“…painting affords the dancers a stronger feel for the role and the character they are playing. What they have is no longer a mask. It is a new skin. The art of body painting means that we are able to become, for a moment, something, or someone, else…I love watching how the dancers, seeing their transformed faces in the mirror, begin to seek new forms of movement and dance and new poses as they endeavor to adapt to their new skin.” — Agnieszka Glińska
The recent issue of Make Up International magazine from Kryolan Professional Make-up contained an article on a beautiful book of body art from the bodypainting dance company Art Color Ballet of Poland. The book, titled “Art_Color_Ballet”, is available in the U.S. from retailers who carry Kryolan make-up. I got my copy at the FABAIC convention last May, and I treasure it. It is full of stunning fine art photographs of painted bodies in juxtaposition with painted canvases as well as photographs of bodies in motion in their dance performances.
I have only been fortunate enough to see Art Color Ballet in performance once, with the championship winning piece in the UV Competition at the 2009 World Bodypainting Festival in Austria. At that festival I did get to speak briefly with their founder, Agnieszka Glińska, at a time when she wasn’t busy painting. I told her that I take great inspiration from the work her company does—from the very idea of forming a dance company in which bodypainting is such an integral part—and she was gracious enough to take a look at a video of the Nuba Bird dance piece with my bodypainting designs. She also gave me a small print of one of their fine art bodypaintings, and I was excited to see that it is the one they’ve now used for the cover of the book (above).
You can find information and videos on their website: http://www.baletcolor.pl/?lng=en You can also find additional videos on You Tube
“The human body has also proved to be an inspiration. From the dawn of humanity, it has fascinated artists. In its very self, it is an expression of time and time’s transience. At first innocent and virgin, then erogenic and arousing, so as finally to intrigue in its atrophy and departing. In its complexion, smoothness and, with time, its patina, the shell in which we are clad sends forth a mysterious message as to our presence here on earth. In movement, the body speaks of its vitality; when we cover it in color, its eloquence will be all the greater.” –Leszek Madzik, from the introduction to Art_Color_Ballet
My snapshot of Art Color Ballet in performance at the 2009 WBF
The resultant print of an Yves Klein Anthropometry
by Christopher Agostino
The post I wrote about possible origins of bodypainting in prehistoric times drew a comment that “man started bodypainting to get women naked” — I might have trashed it as flippant sexism until I saw it was from an accomplished painter with the right to say whatever he wants, Brian Wolfe. Another friend chimed in with the observation that way, way back then nakedness was probably the norm. Not today. The nakedness of the people we paint remains an issue for bodypainters, especially here in the U.S.—but I am not writing about that today (see the post: is a painted body naked?https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/15/is-a-painted-body-naked/ )
"Yves Klein Blue" (or "International Klein Blue" as he called it)
I did think of Brian’s comment in a different context: Yves Klein and his “Anthropometries”. Yves Klein is one of my heroes, one of the radical conceptual artists that could make art with their minds as well as their hands. There was the brilliance of Marcel Duchamp who reimagined the answer to “what is art?”, and then there was the playfulness of Ives Klein who invented his own color—what a concept that is, to invent your own color. I’ve had Yves Klein on the brain as I have been writing and thinking about the question “why body painting?”, because his Anthropometries are the first thing I think of when I think of “bodypainting as art”.
Anthropometry performance 1960
The linkage to Brian’s comment came from a review I’d read about a recent Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn Musuem (http://calitreview.com/9415) that opined that we (the viewer) have to confront the question of sexism in the Anthropometry performances. That there is something troubling about a formally dressed male creating art in public with completely naked women. I will add that they are being observed by a fashionably dressed audience of men and women and accompanied by a group of classical musicians, also formal in appearance. The only people naked in the room are the women serving as the objects of art. This is not a “happening” with everyone getting naked and painted. This is a lot of people with clothes on looking at naked women in an art gallery.
He took the naked women off the wall, out of the frame, right into the middle of the gallery.It is disturbing, and disturbing your audience is a vehicle for getting them to pay attention and engage with the art. Confronted by naked women being used as paint brushes, the spectators have to deal with the central role of the human body in art—especially the naked female form in fine art. And, from my perspective, that makes this the primary example of bodypainting as fine art because it so completely centers on the body in the creative process—there is no art here without the body as it is the naked body itself that makes this a process of art as the models cover themselves in his YKB paint and press themselves against the canvas, and it is the naked body that forms the resultant object of art in the prints that remain as the final product. The video from the Hirshhorn Museum (below) relays how Klein felt his hands were no longer enough to create art. He needed “living brushes”, the models themselves, to create an art form “designed to prevent that aesthetic objectivation which would give prevalence to the two-dimensional composition and make us overlook its bodily origins”—as analyzed by Michel Thévoz in The Painted Body. The text by Pierre Restany for the invitation card to Klein’s Anthropometry performance of 1960 makes the direct linkage between this act and those ancient origins of bodyart I write about: “The blue gesture released by Yves Klein runs back through forty thousand years of modern art to link up with the anonymous markings, the both sufficient and necessary markings in that dawn of our world, which at Lascaux and Altamira signified man’s awakening to self-consciousness and the world.” (See? I don’t just make all this stuff up.)
An "Anthropometry/Shroud"
To achieve that end, Klein not only needed to use the model as the brush, he needed the model to be naked. Nudity continues to have a radical role in art. Years ago I saw a modern dance performance in which the dancer was on stage alone completely naked. I believe the piece was called “Primate”, and she moved in an animal manner, comfortable in her nakedness, allowing the audience to consider what was so shameful about being naked? A recent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art included live naked people and directly addressed the taboo of nakedness in public. One part of the exhibit had two naked people standing in a doorway so that the museum visitor had to brush past them in order to get through the door, confronting their own feeling of discomfort being so close to a naked stranger. (I didn’t see this exhibit so this description is based on a critics’ radio interview about it. The exhibit: Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present March 14–May 31, 2010http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/965 )
At the origins of bodyart, the nakedness of the person being painted was probably not an issue. We have a different relationship with our bodies now and bodypainting functions in a very different context. In his analysis of the bodyart of the Southeast Nuba, James Farris states that the most significant element of the bodyart is the medium it is produced on, the human body—but that’s in reference to a culture in which nudity and very minimal clothing is commonplace. To risk misappropriating Marshall McLuhan‘s work (which, according to Woody Allen, is easy to do) by linking him to this idea of Farris, if the “medium is the message” than what is the contextual message embedded in the medium of a naked body in public in our current, body-conscious, sexually excitable but morally prudish, American society?
Brian and Nick Wolfe painting their championship winning design at the World Body Painting Festival 2009
Regarding the question of sexism in Yves Kein’s Anthropometries, we are back to Brian’s comment about male artists getting women to take their clothes off. Looking at the male dominated history of fine art it is hard to argue with. As I thought about this, though, it occurred to me that if you took a survey of all the naked bodies in paintings and sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (most of which would have been created by male artists) the percentage of naked men vs. women depicted would be considerably higher than the relative proportion of male to female models at your average bodypainting competition or convention, and that’s an environment that will have as many female artists as males, so in the modern bodypainting world perhaps Brian’s comment needs to be expanded to say that everyone likes to get women to take their clothes off.
about Anthropometry, from the Hirschhorn Museum show:
a video of the live performance, in color, but with cheesy music rather than his original Yves Klein Monotone Symphony:
An excerpt from: Art Review: Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers at the Hirshhorn, Washington, DC By Alix Mckenna, June 3rd, 2010 at 10:00 am
In one of Klein’s, racier projects, the Anthropometry series, the artist dressed to the nines and directed naked ladies while they painted themselves in IKB paint and impressed their bodies onto the canvas. Musicians played in the background and an audience of art lovers watched the spectacle. The impression of these bodies represented the energy and temporal nature of the human form. While Klein spoke about his Anthropometry pieces in cosmic and asexual terms, the edginess of the project cannot be denied and is one of its greatest strengths. The mysterious, headless impressions reduce women to their most elemental signifying components. Against a white canvas, we see cosmic blue breasts and thighs and stomachs. They are as primitive and as powerful as the Venus of Willendorf. http://calitreview.com/9415
Traditional Significance: in cultures with profound traditions of bodypainting it is a celebration of the beauty of the human form. Among the Southeast Nuba the most elaborate painting is reserved for the young men in their prime health and youthful vigor. In the highlands of Papua New Guinea the brightly colored body-decoration presents a heightened self-image, an idealized form beyond the individuals’s daily persona.
Primal Transformation: anthropologists now point to the use of symbols and the beginnings of art as the igniting evolutionary spark of modern humanity, the defining impetus of the final great leap from animal to human— we are the symbolic species. And, as likely as not, that first act of art was to paint ourselves.
Radical Theory: to paint a body today is a profound expression of that which makes us human, transcending the boundary of our physical, animal form through the act of making ourselves into art, into the essential celebration of our consciousness — reaching back to our origins through the most traditional of all art forms while startling the modern viewer with the acknowledgement of our naked identity as human animals.
Traditional celebratory bodypainting from Papua New Guinea
Why does a painted, naked body evoke such a response? How can the most ancient of art forms be so surprising today?
I venture to say that a painted, naked body would be more disturbing in effect on an unsuspecting viewer than a body merely naked. A naked body is more readily comprehensible and our reaction more easily determined, or perhaps pre-determined, depending on the brand of morality we bring to the occasion. A fully painted body is less easily definable. It is both naked and clothed, both primitive and civilized—evoking the quality of “disturbing strangeness” as described by Freud, an uncomfortable reaction to “the return of what we have driven back” as we moved from tribal to modern culture. As relayed by Michel Thévoz, Freud was talking about why a member of modern society reacts so strongly, so negatively, to the painted faces of “primitive” people. I think there is an additional element of confusion, an additional uncertainty in how to react, when that unsuspecting modern viewer is confronted by a live example of full fine art bodypainting, because in addition to an apparent return to the primitive (a naked painted body) there is also the apparent elevation to higher culture (as that body has become art).
To continue in an overreaching, radical vein, I can make the argument that bodypainting is today an art form which is capable of fulfilling the quest of the artists 100 years ago who threw out the academic conventions to create “Modern Art” in order to re-establish the ability of visual art to challenge society, compel emotional response and shock the viewer into paying attention—in order to return art to it’s original function, the function art has in primitive cultures, of defining our humanity and raising individual and social consciousness.
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So to bring this back to the question “why body painting?”, as in “why do I paint bodies?” The simple answer is because its effective. To think that bodypainting presented in a modern context is capable of functioning in the same revolutionary way as the radical art of the early modern artists is not to say that I paint bodies in order to be the next Picasso. I do however find that artistic bodypainting (and facepainting, for that matter) have an effect on consciousness in a local, immediate sense both for the person you paint and for the people that see them. When you paint someone at an event, it injects a quality of magic, of mystery, into our modern civilized lives. In returning a glimpse of the primitive, it allows for questions about human identity and the permanence of form, and in that way it touches upon the original, transformative power of art.
