Is a painted body naked?

by Christopher Agostino

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.

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

To learn more about our programs and performances: http://www.agostinoarts.com

follow me for the face of the day: https://twitter.com/#!/storyfaces

is a painted body naked ? – Pt.2: Painting Clothing On vs. Painting on Clothing https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/18/is-a-painted-body-naked-pt-2-painting-clothing-on-vs-painting-on-clothing/
Why Body Painting? – 4: Radical Act – The essential celebration of our humanity / the ultimate modern art (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Men Getting Women Naked and Yves Klein – Female Nudity in Art (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Why Body Paint? – 1: Collaboration – Painting the Mangbetu Queen (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Why Body Painting? – 3: Origins – Touching Ancient Sources (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Why Body Painting? – 3A: Origins – Why did we start painting ourselves? Ancient bodypainting kit discovered at Blombos Cave (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Why Body Painting? – 2: Ultimate Collaboration – MODELS, Pt.2: Just how much a model can help, Amber and Kuniyoshi at FABAIC 2011 (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Kumadori – Japanese Kabuki Theatre Makeup (thestorybehindthefaces.com)

Traditional Bodyart – Nuba; Sudan; Africa – 1: changing my perceptions

Apr11

by Christopher Agostino

In the ’80s as I began to seek out cultural sources to better understand this art of transformation that I was engaged in I found “The Painted Body” by Michel Thévoz in the Strand bookstore. One photograph in the book stood out. The design was black and white, the gaze of the subject so direct. Most striking, it was strongly asymmetrical. Yet, still, balanced and beautiful in a way so different than any faces I was painting, or the Chinese Opera and Kabuki designs I had been studying. I wanted to learn how to paint a face like this.

Thévoz’s book remains unique in its focus more on the sociological significance and psychological underpinnings of transformational art than on its methods and practices. This photograph was only identified as “Nuba face painting, Sudan”, with no information about it in the text. It was at a place in the book exploring a subject that drew my attention because it related to what I was trying to achieve by painting people in designs from other cultures — the question of why our modern response to a painted face is fear and discomfort. He discusses Freud’s reasoning that we have “a reaction of dread at what we are nevertheless obliged to recognize as intimately our own, a reaction which in fact signals ‘the return of what we have driven back.'” Freud’s succinct phrase for this modern response to the primitive transformation: “disturbing strangeness”. To this day, I make it a point of painting at least a few faces that are disturbingly strange at even the nicest of events — it keeps people on their toes. I am glad that Michel Thévoz and Freud have given me an insight into this impulse, and I connect this photograph to that understanding.

When I first saw it, this black and white Nuba face reverberated with many connections to concepts I was trying to work out. It’s the same colors as the hundreds of KISS faces I had painted over and over on Friday and Saturday nights at Adventureland Amusement Park in the late ’70s, but it’s a KISS face as painted by Picasso. It was 30 years before I fully realized that particular connection in a design blending these two influences, but even at the time I saw that this “primitive” “tribal” face was very “modern”. As I began to do educational programs in High Schools on the history of masks and makeup, I found that these Nuba faces got a great reaction from the teens, just as the KISS faces did a decade before.

That black and white Nuba face is also so bold and so simple, another push in a direction I would pursue throughout my endeavors. And just the fact that it stood out as so very different in a book full of bizarre looking humans helped me to see that anything is possible in a facepainting design, there are no rules. That lesson has been pivotal for me.

My fascination with the bodyart of the Southeast Nuba of the Sudan only increased as I began to learn the story behind their faces, and from the initial inspiration of this one image a lot of work has flowed. The photograph in Thévoz’s, for example, was taken by Leni Riefenstahl, and there certainly is a story in that.

Search “Nuba” on this site for additional posts about this subject.

It only occurred to me as I was writing this that transforming hundreds of teens into KISS faces at an Amusement Park in 1977 may have been my first experience of tribal facepainting.

Why Body Painting? – 4: Radical Act – The essential celebration of our humanity / the ultimate modern art (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Face Painting – Kids for Kids Event – Inspirations from Africa and India, including Rangoli (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
Kumadori – Japanese Kabuki Theatre Makeup (thestorybehindthefaces.com)

Body Painting Fashion Show: The Odd Ball at Real Art Ways

Apr5

In April of 2009 Agostino Arts had a chance to try something new at The Odd Ball, the annual benefit party for Real Art Ways, an arts center in Hartford, CT. We brought a team of our Transformation bodypainters and a mountain of Aquacolors and got a group of their visual artists to join with us in creating a painted body fashion show.

The goal was two-fold: to create an unusual and fun performance art event for the benefit as entertainment for the guests, and to generate some excitement within the community of artists associated with Real Art Ways by giving them this opportunity to explore a new, living medium. Real Art Ways recruited the artists and volunteer models. Prior to the event I sent the artists some information about what kind of makeup we’d be bringing and the basics of how it applies, plus some blank body forms and the like that we use when designing new bodypaintings. The design process was left completely up to each individual artist. I also sent some information along for the models as to what they could expect.

We began the evening with a short workshop session to demonstrate the basic application techniques and some of the tricks of the trade, so that each artist could realize their own concept without feeling limited by any lack of previous experience. Aquacolors go on so easily that in the hands of painters it didn’t require much instruction to get them all going. Some of them had painted people before, and we had a number of our artists there to paint our own designs and help if needed. Bodypainting is fun, especially when it is being done just for its own sake like this. It is such a tactile and ephemeral process, and so collaborative between you and the model, that I think most artists experience a visceral sense of the creative act as they paint — and with a bunch of artists all together in one tight room painting away at a party it makes for a real good time. For me, it was especially exciting to see how artists used to painting on canvas and other medium brought their own style to the bodypainting.

We brought along a videographer, Ann Orrin, to document the process, and Real Art Ways had a studio photographer (Steven Laschever) shooting the finished results and a second photographer (G. Russell) also recording the process.

See the video: