The Human Body

The terms of the human body, some might say, are determined through a theoretical dissection of both the private environments and public atmospheres in which we live. By terms, the rules and evaluations of bodily condition, I mean to establish a division of perception. The first divide is that of the social body, the perception of our bodies in relation to a larger intellectual and sexualcommunity, one that views each other in groups. The second divide is the condition of our nature, a perception of the body without relation or comparison, a singular entity that is independent, formless, and free. This segregation of seeing is general and yet universal because it capitalizes our differences. By examining these seeming generalizations, we break them down. It is through a demolition andreconstruction of these concepts that we can assign specificity and reason to these ways in which we look.

It is in the freeing of both natural and artificial bodies that art is created. For while some artist’s depend on the predisposition of their subjects to provide the work with it’s primary message and meaning, other artists rely on a temporal and physical freedom, an ability to use objectswhile also freeing them of their social significance and thus endowing them with endless possibilities of form. Spencer Tunick, an installations artist and photographer, struggled to achieve this freedom as a working artist in New York City. This artist is most famous for his installations, often characterized by masses of naked people arranged together in domestic locations, and in countries fromevery continent of the world. Removed of sexual implication or intention, the nudes are used primarily and only as intended by the artist, as an exploration of the shape, contour, and texture of the naked body. Spencer is fascinated by the metamorphosis of the human body into a form, and the effect that his chosen locations have on this new shape (and vice versa). In this way, the naked bodies areSpencer’s clay, and he uses them in the same manner that a painter uses oils or a sculptor uses marble.

This way that the artist looks at the body, is a radical contradiction to Western society’s view of the nakedness. In the eyes of some of his critics, Spencer’s work invades social privacy not only through the art, which to them degrades the sacredness of the body by exposing it in massnudity, but also in the making of his art which requires an abnormal amount of public nudity, indecent exposure. Tunick challenges traditional ideas of intimacy, and asks us to free the body of sexuality and view it aesthetically for the purpose of his art. The social body cannot exist, most specifically in the nude, as anything other then a sexual thing. This is our naked condition.

The analysisof form, while an engaging arc to follow, can also reveal an inverse exploration of the body. An examination of the deformed. This word, Michel de Montaigne addresses in his essay Of A Monstrous Child, suggesting that the existence of a social body is formless, but far from free. He describes the figure of a boy, below the breast he was fastened and stuck to another child, without a head, and withhis spinal canal stopped up, the rest of his body being entire ( Lopate 57). Montaigne paints for us, a portrait of the boy’s physical form, or rather his de-form. With fastened, stuck, and stopped as his verbal interpretation of a Siamese twin, he illustrates how a human body, or form, can possess a lack of freedom in that it is harnessed to its disabilities in a physical way. For the deformed,there is an ownership of one’s difference, an ownership that is visible and undisputable. Through a scenic description of a deformed child, Montaigne uses the different shapes and contours of the child’s deformed body in order to create a visual contrast between what is ordinary and what is unordinary. 

The perceptions of the nude and the deformed both manifest out of a concept of the social...