Planomenal Industries

Heap No. 1: Spencer Tunick

Pink poured into the streets with the aesthetics of a city planner.
An articulated and differentiated mass writhing with personalization (each head of coloured hair, each skin tone demarcated by those neighbouring it, almost all body hair absent other than the pubic which, when shown, merely echoes the face). A nudity which seems impenetrable at each point but which lays like a grid that captures within each crevice; gaps without escape or release. More than anything, these bodies, never sufficiently deformed to represent the tonal spectrum which would give them force, represent the sort of articulated plastic casts used to contain mass produced desserts. The flesh becomes an armor against the world, a militarized human shield. A shaped unity that would only hint at the possibility of a smear but would be devoid of scent. As such, the images take on the quality of litter. As 'flesh sculptures' (the term Tunick uses for them) they make a piece of Ikea furniture look like a Giacometti.

The heap of non-orgiastic bodies, stripped of their innocence, possessing a redolent bourgeois variety of anonymity.
But is it even possible for a crowd to be naked? No, at least certainly not in this case. There is nothing more cloaked in Tunick's work than the human body for it is the clothing of environments. But as clothing, they reject the possibility of fashion and so persist as a stabilized and oppressive force. This is what is interesting about them ultimately, that they de-activate the power of fashion. Human beings become the clothing of their own shelters and landscapes in a kind of inverted shame; a doubled up hiding of the fragility of the world. Whatever exhibitionistic or fetishistic value (which is what is often played on in the press in the form of a consummate denial of its presence) is markedly absent. Rather there is a diminution of threat, quite literally since they are done in compliance with the police, and a lack of tactility. In effectively neutralizing the physicality of the body and 'naturalizing' it as an element of architecture, the work operates as a way of making flesh compliant and passive, robbing it of life in an anti-septic utopia.