Looking at pictures of women in porn is something I do to stimulate my sexual imagination. Looking at “art” pictures of nude women moves me close to being interested in a woman’s body for it’s form, but there is still that urge to procreate that keeps me also thinking about things I might like to do with the model. In fact, I don’t know if those thoughts would ever disappear, no matter who I’m looking at, male or female, fat or thin, and in any of the other various configurations we might see.
But I don’t think I’ve ever had the opportunity to look, just look as long as I wanted to at the shape and form and curves and surfaces of a human body, unadorned by clothes.
I find the idea of this exhibition to be fascinating. I love how forcing people to squeeze between two naked people forces us to think about all the feelings and thoughts we have about this. How many people won’t even go into the exhibit? I also love that the exhibit would give me a chance to just look. Even in the pictures, it brings up all kinds of feelings—not just prurient ones, either. It makes me think and it makes me try to figure out the relationship between what I see and what I think.
@Kardamom reminds me of a point I wanted to make. I do not consider locker rooms and life drawing to be “just” looking. In those situations you have a purpose. In one, you are getting from one state to another, and there is no opportunity to just look, without doing anything else. In a life drawing situation, your focus is on drawing or painting and not on your perceptions of the body. You are thinking about how to express that body, not just being with that body.
In fact, none of the other situations people are mentioning are situations where you can just look. Hospitals and sex parties are not about focusing on the human body in an aesthetic and live way.
Some of you seem to find the exhibit interesting, and I think @absalom‘s comments are exactly some of the issues that the artist is probably getting at. Whether or not that is the case, his point that nudity is no longer default is very interesting and has a lot of implications I doubt most of us ever think about.
It’s interesting also that some people seem to find it necessary to say that nudity doesn’t bother them. Then, in nearly the next sentence, they’ll say that they would not be interested in seeing it. Then people bring up the subject of whether it is art or not. I suppose this latter will always be a question even though we’ve disposed of it several times in the past already.
Still, I will address that. Art is a way of “seeing” things. You can look at something, and not notice it because it’s totally normal and you don’t expect it to be anything other than what it has always been. An artist can come and take that object and turn it into art by putting it into a museum or another display space. The most famous example of this is the urinal. Seeing it on the wall of a museum forces you to see it differently. It forces you to consider the aesthetics of the urinal. It makes you jump to the question of whether it is art or not, which in itself is a reaction that is a very creative response. You have to think.
Is the human body art? Is being forced to interact intimately with an unadorned human body art? Performance art? The interaction, again, forces you to deal with feelings about the body. It is a physical act. It is a dance. It is a performance, even if the bodies are just standing still, which, of course, they aren’t—although the movements might be below the threshold that you pay attention to. Go to a Buttoh dance performance if you want to see slow.
Art makes us see differently. It frames things so we can focus on them. I’ll bet there are almost none of us, these days, who have focused on a human body as we focus on a photo or a painting or a scene in nature. I know I haven’t. When I have a chance to see, I will either look furtively (because I don’t want to embarrass either the person I’m looking at nor myself); or I will look and look away; look and look away, as in when I am sitting in a hot tub with ten naked people at Esalen. If I am talking to someone, I lock my gaze on their face, and don’t look at anything else.
Art makes us experience things differently—no matter what sense we are being asked to employ. Art makes us pay attention in a new way, and it doesn’t care whether we think it is art or not (although funders care very much). Art gives us the opportunity to see things as we have never seen them before. I would love to see that show, because I’ve never had that opportunity that I asked about in the question.