Helmut Newton / Women / Livejournal

WOMEN by Helmut Newton

Art undressed / From Flawless to the Flawed

ART UNDRESSED: 

FROM FLAWLESS TO THE FLAWED

A new kind of modern nudity

by Ellie Howard

The classical nude has been shoved off her perch. No longer do we look to the womanly hips of gleaming marble as the epitome of feminine beauty – instead, gallery walls are adorned with saggy bits, wonky tits and pubic hairs. The nude has undergone extensive surgery, transforming the flawless into the flawed.

Erica Simone / Power of Naked

Erica Simone

POWER OF NAKED

Directed by Paul de Luna

Not sexualised, just present … Isto é um negro? (Is This a Black?). Photograph: Nereu Jr

The shock of the nude: Brazil's stark new form of political protest

In a defiant riposte to president Bolsonaro and intolerance, performers at São Paulo’s international theatre festival are reclaiming the rights to be seen and to be different

Mark Fisher
Friday 29 March 2019

I

f ever there were a city where disrupting traffic felt like a political act, it would be São Paulo. Its 15 million inhabitants routinely take an hour to drive across town and can waste a month per year just getting to and from work. So when the dancers of Cia. Les Commediens Tropicalesstep in front of the moving vehicles on Avenida Paulista, sashaying in their bright party dresses and sombre suits to a jazzy Brazilian beat, it feels like an act of defiance.

In a street-theatre intervention entitled (See[]Have) Adrift, they lie on the tarmac, flirt with drivers and hitch lifts on the sides of trucks, turning the cars into reluctant dance partners. It’s the same when they snog on the pedestrian crossing in same-sex couples (with a nod to Banksy’s kissing coppers) as hooting taxis squeeze past.

“We love the fight between the public and the traffic,” performer Carlos Canhameiro tells me later, remarkably uninjured. “The street belongs to you.”

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 ‘The street belongs to you’ … (See[]Have) Adrift. Photograph: Guto Muniz

If there are politics even in this breezy piece of Brazilian street theatre, it is doubly the case elsewhere in the 10-day Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo (MITsp). Under the directorship of Antônio Araújo, the festival is squaring up to an era of right-wing populism with a celebration of otherness, difference and resistance.

More often than not, this resistance manifests itself in the naked body. In show after show, nudity takes on a political role. In part, this is a reaction to the censoriousness of the evangelical movement that helped sweep Jair Bolsonaro to power last year. In part, it is a response to the president’s intolerance of feminism, homosexuality and even the country’s famous carnivals. Standing before us undressed, the performers seem to say: “I am here. I exist. Do not deny me.”

‘My body always comes before me’ … Renata Carvalho in Transpofágico (Transpophagic Manifesto). Photograph: Nereu Jr

That is the case, for example, in Isto é um Negro? (Is This a Black?), a joyful show about skin colour that defies you to ignore the flesh under discussion – not sexualised just present. Created by graduates of the School of Dramatic Art of the University of São Paulo, the first-hand stories of discrimination, informed by the legacy of colonisation, are angry and agitational. But there is also compassion, as Tarina Quelho’s production asks the audience to share the things that turn “us”, a group of individuals, into “us”, a collective of common interests. In a time of division, the simple act of coming together in a theatre can seem like a gesture of solidarity.

In Brazil, the threat to expression is real. Artists are aghast at the swingeing cuts in a country that has dissolved its ministry of culture. They are also fearful of the drive towards censorship. Last year, trans performer Renata Carvalho received death threats and lost bookings after she performed the Brazilian version of Jesus, Queen of Heaven by Edinburgh playwright Jo Clifford. That’s why, in Transpofágico (Transpophagic Manifesto), she stands naked before us as a “travesti”, in a blend of autobiography and polemics about a life spent under constant scrutiny. “My body always comes before me,” she says, choosing to put her body firmly before us now, even stepping into the auditorium to let the audience touch. Several opt to hug her instead.

To an outsider, political meanings are not always obvious until you remember that, whatever else, a man like Bolsonaro would detest having to watch this sort of thing. That is unquestionably the case with Lobo (Wolf), a gloriously extravagant feast of male nudity that carries an arresting message of female empowerment. It begins like some masochistic gym class, with 16 naked men running in circles, sweaty and breathless, crashing into each other before collapsing into a writhing, orgiastic heap. It’s only then that writer and director Carolina Bianchi asserts her control, shooting from the hip (she carries two guns) and turning for moral support to Artemisia Gentileschi, Emily Dickinson and Mary Shelley. They are, she tells me later, “women who have this obsession with death and violent things – not just women who talk about flowers”.

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 The psychological effects of colonisation … Renato Livera in Colônia (Colony). Photograph: Nereu Jr

The thrilling show culminates with the men passing a globule of saliva from mouth to mouth. With the audience packed tightly on three sides, these are bodies that cannot be wished away or made invisible.

Giving shape to the invisible is what so many of these productions seek to do. You see it in Colônia (Colony), in which actor Renato Livera fills a blackboard with notes on the psychological effects of colonisation. And you see it in the excellent Altamira 2042, in which Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha turns a meditative jungle sound installation into a documentary study of people displaced by the ongoing construction of the massive Belo Monte hydroelectric plant on the Xingu river, a tributary of the Amazon. Warning of environmental catastrophe ahead, she sees the rainforest region of Altamira as “the energetic centre of a world war”. In a polarised world, it feels like the naked truth.

THE GUARDIAN

Reisha Perlmutter’s mesmerizing paintings of nude women underwater

Reisha Perlmutter’s mesmerizing paintings of nude women underwater

The 27-year-old artist explores the biological connection between the body and water.

By Hannah Ongley
Jul 28 2017, 4:48pm

Reisha Perlmutter has approximately 158K Instagram followers. And it's obvious why one of her mind-bending oil paintings of nude women submerged in sun-dappled, emerald water can easily hit six thousand likes. Reisha has only been painting her water series for two years. The starting point of her New York Academy of Art thesis was abstract cow hearts and the capillaries on translucent, aging skin. But the newer paintings, while captivatingly beautiful, are also a biological study, exploring the connection between flesh and water. Reisha has traveled from Montauk to Greece painting women of all shapes, sizes, and skin colors.

"I think it does surprise people that I don't consider myself a photorealistic painter," Reisha says when I mention how different the paintings appear up-close. "I think the initial shock arises from the fact that my work is primarily shared on social media platforms, where the image is shrunken down tremendously and certain details are lost. As the image gets smaller, the gestural quality, and physical quality of the paint is often lost in translation."

In real life, you can see the brush strokes, further blurring light, color, woman, and water. Water abstracts specific body parts — outstretched limbs, uninhibited stomachs, and tattoo-covered mastectomy scars — and the body as a whole, separating subjects from their worldly insecurities. "The idea of wholesomeness, and accepting all aspects of the body as they relate to our biology, our identity, and more importantly life as a force," says Reisha, "is something that I am fascinated by."

As she prepares to open a solo show in East Hampton this weekend, Reisha talks to i-D about the empowering nature of water, being censored by Instagram, and remembering that we're all just tissue and bones.

How do you persuade women with everyday body hang-ups to bare all and enjoy being one of your subjects?Women coming to model for me are introduced to my work in a variety of ways, usually friends of friends, people I meet in my travels and everyday life, and are more than happy to be involved. During the shoot, it really happens in a very natural and organic way. I find that by talking to these women about my work and explaining my process, I am able to differentiate myself from a photographer with a critical eye, direction, and certain expectations. Instead, I aim to be non-threatening, and non-judgmental, inviting women to completely relinquish themselves from the weight and expectation placed upon them.

Why is being submerged in water so empowering?Water really removes the idea of the critical eye. It allows us to feel suspended, and held. Water breaks us away from a fixation on certain parts of our bodies that we may feel self-conscious about, and instead, we are able to return to a feeling of wholeness, of connection, and awareness of our bodies without mental hangups. There is also something incredibly carnal about our relationship to water. As biological beings, we respond to water in a fundamental way. We are primarily made up of it, we come from it, and we use it to cleanse ourselves with. Connecting to water, feeling it, and having it hold us, allows us to release ourselves from our mental hang-ups of what we should or shouldn't be. Instead, it holds us in a moment of simply "being," and reconnects us to the simplicity of feeling.

Does Instagram often make you censor your art for showing nipples?Unfortunately yes, Instagram censors a lot of my images. This is something that was initially extremely frustrating to me. However, this censorship forced me to evaluate and begin to explore our fixation with our bodies as individual parts, and an underlying societal fear of seeing all aspects of bodies as empowering, strong, flawed, and simultaneously perfect.

I do think that there is a simultaneous fear and strain on sexuality in our culture, both of which do not exist in balance. I consider sexuality as an aspect of biology, but not the ultimate governing force. In my opinion, sexuality in relation to biology shouldn't be judged so harshly, it should be considered as one of the many aspects of our humanity.

Do you think art can help society to learn that women's bodies are not inherently sexual?This is actually quite a complicated question in terms of how we fundamentally relate our biology as humans to sexuality, and how society interprets that. On an extremely basic level, I do actually believe that humans are ultimately sexual; women as much as men. However, I think that there has to be a fundamental power shift in how the media perceives the power associated with sexuality. I don't think women need to hide from their sexuality in an effort to not be considered inherently sexual. I do think that empowerment can come with accepting and owning one's own sexuality, as one of the many aspects of who we are. By recognizing it without shame, I think it allows for the ability to accepting other forms of empowerment and strength and society that are often dictated by male perception or idealism.

You paint from photos, but resist the term photorealistic. How do you approach the canvas instead?I always begin my paintings very loosely, and open. It is this process of beginning with chaos and eventually coming to a sense of organization that I love so much about painting. I see it as a metaphor for life, and the fixation on trying to control every aspect of life as in a painting is impossible. Instead, we can only try to manipulate the medium to the best our ability, while being open to allowing it to move as it is conducted by physics and chemistry. I think the relinquishing of power in painting keeps each piece alive for me.

You yourself feature heavily in the water series. What is it like painting such intimate self-portraits?Painting self-portraits allows me to dissociate myself from what I look like superficially, and instead, be able to perceive myself as a combination of cells, bones, and tissues that connect in a specific way that make me look like "me." I have been painting myself for quite a long time, and it has been fascinating over years to non-judgmentally perceive changes in my facial structure. There is a cellular intelligence dictated by DNA that supersedes superficiality associated with image. Every time I paint myself, especially from life, I look at myself as a biological phenomenon as opposed to a 27-year-old female with imperfections. This is something that has proven to be critical for me as a form of self therapy.

VICE

Jonathan Jones / Why artists just don't get Kate Moss

Kate Moss

Why artists just don't get Kate Moss

She's been depicted in plastic by Allen Jones, tattooed by Lucian Freud and snapped by the world's greatest photographers. But as Moss turns 40, she's a beauty still waiting for her Picasso

by Jonathan Jones
THE GUARDIAN
Thursday 16 January 2014

Full exposure … Lucian Freud's portrait of Kate Moss. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Reuters

Lucian Freud's portrait of Kate Moss

Kate Moss creates a timeless bubble around herself where feminism never happened. In this archaic realm, women are bodies and men are eyes. This has proved a lot of fun for male artists, who can make the kind of art about Moss that in any other context would be dismissed as 1960s-style misogyny.

If you think I am exaggerating, consider how she has revived the career of Allen Jones. In the 1960s, Jones made fetishistic pop art that fantasised freely about sex. His sculptures even turned women into pieces of furniture. One of these works in the Tate was attacked in what is thought to have been a feminist protest.

Plastic fantastic … Kate Moss by Allen Jones. Photograph: Christie's Images

But Allen Jones is hot again – thanks to Kate Moss. In a sale at Christies that celebrated her as a "muse", his images, including a Goldfinger-like photographic work and a plastic model, were the most publicised and high-selling works (at £32,500 and £133,875, respectively).

A beauty that can redeem Jones is not to be sniffed at. And, of course, Moss has also "inspired" Gary Hume to portray her with an empty silver face, Marc Quinn to depict her doing yoga, looking like some mythological goddess, and Lucian Freud to paint her as a reclining nude when she was pregnant.

Bendy … Marc Quinn's 18-carat gold Siren sculpture of Moss

Yet I don't buy into the idea that Moss is a great "muse", a word I don't understand or like. "Muse" is a stale Victorian concept thatsentimentalises the messy realities of desire and art.

There's another problem: Moss doesn't live in a great age for beauty in art. I think she may know this. Her relationships with artists are actually quite tantalising. Jones, Quinn and a legion of fashion photographers have been allowed to capture her image, and yet an image is all they have taken away – you get sense that the real Kate Moss has eluded them. Their excitement is so obvious, so puppyish. The chance to put heterosexual excitement into contemporary art is so rare that they just shoot their aesthetic load with a splat.

Kate's many faces … Peter Blake's print on canvas sold at Christie's in 2013 for £31,250

Moss apparently wanted something more, for she embarked on a potentially far more serious encounter with the one artist up to the job.Titian and Picasso were not around to paint her, but Lucian Freud was. Their relationship was intimate enough for him not only to paint her nude but also, as she has revealed, to tattoo her body. Using skills he learned in the merchant navy in the second world war, the great painter turned amateur tattoo artist gave her an image of two tiny birds on her lower back. That's what I call body art.

If Freud had met Moss 10 years earlier and portrayed her over and over again, if the intimacy that tattoo betokens became a complex passion between painter and model, then we could really say she inspired great art. As it is, Kate Moss is the muse who has never found the right artist. Where's a sexist voyeuristic genius when you need one?

THE GUARDIAN

Sante D'Orazio / Pamela Anderson

Pamela Anderson Smiling #1, Hollywood, 2000

Sante D'Orazi

PAMELA ANDERSON

Pamela Anderson

Sante D'Orazi
PAMELA ANDERSON

Pamela Anderson