My friend Kate sent me this image she saw in Communication Arts Magazine and I think it speaks directly to the question I addressed in an earlier post regarding bodypainting and nakedness. In this foto I’d say that the woman is pretty thoroughly painted and very definitely naked. Reading perhaps too much into it, I think that dual impression is part of the intention of the artist here, for they have deliberately left the model’s pubic hair visible when it could have been hidden via the bodypainting, and that seems to me to be intended to make the viewer recognize the nakedness of the model. I can see this image as making a statement that a painted body is naked, just as a zebra is naked, no matter how thoroughly decorated it is. Even if the artist’s intentions were not that specific in regard to this question, I see this image as equating the painted model with the striped zebras, placing them both in the same state of nature/nakedness.
I also think it’s a cool photograph — how cool to have had the chance to do a photo shoot with live zebras — and I think that anyone would see this as a work of art. Although some people have trouble with nakedness in any form, having a naked human appear in a work of art is an established and accepted tradition, from the ancient Greeks and on. So much depends on context.
Check out the previous posts for more on this question:
Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the Communication Arts Magazine July/August edition that this image was in, and couldn’t find out who was the bodypainter or photographer from their web site http://www.commarts.com/ , so I can’t include proper credits here. If you know who generated this image, please add that information as a comment.
Why is it that if you paint underwear on a naked model she seems to be wearing more clothes than if you paint almost anything on a model wearing underwear?
My beat up cover from Vanity Fair, August, 1992. Demi Moore, body paint by Joanne Gair, photograph by Annie Liebovitz
There’s a slowly growing awareness of bodypainting in American Pop Culture, and I’d mark its beginning with Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair. Prior to that, bodypainting was for hippies, Woodstock and Goldie Hawn. More than just a masterful exhibition of a makeup artist’s ability, that cover broke boundaries.
Goldie Hawn from Laugh-In
This was a naked woman (a celebrity!) on the cover of a mainstream magazine — yet she wasn’t naked. It was a successful fashion image — yet she wasn’t wearing any clothes. Bodyart functioning as conceptual art, playing with perceptions and expectations of the viewer, maybe you can even connect it to what Man Ray did in his famous “bodyart” photograph.
The year before when she was on the cover naked and pregnant, Demi Moore positioned her arm to cover her breasts. This time, the body paint was deemed sufficient covering for this magazine to be displayed on newsstands, which we can take as a significant statement of “no” in regard to the question “is a painted body naked?”
As exciting for me as that cover was the little bit on the editor’s page about how long it took — demonstrating the serious approach that can be brought to body painting — and the name of the body painter: Joanne Gair. When did you ever see “body paint by” as a credit line before? She has got to be the closest thing we have to a “famous body painter” in mainstream consciousness, and this public understanding of bodypainting as illusion remains prevalent with her work in the very popular annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Regarding SI, I don’t think that anyone could argue that the painted models there are any more (or less) naked than the models in the real bikinis.
There is also a whole realm of Joanne Gair’s work beyond the painted bathing suits — look for her book “Body Painting”(2006). http://www.joannegair.com/books1.1.htm
I haven’t attempted to paint clothing on anyone since the 80s, my bodyart goals are different. I have though been required at times to paint my art over clothing by clients and convention producers, over a bra or such, and it just doesn’t look right. Maybe because when the women is naked, or just in nipple shields, the paint can better pull off the appearance of being a costume than if you can see the bra straps telling you that somebody is standing in front of you in their underwear. I’ve come to tell clients that this just doesn’t work right, so if they need real modesty we should have some kind of minimum clothing and work it into the design rather than try to hide it.
A few years back I was hired to do some “sexy” painting on a couple of models for a cd release party in a night club, with nipple covers and enough paint that they wouldn’t seem naked, plus the cd logos thrown in. One of the models showed up and wouldn’t take her bright blue satin underwear off — the client had hired the models and I don’t know what he told her to expect. She explained to me that she didn’t need to take her top off because she had seen photographs when body painters put fake clothing on naked models, so I should be able to make her look naked while she kept her bra on.
These days, there are also all those nifty prosthetic pieces from people such as BodyFX that make disguising the body parts part of the design — like “starfish boobs” for your topless mermaid. From their website: “BodyFX Prosthetics are new and innovative products that will help you to create artistic and discreet body paints. Instead of painting bra’s, you can use an artistic solution. To overcome the nudity factor, BodyFX Prosthetics can be glued over the whole breasts or just the nipples. Using BodyFX Prosthetics, you will find more clients (and models) are willing to try body-art as a means of entertainment.” http://www.bodyfx.co.nz/products/prosthetics.htm
Is bodypainting just a way to get naked women out in public? I saw the promotional film for a documentary in the works that’s about bodypainting as a fine art, and in it an artist takes real umbrage when the filmmaker asks him if bodypainting exploits women. Although I sympathize with the artist’s annoyance with the question, since we work in a field that is too often represented by disturbing images from Key West showing up in your emails, or lots of naked painted people on bicycles, I can understand why an interviewer would ask it. In a group discussion a few years back with the genius behind Pro-shields (designed to protect the innocent by thoroughly covering nipples on female models to be bodypainted) the question turned to why such trivial items as whether the outline of a nipple is visible or not under the paint can determine whether people find bodypainting offensive or not. I heard a phrase often repeated that in body art the painting is what is meant to be looked at, not the body, and that folks that are just seeing (or voyeuristically enjoying) the nakedness of the body are missing the art. Speaking as a bodypainter who puts painted people (male and female) into the public view, I think this is disingenuous and it puts too much of the burden on the viewer when it is us, the body artists, who choose to present this as our art. Bodypainting is certainly not clothing, and therefore does not objectively remove or cover the nakedness of the model, however much it transforms their identity (and I do feel that a well painted body looks more fully clothed than, say, a women in bikini at the beach). Clothing protects the body and it changes and disguises the shape of the body. Bodypaint celebrates the body, specifically it celebrates the beautiful form of the human body — or we would be painting on flat canvas instead. So when someone looks at the model we have painted they should be seeing the model, the body, as well as the art.
Painted at the Face and Body Art International Convention, 2009, on a beautiful model.
The idealized human form in Greek and Roman art — naked.
In Western Culture the veneration of the human form is exemplified by the prevalence of the naked body in art and painting, which goes back to the Classical Greek conception of the naked human form as being the symbolic representation of the perfection of Nature. Athletes, we are told, competed naked in the ancient Olympics. In fact, as the influence of the Classical Greek culture spread, body arts declined in Western Cultures because the marking of the body was seen as a disfigurement of the perfect form of the naked body. Perhaps it is a sign of our continuing cultural progression that bodypainting has begun to enter the main stream of public perception again, for this is an art form that reaches beyond the Greeks. The return of body art into Western/European Culture is a world-inspired expansion of our understanding of art.
The tradition of celebrating the human body continues in Western art
The underlying reasons for traditional body art — meaning the use of bodypainting, tattooing and scarification in traditional cultures — are in its social and ritualistic functions. As cultures evolve over time, these ritualistic functions gain aesthetic values as well, they become art. In “Primitive Art”, Franz Boas writes about how, once the symbolic requirements of the mask (or bodyart) are achieved, the mask maker’s goal is to make the object beautiful — the “artfulness” is always important. When we look at cultural examples in which body art has progressed past ritual to the point where it is done for more purely aesthetic reasons, when it has become a “fashion”, at the foundation of those acts is a desire to celebrate the innate beauty of the human form. Through art, to pay homage to what God (or Nature) has made when he made man. This is the cultural explanation for what is perhaps the most profound use of body art that can be sited: the body painting of the Southeast Nuba culture of Sudan, a tribal culture in which individuals turned themselves daily into living, painted works of art as a veneration of the wonder of creation, demonstrated in the perfection of the human form. This was done when the individual was in their youth, their prime, their bodies in peak form. The older or the infirm did not paint themselves.
“Whatever the source of the designs used on the body, the critical factor is that the body must be emphasized, complimented, enhanced. No design or artistic treatment must distract from the presentation of the physical form itself the chief reason, after all, for the personal art rests in the proper cultural exposure and celebration of the healthy body.” — James Farris, Nuba Personal Art
I compare this to our modern body artists, and suggest we should own up to it. If we are not celebrating the beauty of the human form when we paint bodies, why do we predominantly paint ideally shaped models, female or male?
This is not an exploitation of models, women or men. No more than Alfred Steiglitz was exploiting Georgia O’Keeffe in his photographs. This is a celebration. This is art. This is art painted on naked people, and there is nothing wrong in that, because people are beautiful whether they are naked or not.
