’s an opportunity to celebrate the body eclectic. In an age when the dominant body image is anatomically impossible – Pam Anderson’s Barbie, Beckham’s Ken, Posh’s Bambi-on-hunger-strike – or surgically enhanced, us ordinarily proportioned folk are starting to feel a tad freakish.
It’s alright for Madonna to swan about looking divine at 50: she’s got a personal cook, trainer, dietician, nanny, accountant and guru to take care of the tiresome daily details while she puts herself through the seven gates of Gehenna in order to keep her pert butt and walnut arms.
So I say let’s all toddle down to Tunick’s be-in, don our birthday suits and flaunt our cellulite, stretchmarks, potbellies, saggy arses, pendulous breasts and everything else we’re told is imperfect so we’ll invest in scandalously-priced powders and paints that claim to do the impossible: stay the hand of time. There must be something emancipating about getting togged off en masse (although I imagine the wind-chill Liffey factor is rather more flattering to women than men). Screw vanity. Vanity has done nothing for us except inspire a welter of first world problems: anorexia, bulimia and the sort of body horror that makes a long hard look in the full-length mirror as soothing as an early Cronenberg flick.
While we’re on the subject, three cheers for Marian Keyes, who recently spoke of her loathing for Posh Spice. “I can’t abide her,” the writer told the RTÉ Guide. “I hate her look. I hate her clothes. I hate her manicured square French nails. I hate her orange legs. I hate her starved little body and her matchy-matchy shoes and bags. I hate the whole package.”
See you down the docks, friends. Let’s get butt naked and, um, photograph.