From: Rod Fleming (rodfleming@sol.co.uk)
Date: 09/14/00-12:20:20 PM Z
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christina Z. Anderson" <tracez@mcn.net>
To: "Alt Photo" <alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca>
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2000 3:42 PM
Subject: Tutti Nudi
Is there truly a proliferation of females comfortable with
> posing nude and not males;
I can't say what the story is now, but when I was at Art School the models
were split about 50-50 men and women, with one man in his 60's who had been
a fulltime artist's model since he left school at 14! He was great to draw.
I often wondered what he had been thinking about, for those fifty or so
years, to occupy his mind.
is the female body the preferred form to draw
> from?
As I said, in many ways I prefer to draw from the male body, and I know I'm
not alone in this- men have less subcutaneous fat and so the muscular and
bony forms are better defined and easier to draw- for me at least. Funnily
enough, the shape I think everyone has been alluding to as that
"stereotypical" female figure is less interesting to draw- men, or the
larger woman, are great for drawing- big girls were always more popular with
us than skinny ones. Rubens definitely was on to something there.
>I personally think female is norm and there is a stigma attached to
> males modeling nude MUCH moreso than women.
Probably true, generally. Many of the models at my Art School (Edinburgh)
were ex-students sort of "in between" study and work, and so they were all
used to the conventions. One of the amusing things was at that time the male
models had to wear a posing pouch (work it out for yourselves) in order not
to shock the "sweet young things" who were drawing from them! Full male
nudity only in a male-only class! This did not bother either the male or the
female models, but there were frequent protests from the female students.
>As Susan Sontag says, old age is "ob-scene" or off-scene, a still
> great tabu in the art world.
Not for drawing, or at least it should not be; life drawing is an analytical
challenge which pulls together the eye's understanding of form and the
hand's ability express it- the age or shape of the model is irrelevant to
this.
Photography, though, is something different- it is far more immediate in its
impact. Sontag says that it is "stencilled off the real" and though I have
my issues with her, I agree with that. The sexual message that is
transmitted when one is confronted with a naked person- particularly one in
a sexually reinforcing pose or context- is carried very forcibly in
photography, which is of course why photography is such an effective medium
for porn. The drawings in Japanese Pillow Books or in the "I Modi", though
no less explicit than the most brazen modern XXX have a different, less
startling effect, perhaps a patina of acceptability from being at one
remove.
The very nature of the photograph- the fact that we take it as legal tender
for reality- means that the viewer is forced to look inside themself to
analyse their own response- if you are turned off by a picture of two naked
elderly people kissing, the question should be "What is it in me that is
upset by that?", not "Why are they doing that, it upsets me?" Painting just
does not put us in this position- we can distract ourselves too easily with
the brushwork, the use of colour, the line.
I think, FWIW, that we in the West live in a society where youth and beauty
are over-idolised- but it is not the artists at fault here, but the
advertisers and media manipulators who ruthlessly exploit the imagery to
their own ends. There is no shame in celebrating the beauty of an 18-year
old girl in the first flush of womanhood- provided we accord the same
respect to her when she is older.
At lunch today I discussed this with my wife, and expressed my own point of
view that women (we were looking at pictures of her) get more attractive as
they mature, not less; and why should this not be true for men too? I think
it depends on where you are standing.
As a last thought on this already OT and getting more so thread, do you
remember "The Graduate"? Why were we supposed to be shocked that Hoffman
fell for the glamourous, experienced, doubtless skilled woman played by the
wonderful Anne Bancroft? Why were we supposed to find this relationship
"improper" and his relationship with the daughter- played as a naive,
"innocent" and compliant young girl- "proper"? Was it because the Bancroft
character, being older and more powerful, yet a woman, was in control of the
relationship? This is a more telling case than any number of youthful
blondes exposing their anatomy on Page Three.
Rod
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