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Nudity and Art

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Nudity and art: what's our problem?
We snigger when artists like Marina Abramović expose themselves in performance. But shouldn't we be cheering their bravery instead?

Bare necessities ... a visitor to the Marina Abramović retrospective passes between two naked actors. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP
"So what kind of art is that?" asked a Radio 5 Live presenter on Friday evening, with a giggle. He was responding to the news that some members of the audience had been ejected from the Marina Abramović retrospective, The Artist Is Present, at New York's Moma for touching the naked performers. The piece in question is a recreation of Abramović's 1977 piece Imponderabilla, created with her then-partner, the German artist Ulay, in which the pair stood nude and very close together in a doorway, so that those passing through had to directly confront the artists' gaze and, of course, their nakedness.
Even before the incident at Moma, the nature of Abramović's practice, which stretches back 40 years to the 1970s, and which has frequently involved her body (a 1974 performance asked audiences to select one of 72 objects, including a gun, and use them on her body in whatever way they wanted), has been the subject of casual derision in some quarters; and of course the latest story has caused plenty of sniggering.
When will we stop laughing and start cheering the bravery of these artists? As Abramović herself observed when security concerns were first raised about the amount of naked flesh on display, we seem less comfortable now about nudity in the gallery or the theatre than we were 30 years ago: "In 1977, there was no problem, and it looks like now there is a problem. So, what's wrong? ... In America, they showed Janet Jackson's nipple by accident and that was the main news of any TV programme for days, at the same time as the Iraq war. That's totally wrong."
Abramović may not be taking off her own clothes during The Artist Is Present, but, as the title suggests, she is revealing herself every day, spending the duration of the exhibition sitting at a small table with an empty chair opposite, and inviting members of the audience to join her. This is the first time the museum has devoted a retrospective to a living artist, and while it may raise questions about whether work that is by its nature ephemeral can be recreated and displayed in a museum context, it's a reminder that live art has a rising currency and an urgency that audiences respond to very directly and in large numbers.
The Moma show is hugely successful, and as documents such as Live Art UK's In Time make clear, there has been an unprecedented explosion of live art in this country over the past decade, too. Not just in initiatives such as Tate Modern's Live Culture, but in theatre and non-theatre spaces up and down the country, from the Arches to Arnolfini; from Spill to Sacred and Forest Fringe.
So maybe when artists take off their clothes, we should stop sniggering, and instead respond to the challenges they set – to look at ourselves, and the world, differently.

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