Boundaries of the Body

After previous research and intervention, I began to realise that liberating women’s bodies was not the main focus, it was more about helping women to be consciously free and reducing the influence of the male gaze. I have researched the field of body art in order to find a new way to bring the attention of people not only to the body image of women, but also to their individuality, talent and ability.

1.The Body in Art

The human body is central to how we understand facets of identity such as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. People alter their bodies, hair, and clothing to align with or rebel against social conventions and to express messages to others around them. Many artists explore gender through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative process.

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of social upheavals in the United States and Europe, significant among them the fight for equality for women with regards to sexuality, reproductive rights, the family, and the workplace. Artists and art historians began to investigate how images in Western art and the media—more often than not produced by men—perpetuated idealizations of the female form. Feminist artists reclaimed the female body and depicted it through a variety of lenses. Around this time, the body took on another important role as a medium with which artists created their work.

2. Male Nude in Art

Most body art involves the female nude, but what about the male nude in art? I started researching this area.

The male nude of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has certainly honed its transgressive verve through the world of out-and-out performance art, as in such noted examples as Keith Boadwee producing video loops depicting himself shooting streams of paint from his anus to create Pollockian painterly marks.

But male nudity has also taken somewhat gentler and tender forms in the art of recent decades. One might think back, for instance, to the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s One Tiger, Eight Breasts, which he published on Twitter in 2010. While the image played on the Western tradition of artists’ portraits with their assistants or models, it emphasised a suitably 2010s notion of equality in its disruption of the perennial power relation between the clothed male artist and the naked female subject. All five of the image’s subjects – including the artist himself – were unclothed.

Such hot-button issues as age and disability have also been addressed in male nudes of the last few decades, the latter by Artur Zmijewski’s large-format photographs and videos showing able-bodied people ‘lending’ a limb to help individuals with physical disabilities to stand, walk and wash. The former, meanwhile, was intriguingly embraced by John Coplans in confrontational black-and-white close-ups of his body dating from his sixties — in the process, defying society’s tendency to disregard old age as ugly and unwelcome.

3. Boundaries of Body Art

Then where is the boundary of body art? In my research, I found that many body art forms are not well accepted and felt the intention of the creator by the audience. I hope that the interventions I make will reach a wider audience and be viewable by children. The reason I’m thinking about this point is I’ve been seeing Acne Studio adverts all over London recently and they don’t give me the desire to buy a handbag. I also think there is no limitation to posting them in the city centre without considering the impact on children and teenagers.

Swedish clothing brand Acne Studios’ new campaign for its Musubi handbags plastered throughout the city, the purses are displayed on the bare behinds of two models who are seen bent over at the waist.
The campaign — which features male dancers as the models and was shot by New York City photographer Talia Chetrit — also shows two men embracing with one holding a handbag to cover the other’s exposed derriere. Another model displays full frontal nudity, his knees bent and legs spread, with the purse shielding his privates.
The ads have residents debating whether they are artsy or awful.

Reference：

1. The human body in art, Rebecca Wall, Art And Culture
2. The body in art
3. Keith Boadwee
4. What Is the Role of the Male Nude in the Art of Today?, Gavin Lenaghan, Art And Culture, Artwork
5. Bad ass-vertising: Not all New Yorkers are behind these Acne Studios handbag ads
6. Physical Attractiveness, Personality, and Social Reactions to Peer Pressure, Gerald R. Adams
7. ‘Body Art’ and Social Status: Cutting, Tattooing and Piercing from a Feminist Perspective, Sheila Jeffreys
8. The influence of fashion magazines on the body image satisfaction of college women: An exploratory analysis, Turner, Sherry L; Hamilton, Heather; Jacobs, Meija; Angood, Laurie M; Deanne Hovde Dwyer, Adolescence; Roslyn Heights Vol. 32, Iss. 127, (Fall 1997): 603-14.