Tag Archives: nude

Bearding the Nude Academic in Her Den

Nude drawing of Mary Beard by Catherine Goodman

Laurie and Debbie say:

British “public intellectual” (actually a professor of classics at Cambridge) Mary Beard is a frequent commenter on the BBC. This week, she launched a new TV series called “Shock of the Nude,” in which she will be examining nudes in art and history, and will be exploring the difference between art and pornography–something no one has ever fully succeeded in doing.

In preparation for the TV show, Beard approached British artist Catherine Goodman, and commissioned a nude portrait of herself. From what we can tell from Internet images, Goodman was a fine choice: a good artist who seems to understand what Beard was exploring. It’s just fun to imagine the two of them, listening to an audiobook biography of Charles Dickens while Beard posed and Goodman worked.

Mary Beard and Catherine Goodman in Goodman's studio

Obviously, we are always interested in examinations of nudity in art, and Beard’s show sounds fascinating: we’ll be watching for it to turn up on this side of the pond.

By deciding to take off her clothes rather than declaim about nudity from the sidelines, Beard demonstrated both a laudable intellectual honesty and a spirit of curiosity.

Explaining her decision to bare all, Prof Beard said she wanted to strike back against idealised body images.

“I didn’t want to be the elderly academic commentator who talks about an edgy subject entirely from the safety of her own leggings and mac,” she said.

Nudity is vulnerability, and we agree that Beard couldn’t examine nudity without acknowledging that. Nudity is also coded in a great many contexts as sexuality, which is aided by the extremely narrow range of nudes we are accustomed to seeing in art and elsewhere:

“I realise that some people are going to say why on earth did she do it? Shouldn’t 65- year-old women keep their clothes on? But that is also part of the point of the whole series. Whose bodies do we see? Whose are deemed ‘okay for art’? Don’t old people have bodies too?

“In trying to democratise the nude a bit, and in being a bit more inclusive of different body types – maybe we are striking a little blow against all those idealised, photo-shopped body images with which we are surrounded, and which we can never live up to.

Nudes and sexuality are in the forefront of Beard’s reasons for making this series, as noted in an article in The Guardian:

“If you’re look at the nude you can’t avoid that question of where is the line between art and porn?” Beard said her main aim for the series is to make viewers look at the nude portraits and sculptures with a fresh perspective.

By including her own nude portrait in the show, she is also trying to make herself look with a fresh perspective–and that bodes well for the quality of her series. Of course, since we have been advocates for extremely diverse nudity, and Laurie has taken and displayed over a hundred photographs which make Beard’s points very clear, it’s a great pleasure to see these concepts being examined on such a public stage.

Thanks to Steven Schwartz for the pointer. Follow Debbie on Twitter.

Not-So-Nude Flight Attendants

Debbie says:

Call me naive, but to me “nude” means, among other things, showing skin that’s not usually shown. So when I saw a pointer to this article about an Air New Zealand inflight safety film featuring nude flight attendants, I had an image in my head: I bet you have the same one.

But no! Here’s the actual video:

As you can see, these flight attendants are not only wearing “body paint mimicking their uniforms,” it’s thick and very complete body paint, extremely carefully executed (and well-dried, too). You have to look very closely indeed to be able to notice that it isn’t the actual uniforms. What you don’t see is anything at all that has the flavor or quality of nudity.

This raises two questions, one flippant and one serious. The flippant question is “What was the shoot like?” I have an image of a small army of body-paint specialists, male and female, painstakingly working on each flight attendant (or actors taking the part of flight attendants) in private and foregoing any possible double entendres. In fact, the whole thing is so careful that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the principals were wearing flesh-colored body stockings under the paint. I suspect the backstage and blooper reel videos are a lot more fun than the released video.

And then the serious question: when is someone nude? Or naked? If I agree to have my naked photograph on the cover of a book, that seems fairly unambiguous.

cover of Women En Large

And even if the photograph doesn’t “show anything,” i.e. any nipples or genitals, generally it’s still a nude.

Cynthia with guitar

(Laurie and I have a whole speech about how it’s only a male nude if the penis is showing, but that’s another blog entry. It’s certainly a female nude if all you can see is a naked back.) But if I’m covered in concealing body paint (especially body paint that simulates professional clothing), what’s nude about me? Is there something titillating about squinting to see if a bump of nipple or a pubic hair can be seen through the paint? And from a commercial standpoint, what did Air New Zealand hope to accomplish? They claim they wanted people to pay more attention to the safety video, but unless they make a big deal out of the “nudity,” most people won’t notice. And if they do make a big deal out of it, most people will be squinting for that glimpse of something forbidden and are less likely to remember the safety instructions.

I’m all for straight-up nudity, but this disguised and denatured nakedness has no appeal to me whatsoever.