Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy

"That’s what makes her work so rich. It is the breadth of what she does with the topic. She thinks so far beyond the nude on the gallery wall. She’s thinking about it through the history of philosophy, in relation to the history of religion. She thinks about it as well in all sorts of pop culture forms – advertising, entertainment, media. she can be quite playful, but she’s also a very impressive scholar. Every time I refer to this book, I find something new in it. She traces dualisms of many kinds: nature versus culture, civilised versus savage, chaste versus unholy. These are the kinds of conceptual structures around which moral values play out, and they are absolutely essential to understanding what nudity means to us. I really like the fact that her cover image of her book is of an unclothed baby, this idea that you’re born into this natural state of liberty, which then becomes culturally marked depending on where you’re born, when you’re born, and the culture into which you’re born. “Much of the discourse of naturism involves references to Eden, a lot of talk about Paradise and returning to something that’s been lost” Barcan shows the many contradictions in our historic and contemporary understandings, but also the kind of duality in the very concept of nudity, in the Christian or even previously in the Greek tradition . Nudity could be viewed as a symbol of purity, or simplicity, a kind of an original state, Alternatively, it could be seen as degradation or exposure. You see this in one of the foundational myths of Christianity, the story of Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of Eden and becoming aware of their nakedness. That’s very closely tied to the idea of original sin. It’s a duality that seems to make our culture uneasy still, even in the 21st century. Social media only amplifies the dilemma. When bodies are viewed by machines on a massive scale, you get new contradictions coming through in very particular ways, sometimes quite draconian ways. The likes of Facebook and Instagram have blanket bans on nudity, so even nude bodies that might be considered benign or even positive get excluded. These categories are so subtle and open to interpretation that even law courts, philosophers and religious scholars have difficulty defining them. It’s very hard to handle on the large scale of the web, in some sort of black and white, cut and dried way. Viennese art galleries actually created their own social network channel on OnlyFans because they found themselves unable to show images from their collections on mainstream social media. I think they partly did it to create a provocation and to show the illogicality of social media approaches, but the simple fact that they’ve taken out a channel on what is largely known as a porn site, typically reserved for camgirls and other sexual performers, gives an idea of the extent of the censorship of painting and sculpture on social media."