The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality

"Although this was published some years ago, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality is undimmed by the passage of time. She looks at how we frame the nude, and more specifically about the boundaries between what is and what is not considered nude. These border definitions in her case involve thinking about art and obscenity, or more subtly, thinking about pornography versus erotica . She also considers what these boundaries mean for who’s doing the looking and who’s doing the presenting. She’s a pioneering feminist art historian, whose work subsequent studies build upon. I have certainly absorbed its lessons. “ The term nude is quite mobile. And nudity is not the same as the nude. Nor is nudity the same as nudism, but they tend to overlap quite a lot in people’s minds.” I find it endlessly provocative. Thinking through categories, which move around depending on who’s looking and who’s valuing, is a challenging feat, when every set of cultural contexts is really fluid. Her writing about the life model I found particularly thought-provoking, looking at the (typically) male artist and the (typically) female model in relation to one another. On a personal level, this was fascinating to me. I was glad to work as a life model throughout my late teens and early 20s, in the 1990s, although it was impossible to ignore that it was almost always young women who were modelling and almost always older men who were drawing and painting in those classes. Lynda Nead scrutinises this tradition as part of her study. In my work I’ve tried to involve that perspective. I want to always think about the motivations of the models who are depicted in representations of the nude and where possible, try and name them and credit them because often, they’re not known. This is an extremely difficult task because pornography and obscenity are really in the eye of the beholder. Witness how attitudes to nudity have changed over time, and how they continue to change. From a legal standpoint, these concepts are incredibly hard to pin down. Part of what I was researching in relation to nudism throughout the twentieth century was the legal context. Legislation really came to the fore in the 1960s, when there were a lot of high-profile conflicts and now famous legal battles relating to obscenity that really tested legislation that had been in place in Britain since the mid-1800s . By the 1960s, these laws were hopelessly outdated, and yet there was still an effort to enforce them. The court proceedings around Lady Chatterley’s Lover are known as a pivotal cultural moment in the 1960s. But it was far from straightforward, even by the standards of the day. The representation of the nude body in different contexts, whether it was in photographs or films designed for ‘masturbatory aid’, shall we say, or whether it was something that was intended to be art, all of that came under scrutiny. It was fascinating to revisit the work of specific photographers and the court cases they were involved in. The arguing to and fro is absolutely preposterous at times, certainly by the standards of our own day. But what’s more, the litigants often can’t even say what it is they’re arguing about! It becomes like a soapbox shouting match with a lot of sparring and shadowboxing going on, where the subject is discussed quite obliquely, if at all, because many of the offending images are unmentionable in polite society at the time, so they’re intimated rather than referred to explicitly. “Witness how attitudes to nudity have changed over time, and how they continue to change. From a legal standpoint, these concepts are incredibly hard to pin down” It can seem quite ridiculous. For example, in my discussion of the British nudist movement of the mid-twentieth century, I point out how genitals and even pubic hair could not be displayed in naturist publications from the 1920s to the early 1970s. In fact, they could barely be show in any publications at all, whether it was a work of anthropology, or a work of titillating glamour photography or an art publication. One simply could not show pubic hair without risking prosecution, and so models had to be posed in elaborate ways, and photographs cropped in ways that the completely avoided that area of the anatomy. Models either had to turn their back to the camera – buttocks were okay – or the image would require editing. Frontal nudity was not okay if it showed genitals or pubic hair. What we find as a result is a range of avoidance strategies, including scraping out the offending area, or retouching the negative, to remove any evidence of pubic hair, leaving behind a strange empty space, much more conspicuous than the original depiction. Much of the debate around nudity at the time became about pubic hair itself, whether to show it or not, all of which now seems remarkably bizarre, and also historically distinct given what pubic hair is taken to mean in the 21st century, and new practices – and controversies – about shaving. These strange empty spaces of the era were worse than showing the hair itself, because they created a vacuum which of course was then flooded with interpretation. Censorial policies like these created an idea of forbidden fruit, which is exactly what the nudist movement was trying to avoid. Nudism was meant to be changing cultural ideas about shame, and changing cultural ideas about parts of the body being sexual. Nudists in Britain – then and now – wanted public or social nudity to be non-sexual."