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Artur Żmijewski Game of Tag, 1999
‘Poland’s interior minister on Friday instructed his country’s prosecutors to follow up on an investigation by groups representing Holocaust survivors into how a video featuring a naked game of tag came to be filmed at a former Nazi death camp in the country. Mariusz Błaszczak transferred to prosecutors the dossier on the video that was filmed inside the gas chamber at Stutthof, he said Friday on Twitter. Two days earlier several groups, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, had sent a letter to Polish President Andrjez Duda noting the video was traced back to Stutthof and demanding to know who gave permission for the filming. “It is the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in a long time,” Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi hunter, said in 2015 about the exhibition. “They lied about it. It is just revolting and a total insult to the victims and anyone with any sense of morality or integrity.”
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Jan Smaga Untitled (dog), 2007
‘Jan Smaga works with photography and combines classical techniques with computer editing, constructing three-dimensional photographic objects. The technique developed by Grzeszykowska and Smaga is reminiscent of the process of scanning – a total voyeuristic documentation of the space and the people which inhabit it. In the individual projects, the artist subjects the human body to a similar, detailed analysis of the surface.’
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Sally Mann The Wet Bed, 1987
‘In The Wet Bed, for example, it is not clear whether the young Virginia is asleep or posing, coloring our view of the circles of urine that stain the sheet around her. Many observers of Mann’s work feel manipulated by this sense of artifice, yet Mann argues for its use, stating that “You learn something about yourself and your own fears. Everyone surely has all those fears that I have for my children.”‘
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John DeAndrea Various, 1972 – 1988
‘John DeAndrea is an American sculptor whose intensely realistic depictions of human figures, both nude and clothed, offer an uncanny portrait of contemporary human life. Made using plastic, polyester, fiber glass, and natural hair, his work is painted after naturalistic gypsum casting to achieve a high degree of technical precision and lifelike appearance. He has explained that his work is not intended as political, but rather an existential glimpse at an individual’s sense of self. “You don’t look at people like you look at a sculpture,” the artist has explained about the public’s interest in his work. “We’re in a room and we glance at each other. With a sculpture you can walk around it, take it apart, examine it. That’s part of what makes them appealing.”’
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Campaign Against Sex Robots, 2015 ->
‘True Companion’s female sexbot, Roxxxy, is apparently “always turned on and ready to play,” though as the FAQ page makes clear, she does have an off switch for when the robot shagging is over and it’s time for her to get back into the cupboard. Customers can select the skin tone, hair colour and eye colour of Roxxxy. She can even come with pubes in a variety of styles, but this costs extra. Roxxxy is suggestive of a time when men all over the world will be able to forgo the trouble and inconvenience of a real girlfriend, with all their PMT tantrums and feminist sexual demands, and simply go online, design their ideal sex pet, and wait for a woman-sized cardboard box to be delivered to their door. Dr. Kathleen Richardson wants to stop us hurtling towards this bleak version of the future. A senior research fellow in the Ethics of Robotics at De Montfort University, she’s recently launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots, along with Dr. Erik Billing of the University of Skövde in Sweden. Their campaign manifesto points out that by creating robots for sex, society is reinforcing patriarchal ideas about how women should look and behave, as well as normalising the idea that a relationship can be purely physical.’
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Roger Hiorns Untitled 2005–10, 2010
‘Untitled 2005–10 is a sculpture comprising a black metal bench that is intermittently inhabited by a naked youth and a lit flame. The sculpture also functions without the presence of the youth or the flame and, in this case, sets up an anticipation of presence. According to the wishes of the exhibiting institution, a youth can become part of the sculpture by occupying the bench in sessions of roughly fifteen minutes each over an agreed period of time. Once the youth is present and fully disrobed, a gallery attendant can choose to set light to the gel which ignites the flame on the metal bench, although this is not necessary for the sculpture to be activated. On a prepared area of the bench, enough flame gel to allow for approximately nine to fifteen minutes of flame is lit. The youth and the flame are then present together. Once the flame is extinguished, through the exhaustion of the flame gel, the youth may take leave of the bench.’
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Hilde Krohn Huse Hanging in the Woods, 2015
‘A Norwegian contemporary artist has confessed to being left hanging naked in a tree for three and a half hours after an video art installation she filmed in a Norwegian forest went wrong. Hilde Krohn Huse, who lives and works in London, ventured into the forest in her native Aukra in Norway to film a video featuring herself hanging naked from a rope in a tree. However, when she reached the end of her filming, she realised that she was completely unable to free herself. “The video ends when the camera shuts off, but I was there calling for help for another 30 minutes,” told Norway’s VG newspaper. “I felt sick when I saw the video for the first time, I experienced everything anew. But I slept on it and realised that the video is quite decent.”‘
Watch excerpts from the video here
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Eric Gill Prospero And Ariel, 1932
‘The BBC has announced plans to restore a statue by the highly controversial artist Eric Gill after it was attacked with a hammer in January 2022. There has been a movement to remove the British sculptor’s public works from view ever since the late 1980s, when his posthumously published private diaries revealed that he had sexually abused his two eldest daughters and his pet dog.’
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Paul McCarthy The Garden, 1992
‘For his solo show at SMAK in 2007, Paul McCarthy included two kinetic sculptures of male figures humping a tree and the floor, and in the next room both were laid out on tables, castrated.’
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Charles Ray Young Man, 2012
‘A 1,500-pound sculpture in solid stainless steel.’
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Paolo Schmidlin Porno Queen, 2007
‘Italian artist Paolo Schmidlin makes his second appearance on this list. Porno Queen is a controversial 2007 sculpture. It shows a topless Queen Elizabeth II. The figure seems totally disinterested in the pair of hands gripping her torso. One hand is fondling her breast. The sculpture debuted in Madrid, Spain at a show opened by King Juan Carlos. The work is funny but insulting. This figure was once labeled by the Queen’s photographer as “the work of a lunatic”’
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Eddie Peake Touch, 2012
‘Peake is best known for his 2012 performance piece Touch, a five-on-five 30-minute football (soccer) match in which male players were only clad in shoes and socks denoting their team. The sheer name of the event, Touch, has a homoerotic connotation, though, Peake seems to ask, “is there anything inherently sexual about naked men, with flaccid genitals, kicking a ball around a court?”’
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Jamie Wyeth Orca Bates, 1990
‘Orca Bates (born 1976) was the favorite model for artist Jamie Wyeth. He was first painted in late 1989, and numerous times over the next five years. Orca was a “wild child”, described by Jamie as “more of a seagull than a person”. Orca’s parents, Daniel and Amy Bates, had divorced by the time Orca was 12. Orca currently lives in Pine Island, New York and owns several companies (Orca’s Construction & Restoration Inc., Growboxco, and Muckland Hops LLC).’
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Gilles Berquet Various, 1980 – 2000
‘Gilles Berquet is a French artist known for his highly-sexual photographs featuring theatrical stagings of the woman’s body. Influenced by various mediums (adventure fictions, comics, films, television), Berquet exhibits our worst nightmares and most guilty desires. His works are regularly published in his own magazine Maniac as well as in Muscle Carabine.’
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Wagner Schwartz La Bête, 2017
‘Wagner Schwartz received the first death threat two days after lying naked on the floor of a museum in São Paulo. It was October 2017 and the Brazilian artist had invited members of his audience, which included children, to adjust his body: move a limb, roll him over, that kind of thing. This was for a dance piece called La Bête, a work he had already staged many times at home and abroad. So it was a shock to suddenly find himself the target of an increasingly emboldened network of rightwing and evangelical Christian groups. During La Bête, a four-year-old girl, encouraged by her mother, lifted Schwartz’s hand and then his foot, while another slightly older girl touched his head. These moments were caught on video and uploaded to Facebook. “The creators of this page,” says Schwartz, “put a caption on the video saying the museum incited paedophilia and that I was a paedophile. From this moment on, people who did not know me or the work decided La Bête was a threat.” Evangelical activists and members of the Movimento Brasil Livre, a group that claims to be libertarian, gathered outside the venue, the Museum of Modern Art (MAM), while 100,000 people signed a petition denouncing the work. One popular meme juxtaposed a picture of Schwartz with three bullets and the caption: “Paedophilia has a cure.”
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Daniel Edwards Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston, 2006
‘Singer Britney Spears has found her way into the world of art history. Artist Daniel Edwards has depicted Spears nude in a life sized statue giving birth on her hands and knees on a bearskin rug. The sculpture is meant to promote “Pro-Life” and depicts Britney in the pose of a natural birth (whereas in reality her son was born with a C-section and the celebrity was heavily drugged). The name of the sculpture is “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston”. The ‘art’ piece has caused a political storm but Edwards is keen to explain that he purely sees Brit as a modern fertility goddess. He said: “My feeling about it was that for her to give up her career, to sacrifice that essentially to have a child that seemed like a real dedication to birth. I guess I’m just really responding to the public’s general interest in her pregnancy and trying to capture the ultimate moment being the birth.”‘
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Bill Henson Various, 2003 – 2010
‘Photos of a naked teenager by artist Bill Henson are part of a taxpayer-funded exhibition teaching students about art and adolescence. The Monash Gallery of Art touring exhibition features photographs of a naked teenage boy, with his ribs protruding, and his pubic hair on display. The educational resource provided to students and teachers said the exhibition dealt with themes such as the human body, adolescence and suburbia. Students are also invited to look at Henson’s body of work via a weblink to the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, which was raided by police in 2008. This site depicts teenage girls naked and wrapped in tinsel or topless. It ties the photography to VCE subjects ranging from art to philosophy and asks students how successful Henson is at capturing youth and adolescence.’
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Jennifer Rubell Nutcrackers, 2011
‘Nutcrackers consists of 18 life-size interactive sculptures of women surrounding a pedestal holding one ton of Texas pecans. Each prefabricated female mannequin is mounted on her side in an odalisque position and has been retooled to function as a nutcracker. Visitors interact with each sculpture by placing a pecan in the mannequin’s inner thigh, then pushing down the upper leg to crack open the nut so they may eat it in the gallery. Inspired by nutcrackers depicting female figures – and in particular one found on the internet of Hillary Clinton – these interactive sculptures embody the two polar stereotypes of female power: the idealized, sexualized nude female form; and the too-powerful, nut-busting überwoman. The work also serves as a prompt to action, encouraging the viewer to transgress the traditional viewer-artwork boundary and complete the work by participating in it.’
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Elin Magnusson Skin, 2009
‘In a room on the seventh floor in a cold city, two people are waking up. They hug each other hard, still, it’s not enough to be able to forget where one body starts and the other ends. Neither of them has a sex or a face and they both wear more layers of skin than they ought to. Old disappointments and badly healed wounds have turned them into this. With a pair of scissors they ask each other for permission to expose, rip up and get in. Something forgotten turns into a memory that later transforms into fingers, and finally a hand. Hair begins to smell and the sweat is pouring. In close-ups about closeness we see the longing for something new.’
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Juan Rivero Various, 2013 – 2014
‘Juan Rivero’s art seeks to expose the human body to twist and distort it, to humiliate and display it in all its strength and neglect, in all its brilliance and misery, impressing on them the most personal, unique and exclusive to the idiosyncrasies of the artist, who can afford the spectacle of the terrible and the problematic, even the terrible action of mutilation, decomposition, negation, because what exists, even all that exists, until every being, irritates him.’
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David Shrigley Life Model, 2015
‘Life Model invites the public to draw a rather not so handsome male nude that occasionally urinates into a bucket.’
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Stelarc & Havve Fjell Shadow Suspension, 2013
‘SHADOW SUSPENION WAS A COLLABORATION WITH HAVVE FJELL FOR THE DALLAS SUSCON 2013, ORGANISED BY ALLEN FALKNER. IT WAS HELD AT THE LAKEWOOD THEATRE, DALLAS ON THE 30 MARCH. 6 BODIES, 3 MALES AND 3 FEMALES, WERE SUSPENDED HORIZONTALLY FACE-UP IN A HEXAGONAL CONFIGURATION. THE BODY STRUCTURE WAS SPUN, WHILST WINCHED UP AND LOWERED DOWN AND THE SOUNDS AMPLIFIED. THE DURATION OF THE SUSPENSION ITSELF WAS 23 MINUTES.’
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Sam Jinks Untitled (Kneeling Woman), 2015
‘A crowd of people jostle for a closer look at the naked woman crouching on her knees. Phones held aloft, the group shamelessly take pictures of her bare back and bottom — safe in the knowledge she won’t be waking up anytime soon. The remarkably life-like nude sculpture, created by Australian artist Sam Jinks, was by far the most photographed work at this year’s Art Basel in Hong Kong, a three-day art fair that has attracted tens of thousands of visitors since it first launched nearly three years ago.’
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Konstantin Somov Various (1930 – 1936)
‘In about 1930, Somov met Boris Mikhailovich Snejkovsky (born 23 July 1910), “the twenty-year old young man who would inspire several of Somov’s best later works. He would sit for straightforward portrait drawings, beautiful, mildly suggestive oil paintings, and he may have been the model for more erotic watercolors. Somov was a homosexual, but the exact nature of his relationship with his model and friend is unknown.”‘
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This naked woman crossed Interstate 95 near Flagler Beach, Florida, in footage shared on Facebook on March 22, 2019.
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银角大魔王 霜星的脚01 (2020)
‘锃明瓦亮嘿嘿嘿’
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‘Art lovers have stripped off for nude tours of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, a concept designed to remove the material barrier between artist and audience. The first adults-only tour, where clothes are discarded, attracted about 50 people after-hours on Wednesday evening to view James Turrell: A Retrospective, exploring the American’s love of light and landscape.’
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Thordis Adalsteinsdottir Bear Eats Man, 2013
‘A questionably offensive sculpture at Queens’ Socrates Sculpture Park has merited a fence installed around the work. Bear Eats Man by Thordis Adalsteinsdottir depicts a wooden bear gripping a man from behind and biting into his neck, but a closer look reveals that the victim may in fact have an erection. A wooden enclosure has been placed around the piece, with a warning notifying visitors about the subject material.’
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p.s. Hey. ** Laura, Hi, thanks for the braving. I’m sure Dead Kid’s Ass would have a happy home if you decide to build it. Thanks, the ending of ‘RT’ is probably my favorite thing in the film. I hope your nemesis didn’t flare. Wtf, you’ve done so much more than your time. When does karma swoop in? ** Dominik, Hi!!! I know, I don’t quite believe it. But can God or whoever please fast forward to September, like, right now, just to be safe? Of course love is the perfect sex partner, of course he is. Love wondering who you would most like or even would pay to see nude, G. ** Adem Berbic, No apologies necessary of course. The blog is like a trampoline. The ocean is underrated. Depends on the kind of fame, no? It’s hard to think analytically about something that encompasses both Clavicular and David Lynch, for instance. It is interesting that London still has the kind of international clout it does. London had a period where it practically owned the canon: Compton-Burnett, Rhys, Quin, Kane, Brophy, Frame, Green, Firbank, Welch, Brooke-Rose, Spark, Churchill, etc. The Beatles: Some of their work is unimpeachably great. The pervasiveness of the excitement they generated is singular. They essentially both invented in large part and expanded the perimeters of the pop song form as it is still practiced today. Their influence is absolutely massive. But do you need to listen to them? No, of course not. ** _Black_Acrylic, I think you would like the novel. Who are rooting for in the final? ** Tosh Berman, Fine wordage on The Beatles, sir. And presumably fine wordage on Proust as well. You’ve never read ‘What’s for Dinner?’ That surprises me. It’s lovely, surely needless to say. Your description of that reading is starting to ring a bell. That is how I tried to handle the bookstore events around ‘Smothered in Hugs’. At Skylight I read my Keanu Reeves interview with Bruce Hainley reading Keanu’s part. That was funny. I’ll ask my nephew what he remembers. Based on what I hear and read, I have no interest in the new Nolan film. Even when I’ve been ok with his films, it was always a take it or leave it thing. And I thought ‘Oppenheimer’ was unspeakably boring and empty, and I think that pretty much killed my curiosity about his stuff. If you see it, let me know. ** Hugo, The only clubs I know are the ones that knock you on the head. New York, wow. I hope you slip in there in between heat waves. What are you doing there? You couldn’t lose your edge, trust me. ** Thom, It’s a real pleasure. Your alternate ‘Frisk’ movie sounds dreamy compared to the actual. ‘Recollections of the Golden Triangle’. Awesome. That’s my favorite Robbe-Grillet novel, as you may know, although I do love everything he did. Sweet! My week is beginning to improve. You all geared up for the weekend? ** Carsten, Hi. If only originality was humanity’s top goal. Can you imagine? I guess my opinion is that there is lots of radical art and there always has been and it has never been everywhere and flooding the gates. That’s why it’s radical. The vast majority don’t want artistic radicality, never have. The mainstream has its slight ups and downs, but it’s never static. ** julian, Hi. ‘Coraline’ was the biggest reason I was so excited by the possible ‘God Jr.’ film. So good. I like Jarman’s films, I just don’t like ‘Sebastiane’. My favorite of his is ‘Last of England’. ** Steve, Your panic was understandable. I’m glad you can move on. So far it feels cooler out today, and that’s the prediction, but I’ll believe it when step outside. I guess I will do a gig post, yeah. I haven’t started making it, but I will. ** HaRpEr //, It’s a lovely novel, and if you like Schuyler, it’s a must. Schuyler’s poems can almost make me cry. I can’t think of another poet who does that to me. Interesting that you like ‘A Sentimental Novel’ so much. Me too, but it never really seemed to get much traction among even his readers. It did cause the predictable scandal here in France when it was released. I like what I’ve read of Renata Adler, but I never quite got what it is about her work that certain people are so big on. I think the one of hers that I liked the best is ‘Pitch Dark’. ** Uday, Billy Childish … I’ve read a little, here and there. I’m more familiar with his music, though. Let me know what you think if you score that book or any book by him. ** Okay. If you liked ‘Nudes’, then theoretically you will love ‘Nudes 2’. Or not. See you tomorrow.
James Schuyler What’s for Dinner?
Now available in North America 