P19 Style Fashion and the Full Monty
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P19. Style, Fashion and the Full Monty The Art of the Nude in Photography WC 3835 “To boldly go where no man has gone before” are words which ring out across the galaxies inhaBited By the self‐styled “Trekkies”, those legions of fans of the Star Ship Enterprise and its indomitaBle crew. Star Trek Began as a comic in 1966 But morphed into several feature‐length sci‐fi movies and a tv series which comes only second after Dr Who as the most prolific series in tv history. Spock, Captain James T. Kirk, Dr. Leonard 'Bones' McCoy - Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, DeForest Kelley Of course, over such a long production run, Star Trek, like even Dr Who, had to make changes to accommodate to changing fashions, not only in clothes (sci‐fi wardroBes don’t usually show their age anyway) But more importantly, in changing ideologies and currents of thought. One of the Biggest challenges facing what Began as a male chauvinistic comic was to adapt to the influences of feminism. By the time “Star Trek – The Second Generation” went to air, the mission statement read By William Shatner at the Beginning of every episode1 had changed to “To boldly go where no one has gone before” and the sister ship, Voyager, had acquired a female captain. The half‐Vulcan/half‐human character, Spock the one with the pudding‐ Basin haircut and plucked eyeBrows was played By veteran actor, Leonard Nimoy. Born in Boston in 1931, Nimoy was the son of Yiddish‐speaking Russian (Ukrainian) parents. He Began acting at the age of 8 and has had an extensive film and tv career, including “The Man from Uncle”… But acting has not Been the only string to his Bow: this Renaissance Man studied 1 Trekkies tell me that two episodes were not prefaced by this introduction. 1 photography at UCLA as well as having an MA in education and an honorary doctorate from Antioch University in Ohio. Perhaps not known to most Trekkies, however, is that Nimoy has conducted a very successful career as a professional photographer for the last 40 years, and it is in this context we will look at him and his art a little later, Because Nimoy actor and photographer demonstrates very well how changing social ideologies and artistic fashions can Be reflected in an artist’ work. In particular, I want to use Nimoy along with others, to demonstrate how changing attitudes to the human Body influence what in art circles is generally called “The Nude”, a term which puts a rather genteel spin on a suBject which can range from the aBstract through the distorted and disguised to the down‐right erotic. The changing memes of the nude in art Back in 1976, Richard Dawkins2 coined the term “meme” By which he meant ….any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity3. Dawkins explained why he needed to invent the term: …to describe how one might extend Darwinian principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples tunes, catch- phrases, beliefs, clothing-fashions, and the technology of building arches. Memes, he said …propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene. There are three memes or perhaps “clusters of memes” I want now to examine in relation to photography and its practise down the last century or so. These concern (1) the value placed on the shape or form of the Body; (2) the manner in which the Body is displayed the “pose” as we usually say, 2 Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene 1976 and alter editions. 3 This and the following quotations are from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme 2 But this also includes which Body parts are shown; and (3) the gender of the sitter. (1) Fat Is A Feminist Issue Back in 1978 when Susie OrBach, now a professor at the LSE, proclaimed that Fat Is A Feminist Issue4 we were perhaps less aware how fat people were Becoming in the Western world and the medical dangers attached thereto, But she had a good point: popular fashion in the latter half of the 20th century dictated that women had to Be thin to Be desiraBle. We know, of course, that this has not always Been so: for example, one of our remote Gravettian ancestors Back in the Upper Paleolithic (aBout 24 kya) carved a tiny figurine of a woman whose oBesity was proBaBly the ideal of the time. We know too that great painters, such as ReuBens painted the more generous figure. The Venus de Willendorf: 24-22 kya, Gravettian culture. Peter Paul Reubens: Les Trois Graces 4 Penguin Books, 1978. 3 Renoir: A Nymph by a Stream, 1869-70 More recently even Renoir whom we usually associate with pictures of fresh‐faced young girls frequently chose his amply‐padded companion, Lise Tréhot, as his model. She can Be seen in his work, “A Nymph by a Stream”,5 a traditional theme in French painting of the time when the female nude was associated with Nature and the great outdoors. Photographers of the latter part of the 19th Century and La Belle Époc were of course subjected to the same social expectations and stereotypes the same memes concerning body shape and tended to choose fuller figured women as their sitters than do those of our own times. So, for example, here is an image taken from a daguerreotype of 1840: From a daguerreotype c1840. 5 1869-70. Oil on canvas, 66.7 x 122.9 cm., National Gallery, London. 4 (2) Posing the Nude There is another meme which was transmitted from painting to photography in the 19th century and this seems to have been that one of the most desirable features of the female nude was her buttocks as displayed in what is known as the odalisque pose. The best-known example of this “odalisque” pose is the 1814 painting, later reproduced en grisaille by Ingres: Ingres, la grande odalisque en grisaille As we saw earlier in this course, this odalisque pose was again used By Louis Jules DuBoscq in 1854 when he photographed his model in stereo, the Better (one presumes), to appreciate her ample curves. Stereo daguerreotype attrib. Louis Jules Duboscq, "Study of a Reclining Nude from Behind" c1854 (hand tinted). Ask an artist painter or photographer why he would choose this pose and the probable answer would include reference to “curving forms” and “rotundity”. However, one cannot help but wonder the role sexuality plays in such a choice: while modern humans are upright bipeds, our remote ancestors went about on all fours. In that stance, the genitalia are far more visible and some biologists 5 argue the stage of the oestrus cycle can more readily be observed. Such speculation could probably also be applied to our obsession with female breasts in the art of the Nude. However, the more obviously erotic aspect of female anatomy, the vulva, is and has been off-limits for centuries in Western art even though it has played an important part in art of other cultures. For example, the Judy Chicago ceramic dinner service decorated with female genitalia was and still does raise more than eyebrows. Judy Chicago (coordinator) - The Dinner Party – various artists, assembled 1974-79, permanently installed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2007. (3) Who looks at who? There is a meme in our culture that “artistic nudes”, no matter in what medium, are female. In fact, the French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was once reported as saying words to the effect that “in our society, it is women who are looked at and men do the looking”. As we have seen on many occasions, painters have relied on photographs as an aid to their painting, and this was certainly true of Matisse. For much of his life he subscribed to a magazine called “Les Modèles Artistiques” which featured rather poorly printed photographs of nude women. Although the models were mostly prostitutes and the poses soft-core porn, they were sufficient to inspire the great artist to many of his best works. One of his sculptures initiated by Les Modèles which later inspired me, was his “Les Trois Negresses” in the classic “Three Graces” pose. 6 Carl Van Vechten: Henri Matisse, 1933. Matisse painted many “odalisques” which, he said6 were “…the fruits of a happy nostalgia, of a lovely, lively dream…” but which were also often misunderstood by his critics. By this, did he mean his recollections in old age of the sexual vigour of his youth? Was that the reason he believed men should only look at women naked and not at their own sex that he was aware in himself of the sexual stirring such images evoked and he did not consider it proper for the same to happen in viewing naked men? Yet, despite Matisse’s misgivings, male nudes appeared in quantity in 19th and 20th Century photographs. For example, OG Rejlander the master of “combined printing” using multiple negatives to produce one print took this “Wrestling Study” c1855. In 1885 and in a similarly “manly” vein, Eadweard Muybridge took sequential photographs of men wrestling as part of his rather famous studies of horses galloping, men walking and other subjects in motion in order to observe the movements involved.