Tag: nudity

The Naked Nude by Frances Borzello, part 2

I wrote another post about The Naked Nude by Frances Borzello here.

In the “post script” of this book, added ten years after the original publication in 2012, Borzello mentions the nude and social media. She writes, “A decade ago, I referred to its new and perhaps final home in photography, but now it is clear that it [the nude] has found an even newer one in social media. The nude selfie, taken above all by women with a smartphone in the privacy of their bedrooms, has generated much excited chatter in the art wold – is the selfie the art form of our times? – as well as serious concern over the fact that it is often teens who are taking the photographs.” This was a little confusing to me. Selfies have been hugely prevalent on social media yes, but nude selfies? I’m not sure if when she says “nude” selfies she means “revealing” or “provocative” rather than actual total nudity. I don’t think nude selfies are posted often on social media unless it’s people who make pornographic content posting their work on platforms where this is allowed, like Twitter/X and Tumblr. Has she really seen a large number of nude selfies of teenagers on social media?

Anyway, I’m not sure I agree that the nude selfie or selfies in general are taken “above all by women”. It might be true and I guess she’s just going by her own observation. But from my observation of social media, many men also take selfies, selfies that are both physically revealing and not. And I have received dozens of unsolicited nude selfies, taken in the privacy of their bedrooms, from men in direct messages on Instagram. 

Borzello writes, “The words the critic John Berger wrote in 1972 about women in Ways of Seeing have taken on a whole new relevance: ‘Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. … Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. … The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself in to an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.’ He was talking about the ideal nude in art, but his words apply to the takers of today’s nude selfies. They present themselves with all the artifice and skills that a trained artist brings to the traditional nude, managing the lighting and finding the artful pose that hides the defects and exaggerates the good points. They are ‘dressed’ for nudity, as the ideal nude always has been, with perfect breasts, well-chosen jewellery, judicious depilation and a graceful pose. And it is there, on social media, that we leave her, the descendent of all those glorious nudes who decorate the walls of the world’s greatest galleries.”

I agree that John Berger’s words can apply to “todays nude selfies”. I wrote some notes about Ways of Seeing here. 

She then writes, “Meanwhile contemporary artists get on with the job of reinterpreting the nude, raising issues, picturing the taboo, and facing us with the raw honesty of their work, as Chantal Joffe does in her semi-naked self-portraits of her middle-aged body. Dedicated to telling the truth of what she sees and feels, the bold brush strokes and lack of glamour of Joffe’s self-presentations bear no relationship either to Kenneth Clark’s ideal nude of the past or to the sucked-in stomachs and blow-dried hair of today’s selfies.” 

I found this a little grating. I think I feel protective over the contemporary woman who takes a lot of selfies (and I guess I’m one of them). I wouldn’t argue that every woman/person who takes selfies and uses social media to present them is an artist. But I don’t like the way Borzello writes sort of dismissively about this act. The selfie-taking woman is often dismissed. The online girls are often dismissed. Women are often dismissed. By comparing/contrasting the act of selfie-taking directly with the so called “raw honesty” of contemporary artists who work with the nude, she basically reduces “the selfie” to a superficial, less “honest” form. Again, I’m not saying that taking selfies means you’re an artist but selfies can be a legitimate form/medium of artistic expression. They are a big part of my work. I don’t agree that “it is there, on social media, that we leave her, the descendent of all those glorious nudes who decorate the walls of the world’s greatest galleries.” I don’t think we leave her there. I don’t think we should. I don’t leave her there. Selfies can be superficial and bland and vapid and repetitive and dishonest and not-raw and so can other kinds of art/portraits/nudes. And they can also be the opposite. It’s also interesting that she only talks about selfies and their apparent vapidness (she didn’t use this exact word, this is my interpretation of her words) in relation to women. Again, if in her personal observation it is mostly women who take selfies/nude selfies and put them online, fair enough. But men also take them and post them on social media, whether as often as women do I don’t know, but they still do it. So what do we make of their selfies? It would seem they don’t undergo the same scrutiny as women do. Some of my earlier notes in this blog have touched on this kind of thing, for example:

I don’t think there is any possible way for a woman to photograph herself and avoid projection from (most) viewers of those photographs regarding their judgement/assumptions about her levels of attractiveness and femininity and her sexuality or their assumptions about the absence of those things. Analysing her/their sexuality or lack of, or attractiveness or lack of, or promiscuity or lack of, seems to always be a primary way into the work of women/feminine artists who use their bodies at the forefront of their work. There will be judgements made about her/their level of exhibitionism and why she has chosen this apparent level of exhibitionism. Woman are always placed in categories regarding their appearance and the choices they have made (or are presumed to have made) about how to “present” their appearance.

I’ve just started reading another book by Borzello called Seeing Ourselves which is specifically about self-portraits by women. I’m only a few pages in and she’s already written this: “Since vanity for was centuries personified by a woman looking in a mirror, a female self-portrait is evidence of this female vice, a real-life personification in the manner of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-portrait as ‘La Pittura’, but far more damning. This negative view of women and their self-portraiture is part of a larger set of attitudes about women and art, all stemming from the fact that the female artist was a minority member of the art world with little control over the judgements, views and rules affecting her.”

This view is more aligned with my own and seems contradictory to her reaction to the selfie. Maybe I’m fixating on the selfie thing too much.

I like reading about art and learning about art but I usually do it in a fairly meandering, fragmented kind of way. It’s hard for me to read an entire book about a topic and focus on it and make notes and really take it all in and think deeply about it. So I’m appreciating that doing this course is challenging me to do that. Not that book research is the only or best kind, but there is something useful about delving into a specific topic in this way. It’s useful for me to think more about the origins of things (like, “the nude” and how they’ve developed over time. It helps put things into context.

An artwork pictured in The Naked Nude that stood out to me was this painting by Marlene Dumas:

I don’t know exactly if I like it and if I like it why I like it but it was just striking to me.

silhouette self-portraits

I made these self-portraits yesterday in a kind of accidental way. I was getting changed to take some of my usual self-portraits and I noticed the silhouette of my body on the wall in the light and took these.

I like experimenting with ways to subtly distort or strain my body in my photos, usually I do that by physically putting myself in certain positions. With these, I didn’t have to really do anything strenuous with my body, the shadow and light distorted things and created a strangeness naturally.

The Naked Nude by Frances Borzello

I’ve been reading The Naked Nude by Frances Borzello.

There’s a lot that it makes me think about so I don’t think I can capture everything in one blog post. I might make another post sometime. But here are some notes for now.

  • Borzello writes about her perception of the new nude in art. The contemporary nude, the “naked” nude. She argues that contemporary artists have “turned their backs on the conventional presentation of the ideal nude in favour of something grittier imbued with contemporary concerns”.
  • She writes about The Nude, written by Kenneth Clark in 1956. She writes Kenneth Clark “… suggested a rationale that has since taken on the status of one of the ‘great statements’ of art history: ‘To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes … The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.’ ” So, she believes that contemporary artists have depicted a “naked nude”. In contemporary art, we see nudes that are also aesthetically and conceptually “naked”, that are depicted without denial of reality, sexuality, rawness, daily life. Nudity in contemporary art is not about representing an aesthetically ideal body type.
  • She writes, “While the nude in commercial photographs is beautiful, handsome, sexy, perfect, the nude that interests the artists of today is none of these things. Theirs is a nude that responds to our age, an age in which the body is the focus for many of the issues that absorb us. Articles about food, weight, fashion, sexuality, health, genetics, pornography, medicine, science, exercise, plastic surgery – the list is infinitely expandable – bombard us online, on TV, in books, newspapers and magazines.” She describes the contradictions of such media and the conflicting messages sent, writing, “For every article about underweight fashion models and the prevalence of eating disorders in the industry, there is one by a media personality celebrating the curves often proudly announced as synthetic. Information about healthy eating exists alongside reports of increasing obesity in the young. Plastic surgery goes wrong, screams a headline one day while on the next a lottery winer says she is giving breast augmentations to her sisters. Men are now ridiculed for their imperfections as women have been for centuries. The body is a contemporary obsession.”
  • She argues that artists today who work with nudity “reveal an awareness of all these issues and incongruities. They have turned their back on perfection in order to face up to the concerns and contradictions that surround the 21st-century body.” She writes, “In its refusal to edit out the unacceptable, the new nude represents something not seen before in art. It is a very naked nude, created to confront today’s attitudes and anxieties … What we have now is a nude that revels in Clark’s ‘uncomfortable overtones’. It is the naked nude, the nude recycled for our times.”
  • I have been considering my self-portraits in relation to the way Borzello views the contemporary nude. When I began reading this book, my first thought was that my self-portraits don’t really fit in to what she’s describing in terms of how she perceives the relationship between contemporary artists and the nude. When I photograph and film my body, I am not trying to reveal my physical flaws and imperfections. I choose lighting and angles and subtle filters that minimise the texture of my skin. I make the most of my “youthfulness”, my “femaleness”. These are loaded terms of course, I’m using them here in a pretty straightforward sense. I am exploring an aesthetic of fantasy. I’m not trying to reveal my ugliness or rawness in an obvious way. However, upon further reflection, I feel that my work does “face up to the concerns and contradictions that surround the 21st-century body”. While I’m not trying to shine a light on the rawness of my body in an aesthetic sense, this in itself is a deliberate choice related to trying to elicit questions around using the body as a viable commodity. I agree with Frances’ statement that “The body is a contemporary obsession”. I don’t know if it’s only a contemporary obsession. I feel like surely it’s always been an obsession? But regardless, it’s definitely an obsession right now. In my self-portraits, I don’t “refuse to edit out the unacceptable”. But at the same time I think my portraits do attempt to acknowledge “the concerns and contradictions that surround the 21st-century body”. How do they do this? Firstly, my project centres on commodification of the self. This is absolutely a 21st century concern. Social media now offers the opportunity for people to earn their living by performing and commodifying the most minute and banal capturing-s of a version of the most minute and banal moments of their everyday life. We can commodify our everyday “self” and body and existence like never before. We can display and talk about our bodies online for money. We can make a TikTok account about skincare or make-up or working out or meal-planning. We can commodify our bodies in a sexualised context through social media and OnlyFans. The internet and social media allow us to create and share content made from our bodies just using our phones and we can earn money doing this.
  • One of the key ways I’m presenting my self-portraits is online using OnlyFans. I am selling my self and my body on this platform for financial gain. The work I present on OF is art (in my opinion). Therefore, I am making money from my art by using OF. This process elicits questions around perceptions of using one’s body in art and selling the body in a contemporary context. If I’m making work for OF, a platform primarily used for pornographic or erotic or sexually charged content, does that mean my primary goal is to create images and videos that my audience will find sexually appealing? If I am trying to make images that are sexually appealing, are they art? Are they good art? Or are they a less brave “nude”? Are they less interesting than the work made by artists who embrace a more “naked” nude? I think making a project that questions these things constitutes art that acknowledges “the concerns and contradictions that surround the 21st-century body”.
  • Aside from the context of how I am presenting the work, I think there is an element to the actual imagery itself that embraces the concept of the “naked” nude. I think if you look at one image on it’s own, it could potentially look like any somewhat sanitised image of a youngish, white, “female” body, a body that is trying to be a little attractive and provocative. For example:

But I think, or hope, that if the images are presented in a group or a mass, that something else might happen:

  • I hope that the replication, repetition, saturation does something. What do I want it to do? I want it to illuminate something to do with the grip of capitalism on every facet of our lives (my life). I believe simultaneously that art is sacred and that nothing is sacred. It doesn’t matter how “naked” my nudes are or aren’t. I want to make money and I want to make money from my art. Anything and everything you love or find sacred or unique or special can easily be commodified. It feels like there is an inevitability to this. It feels like now more than ever, people are trying to make money in the “easiest” way possible. I don’t mean that as a judgement, I relate to it. There is a palpable collective exhaustion. People want to feel secure, free, less run-down. I know I’m generalising.
  • There is also something to do with performing the self that is enmeshed within the deliberate replication, repetition, saturation, mass of similar images. The way that so many of us upload a version of our lives to the internet, an alternative version of ourselves that lives in a screen. And the way that so many of these online versions of people start to look the same, interchangeable, as you scroll through whatever platform you’re scrolling. This is a contemporary concern.
  • Alongside the “saturation” factor, or in tandem with it, is the choices I make about how my body is configured in the images. I try to create poses that are a little unnatural, or isolate parts of my body to create an image that feels a little awkward or unfinished or accidental. I think this contributes to something that lifts the work slightly away from a non-contemporary or non-naked nude (in the way Borzello would classify it).
  • So I guess there is a “nakedness” to this work in the sense that I’m allowing myself to embrace the intersection of the sacred and the selling, which can be a taboo.
  • If my self-portraits don’t qualify as “naked” nudes, according to Borzello, that’s okay with me. I’m just trying to judge them through the lens she proposes as an exercise so I can learn more about them.
  • I feel really ugh and awkward posting this because I feel like I haven’t gotten to the point or articulated myself well at all.

re-reflecting on OnlyFans, nudity, superficial aesthetics, confused thoughts

I went back over my previous posts about OnlyFans so I could reflect on my past reflections.

I previously wrote: I’m often addressing ideas around performance of the self online within my work. It’s important to consider why this is still worth talking about, given that performing the self online is no longer as novel as it once was. We are completely saturated by it. I guess this saturation is what I’m interested in now. And using OnlyFans as an artistic medium is an opportunity to explore this. There is both a bleakness and a freedom in monetising your “self”. I like the idea of pushing this to the limits of superficiality or mundanity. Presenting and witnessing, presenting and witnessing, the ultimate freedom and the ultimate confinement. Monetising my self-portraits in this way is like… I’m just making money from existing in such a basic way. The self-portraits take time and work to make, yes. They take thought and time and energy and logistics and conceptualising and contemplation. But making this work is meaningful to me. And the images are just me, existing. I don’t have to speak, I don’t have to smile.

I used the words “superficiality and mundanity” above and I’ve been increasingly interested in the idea of superficiality in terms of an aesthetic. I’ve been reading a lot about nudity and nakedness in art and will write a post more dedicated to that. But for now I’ll say that I’m interested in perceptions and judgements of nudity and nakedness in art. There is this desire for “authenticity” online – in relation to human bodies. Of course, the mainstream conversations online around this only really ever revolve around women or “femaleness”. Women have to be both perfect and authentic (if authenticity assumes that perfection can’t exist). There is a lot of pressure to be perfect and also a lot of pressure to not pretend you’re perfect, because that makes you fake which is undesirable.

Women seem to have to bear a lot of pressure to not do things that are potentially harmful to other women – if we get lip filler and use filters on our photos we are setting unrealistic standards for other women about what a “real” woman looks like. But we also have to support all women and all their choices and be a girl’s girl. All of this is sort of a tangent that I’m actually not that interested in delving into in a really deep way in my work, I guess I’m just letting my mind wander as I think about ideas of being “superficial” in relation to creating images of myself. With my self-portraits, I’ve been intuitively drawn to a style or aesthetic that has a kind of unreality to it. I never digitally edit my actual body (I wouldn’t even know how to) but I am using and posing and contorting my body in very specific ways when I make the portraits. And I sometimes edit in basic ways to change the light or enhance a blurriness to create a glowing effect or something, like in the photo below.

What is authenticity and is that what I should be aiming for when I make an image of myself? In my portraits I’m showing myself how I want to show myself. So when someone looks at these photos, they are seeing something akin to my hope and my desire. Is that not authentic? I don’t know. Do I care about being authentic? I care about making the art I want to make. To me, that would be the ultimate authenticity, regardless of aesthetic.

Presenting my portraits on OnlyFans puts them into a context where the images are more likely to be sexualised, or rather, I am more likely to receive feedback from viewers who are looking at the images through that lens. You can always be sexualised by someone in any space, real or virtual, whether you’re expecting or wanting that or not. I have experienced that many times, as have most women.

Does having an audience on OnlyFans mean that I am focused on trying to look sexually appealing in my portraits? And if so, is that bad? I started taking self-portraits in this style before I started using OnlyFans. When I started using OF I recognised that the style of my work would potentially be interesting to share in that space because while they are not highly explicit they have a kind of sexual/sensual tone and some contain partial nudity. My point is, I started making work in this style because I wanted to explore certain concepts and aesthetics. Now that I am presenting them on OF, I am still creating the work according to my own standards and set of conceptual/aesthetic guidelines, I’m just sharing it in this particular way that maybe adds another layer to how it could be perceived.

But am I trying to look appealing? Yes. Because I’m exploring ideas of fantasy. I am not trying to create or present or perform a “real world’. But I’m also trying to raise questions about the slippage between fantasy and reality. That’s what I’m very interested in. I’m interested in superficiality and recognition of superficiality. I’m interested in elevating something to a state of hyperreality. I like raising questions about levels of performance in everyday life and in art. These topics mean a lot to me and it makes it kind of hard to write about, I’m getting a headache right now. Because I have so much I want to say that I feel I can’t articulate,

I was talking to someone I know from Instagram about it, here is some of our conversation. I’m referencing The Naked Nude by Frances Borzello, the book I’m reading at the moment which I will write a separate post about.

(He is saying that yes he understands and he likes the phrase about the nude becoming naked again.)

(He’s asking why nudity is more comfortable than nakedness and if my photos represent both things.)

(He says he likes that I said this and that it makes sense.)

Ahn Jun and Carla J Williams

Some thoughts about the self-portraits of two artists.

Ahn Jun 1981 –

I love Ahn’s self-portraits in which she is posed on rooftops and window ledges of high-rise buildings. In some of the portraits the point of view is her own – we can just see part of her legs and her perspective of the street below her. In others we can see her whole body in it’s precarious position. Sometimes her surroundings are the focus and her body almost becomes part of the background, you have to search for it. In others her body is in focus.

Cityscapes are very appealing to me and I love the way Ahn places herself in these environments. There is a kind of discomfort that arises when looking at an image of someone doing something dangerous and precarious and unusual. But to me her portraits simultaneously contain a delicacy and serenity and this contrast is compelling. Something I find interesting about her work is that these self-portraits contain minimal awareness of an audience. I don’t get the sense within the image that she is hyper conscious of being watched by a viewer. I believe self-portraits are inherently performative, so her work therefore has an element of this but to a lesser extent than I’d usually observe in the self-portraits of other artists I’m drawn to. This is just my perception. Maybe it’s because the environment is so significant and specific and integral to the work.

Image source: https://ahnjun.com/section/247497-Self-Portrait%282008-2013%29.html

Carla J Williams 1965 –

I learned of Carla’s work recently because Tom sent me this article which he thought would interest me and he was right. Carla talks about discovering her father’s porn magazines as a child, stating that she was “in awe” of the women she saw in them and she thought “they had to be the baddest women in the world to feel free enough to pose in this manner”. She began taking self-portraits in college, citing the magazines as influences. She says, “I didn’t want to be in Playboy or Jet, but I wanted to be seen, and I wanted to be in control of what that looked like”. This reminds me of my own feelings about wanting to control my own image, even if I can’t control how that image is perceived.

I was fascinated to read about Carla’s work and about porn being an influence for her because I feel like women are both constantly sexualised and objectified but are also not allowed to be overtly sexual or be perceived as objectifying themselves on their own terms. We have to “respect ourselves”, while being disrespected from the outside. Reading that she openly owns those porn magazines as an influence was interesting to me, it feels like something a “respectable” woman/artist “shouldn’t” view as inspiration, especially if it’s in a positive way. I’m also drawn to her work aesthetically. Some of her photos have an ethereal quality that reminds me of Francesca Woodman, who I wrote about previously. The self-portraits I’m taking at the moment sometimes have similar qualities I think, in a digital version. I love blurriness and double exposure.

Images source: https://www.carlajwilliams.net/photographic-work-1

recent self-portraits

Some thoughts.

  • These photos are a less literal response to the provocation She has a body of work than some of my previous self-portraits. In these, I simply used costumes that connote “work” to me (white shirt and pencil skirt, men’s button down business shirt). There is also more physical work in these images, the posing and performing and contorting. I like pushing some of the poses into a kind of abstracted place.
  • I’ve learned that my instinct when I photograph myself is to pose and perform in a way that is kind of provocative. It’s sort of deliberate and not deliberate at the same time. It’s very automatic. Where did that come from? I think performance is so ingrained in me, or actually self-consciousness is ingrained in me. Or maybe I’m not being performative. Maybe I’m being authentic. I hate having my photo taken by other people. It makes me anxious to an irrational point, sometimes even depressed and angry. I hate not being in control of my own image. In these photos, I’m in control of my image. So if this is how I feel comfortable, maybe this is an authentic performance?

  • Also, what makes something provocative? And what do I mean by provocative? I’m talking about the partial/implied nudity in the photos. Am I talking about sexual provocation? Maybe, but nudity doesn’t automatically equal something sexual, although it does for the most part when the body in question is “female”.