In the Buff - for Art's Sake

Art can be a cruel mistress, requiring her disciples to perform
brave feats in her service. Some artists must renounce the pleasures of
urban society for solitude. Others accept bohemian squalor and a lifetime
of being misunderstood. But for Spencer Tunick, the muse has prepared an
especially challenging task: convincing thousands of people to strip in
public.

For years, Tunick has been creating landscape art using the
human body—more accurately, lots of human bodies. In his installations,
hundreds or thousands of volunteers shed their clothes and arrange
themselves in carefully orchestrated patterns.

Brooklyn-based Tunick at first staged his works in New York City,
recruiting dozens or hundreds of volunteers through fliers and by word of
mouth. (In hip corners of lower Manhattan, it isn't too hard to find
people who will drop their pants for art.) His Barcelona installation featured more than 7,000 Spaniards in the buff. And his Amsterdam installation was shot in a tulip field.

Why are so many so willing to bare it all? Perhaps it's just the
love of art. But many of the participants interviewed in an HBO
documentary about Tunick's work say that being part of a naked horde is a
communitarian thrill.

"To lie nude on your back next to a stranger amongst 1,000 people
is a new experience," Tunick himself says. "The fact that they together
form something in a communal process gives people a new way to think
about why they are shedding their clothing."

Sociologist Sandra Schroer of Western Michigan University, who
wrote her master's thesis on nudism, agrees that public nudity can be
liberating. "It tends to equalize people—whatever you feel self-conscious
about, you look around and see that every single body has something wrong
with it," she says.

The drive to doff may go deeper, suggests Stanford University
psychology professor Phil Zimbardo, an expert on conformity. It can be an
act of defiance against convention, validated by the purpose of creating
beauty. "In this case, the artist encourages people to make a personal
statement of their willingness to break a taboo," he says. "By doing so
among a mass of others similarly inclined, there's no critical observer
to act as authority. Personal shame is transformed into a socially valued
act."

Tunick's work can be seen at spencertunick.com.