As regular readers of this blog will be aware, I am occupied at the moment by the task of finding a model to help with the preparation of a new piece of work. In that process I have found myself reflecting on the relationship between artists and the models who pose for us. As I believe I have observed in an earlier blog, this is a highly professional relationship, governed by a well-known code of conduct. Lay people, presumably influenced by the (for them) unusual importance of nudity in the situation, do have a tendency to assume that there might be something rather disreputable in it. I suppose that this is understandable. Once a sociologist (and they say) always a sociologist, and in this situation I have found myself thinking about the way in which the artist/model relationship is managed.*
I was struck by the similarity between the situation of artists and their models and that of other professionals whose practise involves an unusual degree of physical intimacy. Here too there are very well-entrenched rules inhibiting physical contact beyond very limited situations. I was thinking, for example, about my dentist, and it is clear that an unusually intimate form of contact is circumscribed here, whereby anything apart from the mouth appears to be definitely off limits. Then, I was reminded of the fact that I suffer from a mild asthma which requires that I attend an annual assessment clinic. In this context I cannot recall any physical contact at all between myself and the nurse. Nobody ever makes an explicit comment about what is required, as the rules are known. In fact, this seems to be the case also with the employment of artists’ models.
I have been attending life-drawing classes for many years now and nobody has ever given me explicit instruction about how to comport myself in relation to the models. It seems that these things are communicated quite subtly, but nevertheless, everybody knows the rules. This feature of the communication of implicit knowledge is interesting, and I suspect that it would turn out to be a common and important feature of professional training and conduct in a variety of areas.
*I discover that I dealt at some length with this topic, although from a different point of view, in my post of 12/04/19.