For some reason that escapes me at the moment, broadcasters have become interested suddenly in the subject of nudity. I mentioned in a recent posting the fact that there is currently a TV series showing in the UK in which viewers are invited to join a televised life-drawing class. In a somewhat different vein, the classicist Prof. Mary Beard has just completed a two-part series on the subject of the nude in art. I’m still trying to sort out in my mind how to respond to it.
The first programme I didn’t particularly like, because it seemed to me that she had rather overdosed on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and his ideas about “the male gaze.” It was pretty ethnocentric in its choice of subject-matter, and I was left as the end of it with a series of “Yes, but…” responses. It became somewhat sensationalist when she sat in on a life-drawing session attended by a group of women on a hen party. We never really progressed beyond a rather giggly posing of the question as to what a “female gaze” might produce in these circumstances. The life-drawing class I attend each week contains many more female than male students, and about half of the models are men. The atmosphere (I imagine) is far from that of a hen-party. Fortunately, her treatment of the issues broadened somewhat in the second broadcast.
I’m still irked by her relative indifference to cultural comparison. There was a nod in the direction of Africa, but I would have loved to hear discussion of Indian art. The obvious question was dodged, as to what the cultural significance of nudity might be in those societies where portrayal of the human form in any way is discouraged, let alone the unclothed form. There was a constant elision of the questions of the meaning of sex and the meaning of nudity. This problem was hinted at in Beard’s treatment of depictions of the crucified Christ, where these dimensions are clearly separated (at least in general) but this was very much in passing.
Towards the end of the second broadcast Mary Beard submitted to being drawn nude, and the question of that as an experience was touched upon very briefly, but largely in relation to her age, and our perception of the older human body. Even so, I didn’t think that we got far beyond raising potential questions.
These two programmes did, to my mind, serve as a welcome antidote to the famous broadcasts back in the 1950s by Kenneth Clark, but shared with his work the tendency to allow the critic to provide the lens through which the subject was viewed, and the artist was allowed only occasionally a voice in the matter.