|
Naked Art
The cultural context and purpose of nude and conceptual art...
At the Tate Modern, London's latest gallery of modern art, more people dawdled in front of Brozontaurus, a naked man slopping his willy and balls, than in the room dedicated to Andy Warhol's celebrated pieces. Amid the hundreds of exhibits Brozontaurus (by London artist Sam Taylor-Wood) has captured the public's imagination; anyone I met who's visited the Tate Modern asked, "You seen the dancing naked man?" But when my eyes fell on Brozontaurus, jostling through the viewers that choked the room, I thought, So what?
Brozontaurus seemed anything but art. It's a naked man in a bare room dancing and jiggling his hips, his crotch swinging; the sepia-tinted film is projected on a large screen and accompanied by monotonous, wailing music. Shown in slow motion, the thirty-something man's movements do not change, though sometimes his dancing appears disjointed, other times hypnotic. My friend slipped out of the room and later said, "I found that disgusting."
I said: "It seems to be there to shock, but what is artistic about shock-value?"
For me art has to express a vision rather than just exist as an expression. Art has to convey an idea, create meaning or perspective in a chaotic world; it has to paint the larger picture, the better if it strikes a universal truth and tell us something about the human condition. By whispering to us on an emotional experience, echoing inner forgotten emotions, art finds its voice. But Brozontaurus fails even the basic test of what qualifies as art - originality. Anyone with a home video camera can create Brozontaurus, so where's the talent? Although I like nude art, I would not care to have Brozontaurus in my living room, neither in my garden.
In a sense Brozontaurus seems to be another Tracey Emin incarnation. Shortlisted for last year's Turner Prize (one of the world's most respected art awards), Emin's My Bed spurred a wave of imitations. In My Bed Emin bares her tattered inner landscape - raped at thirteen, an adolescence of promiscuity and alcoholism, an abortion - and it's the same unmade bed in which Emin shivered for a week, contemplating suicide. The detritus of reckless hedonism clutters the bed, the empty vodka bottles, the torn pillows, the urine-stained sheets, the half-smoked cigarettes, the condoms, the contraceptive pills, the sanitary towels, the three pairs of soiled knickers. The conservative newspapers ridiculed Emin; the liberals couldn't decide if it was art or not, but looked on with voyeuristic gusto. I reacted the same way I reacted to Brozontaurus - so what?
In a discussion, a friend and me grappled with definitions. But perhaps we miss the point by trying to jostle Brozontaurus (and My Bed) in a narrow definition of art-as-meaning. Perhaps we only need to consider Brozontaurus in its societal context: in the public arena, does it serve a purpose? Brozontaurus shocks, and it exposes unconventional male nudity, provoking thought. Brozontaurus crushes another taboo with voyeuristic amusement. Even though we couldn't extricate its meaning or find its metaphors, the fact that we spent an hour discussing Brozontaurus in itself proves that it served its purpose - and so it deserves to be on public display.
If you gaze at it for a while Brozontaurus transforms the viewer's experience, like an illusionistic trick. The monochromatic cinematography and the monotonous soundtrack set the tone; the dancing is repetitive, and made more tediously repetitive in slow motion. This man's act of dancing wearily in a bare room is mad because it's banal; and after a while the video itself, so arresting at first sight, becomes banal and boring. By wallowing in trite boredom the video makes a mockery of the naked body. The name Brozontaurus suggests something just as apathetic and sluggish, something extinct, something that hardly merits a second glance.
If there is one thing that Brozontaurus does, it desecrates nudity in public - and that can't be a bad thing.
© Victor Paul Borg
|
