What do you look like when you're nude?
Is all exposure good exposure when you're an artist?
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
“One doesn’t paint a nude descending a staircase; that’s ridiculous. A nude reclines.”
- nude enthusiast, critiquing Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2”, 1912
Nudes can do anything nudes want to do. With more flair. More chutzpah. More…just more. Anything you can do, nudes can do…butt-er? That’s a t-shirt idea. I give it to you.
Nude, and on the staircase.
Nudes can recline on a chaise, rewire a radio, or reorganize a walk-in closet on a rainy day.
Nudes can put on a one-nude play, off-Broadway, and be exposed and raw and honest.
Be nude. In the nude.
The art is nude and so is the artist—both are on the staircase.
Nudes are the epitome of free. Nude art, nude brain, nude purpose.
Free to lift arms and jiggle bits and free minds and free skin to the freest of air in the free world. Free to ta-dah at the top of a landing in a dramatic to-do, fingers stretching, with one leg flexing a juicy quad. A calf ripple, a knee crack, and a hip twist as the nude extends a delicate and bare toe toward that first cold step.
A step that takes them down and down and spiraling down to the first blush reaction of the critic’s gaze.
This is art.
Nude and not for them (unless they are ready). This nude is coming down those stairs. Now. Down these stairs. Excited to reach the ground floor of this Earth’s gallery, and ready to feel the breeze of acceptance on its bare and shivering skin.
This is your art. On the staircase.
At this moment, this nude—both the art and the artist—is free to reject the inevitable gasp and titter of the establishment crowd. The giggle and the scoff. Free to ignore the horrified finger pointed back at a vulnerable descent. Free to take step after step and with each step, get braver and more complete in form and shape and purpose.
Free to make eye contact with the one in the crowd who is keen to be released. The one who yearns to join you on the staircase.
It is hanging out. All of it. It is making small talk with tired expectations. Expectations that have, up until now, only reclined.
Full view is world view and however your nude arrives it is now nude in the company of strangers. Step carefully, dear Nude. Not all exposure is good exposure, and the Nude Code commands that a naked body alighting the staircase must always watch for legos.
Step bravely, but with caution.
Nude art is the best art and the best artists are nudists.
Metaphorically. Sometimes actually.
Drop your robe. This is it. The moment of your nude work is upon us.
Ridiculous nude, insolent nude. Grab at the banister to steady your descent. It is cold to the touch but reassuringly secure. Now, expose your ribs, the curve of your inner thigh, and the arch of your neck as you begin your motion. Step down, all weird angles, and no fear.
Dare to go. Dare to expose. Dare to be. You must risk it all.
Nudes make art, about nudes, in the nude, while exhibiting nudist tendencies. Terrified yet beaming, with an unexpected swagger and bold confidence.
There is nothing left to hide—this is it.
Nude is vulnerable. Nude is brave. Nude is cold and stupid and illegal in public (sometimes). Nude work is real work. Its authenticity has no buttons. Nude is in the inks and oils and notes and colors and the flow. At the tops of stairs. Silhouetted in the windows of minds.
Everywhere, our flesh bumps up to goose—there is boldness in the coldness.
Reclining is still life, a pose for the prepared. To them, the nude descending the staircase is like violence in motion. There is no pose here, just uncontrolled jiggling and shocking exposures. The viewer is not ready—perhaps—but sees more, learns more, and gets more from the experience. Is excited by it.
This is who we are. Who we can be. What we look like with the lights on.
Ugly. Beautiful. Brave. Moving. All can be read in the flesh of the descent.
On the staircase.
All brave art is nude, but not all nude art is brave.
You need chance.
You need dare.
You need gamble.
A nude artist ignores the fear and the passivity and the danger and the over-varnished wood on the tread of the stair. The perception of what is allowable and the de rigueur of the moments and the times. Ignores the gasp from the bottom of the staircase and takes the step regardless.
No socks, no capes, no pants, no wigs.
Scandalous!
Be a radical interpretation of the human figure. Descending, coming down to land, and meeting the world at another level.1 Run, air chattering at your skin. Run down that staircase, nude and nervous and very much tingling with electricity—with all your art and imagination and fears and dreams hanging out for everyone to see.
Exposed.
Alive.
And free.
What do you look like when you’re nude?
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen2
Go behind the scenes and see inspirations for this post👇
This week’s amends…
"In creative work…creative work of all kinds…those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook…a different set of priorities. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always…these are forces…that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit.
Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness... He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only…
There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether. It is a world where the third self is governor.
The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work…who is thus responsible to the work.
It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be… My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely… My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive...
There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."- Mary Oliver, poet
I did some digging and these are excerpts (with lots cut out) from “Of Power and Time” from Mary Oliver’s book of selected essays, "Upstream"
Via Nitch
On Rotation: “It’s Art” by The Bug Club
Seemed appropriate.
I wanted to put that early version of Radiohead’s Nude from the cassette here (the one included with the deluxe OKNOTOK) when Thom is singing “What do you look like Nude?” but it wasn’t on Spotify. I dig this version mostly because where it started is not where it ended up and we get to see how the lyrics changed and the organ is nuts and I love where it ended up on In Rainbows still called Nude, but no Nude and gosh have I mentioned before that I love Radiohead?
“Subject, object, verb” is my favorite line for some reason.
Side note: My other fav version of the cassette is Thom singing Motion Picture Soundtrack at the piano.
"I installed an ant colony inside my scanner five years ago. I scanned the nest each week..."
Via Kottke
Oh, Crocs, you cheeky things. Actually, I suppose it’s more “Oh, MSCHF.”
US$450.
Via Design Taxi
It just so happens Duchamp’s nudeness was revealed in the form of an actual nude, descending a staircase. His nudeness (I’m speaking metaphorically) and his radical interpretation of the human form with that painting—both the work and his willingness to expose himself to critique—was regarded as a failure at the time. This was 1913.
When the painting was exhibited at The Armory in NYC in 1913, a critic described his show as “an explosion in a shingle factory” Cubism, eh? Fun to think of a time when painting a nude in a cubist style (or a non-standard interpretation of the human form), was regarded as radical. I put the link that inspired today’s post in the story above, but if you missed it, here it is again. Good video here describing why it was a scandal with an exhibition in 2013, again at The Armory Show Centennial Edition. Love that a comment on that article says “Where is the woman.” Point made!
If you can’t be nude now, be nude later.
