Hollywood stars make getting naked on camera look easy, but many will confess how incredibly uncomfortable or even boring it is to bare all on screen. There are tricks to overcoming this, of course, but for those who haven’t stripped for their audiences before things can get a little tricky. If you’re starring in a hotly anticipated film — like the one that spent three installments pretending their lead stars didn’t actually have genitals — the pressure is really on. This got us thinking about the most awkward nude scenes in cinema. How did the actors and actresses handle being in the buff? Some stars used awkward nudity for comedic effect, while others looked flawless, but felt terrible — and in a few cases, the unpleasant feelings we had were all in our own heads. Still, we wanted to know: did they find the experience as strange to shoot as we did to watch? Find out past the break where we revisit a few naked nightmares.
Thomas Houseago readily admits to the echoes of early Cubist-style Africanism in his sculptural work for floor, wall, and lawn. Looking at African art through Western-tinted glasses, he shares the Cubist’s appreciation for the psychological symbolism of masks and imposing nudes. The visceral impact of bulbous plaster, choppy wood, and hefty metal readily serves his sophisticated update of a Primitivist aesthetic. But he’s a modern LA artist, after all, who is very aware of all this embedded historical content, and his work is full of winks and nods to its pop culture filter. His new show at L&M Arts in Los Angeles, All Together Now, includes a juggernaut of roughly hewn, totemic figures and abstract landscapes for the contemporary tribalist.
Miru Kim is fearless. She ventures into places to make her art that most of us would neither enter nor risk arrest to be in: underground tunnels, sewers, abandoned factories, power plants, the tops of bridges and churches. Once she arrives at these hidden and desolate places, Kim explores the setting, finds the best point of view, puts her camera on a tripod, and removes her clothes — in order to take some of the most engaging photographs of the moment.
The nude has a rich history in art, and its use as subject matter is constantly evolving, especially in contemporary photography and video. Spencer Tunick uses naked bodies to create installations of flowing flesh in public places, which he captures in photography and exhibits as prints; Katy Grannan finds her subjects via classified ads and photographs them nude or provocatively clothed in the privacy of their homes and in nature; and Pipilotti Rist puts sensuality center stage in her surreal video fantasies, where fruits, flesh, and flowers merge to create moving installations. Read More »
