Spencer Tunick

Spencer Tunick is a contemporary artist who creates installations of live nude figures, captured through arresting photography and video. Over the past 12 years, he's organized over 65 temporary site related installations throughout the United States and abroad, where his figures are grouped en masse to create visually stirring shapes. His works have grown in appreciation and recently were aquired by the Dakis Joannou Foundation Collection in Athens, Greece. He's arrived in town this weekend to choreograph his latest installation of an estimated 1000 nude Clevelanders this Fri 6/26/04 at dawn at a carefully guarded location.

Cool Cleveland: What were you doing during the culture wars of the '90s?

I thought the culture wars were in the '80s with Andres Serrano, back then I was more interested in basketball. As of the '90s, I’m working with the nude outdoors in the public space, feeling that the body is a dignified object that can complement the outside world, not degrade it. My only situation was trying to work in New York during the '90s, and at the same time being celebrated in South America, Europe and Australia. And all the arrests that took place [due to the nude installations] were illegal, because in New York State, there’s no law against making an art work nude, so my lawyer filed a federal lawsuit in New York. We won at every stage, so it went to the Supreme Court, and Justice Ginsberg looked at my work and decided that I could make my work on the street, and remanded the case back to the federal courts. So I was upheld and the city had to pay a fine and wasted a lot of the taxpayers' money. This was the same time that [New York Mayor Rudolph] Guiliani was running against [now Senator] Hillary Clinton, so it was very politicized. Now with so many horrible things coming up against the body: senseless, dumb pornography, killing... so many horrible things in the work; I think it’s good to work with the body in a positive way.

You’ve been arrested five times in NYC and the Supreme Court has upheld your free speech rights. Have you ever been arrested outside of New York?
There’s never a law against working with a nude in the street, and I’ve gotten permits when I was making work with lower numbers of people. So when the numbers went up, that wasn’t the issue.

Is it just New York that has a problem with your work?
Each state has different laws regarding nudity. Some are so corrupt, because the pornography industry has so much money, and they are trying to protect the public from pornography and many of the laws are old. But a lot of places like Canada, where the Canadian government has a law against nudity in public, they've opened up the law due to the nature of my work. And it was celebrated, and the traffic controllers were there and it was a piece of pride.

Are other countries are more accepting of your work?
From Portugal to Melbourne, to Chile and London, all the local governments have celebrated my work and have encouraged it to happen. But in New York in the '90s, I was pretty much under the threat of arrest every time I made a work of art. I think it’s a great thing. Do you think it’s a great thing?

You want to know what I think?
I usually don’t turn it around during an interview. What do you think?

We ran a Performance Art Festival here in Cleveland for many years and presented 1000 performance artists from 24 countries, so I think of your work as performance art.
Yes, I heard that you did that. It’s good that a big event comes in and forces the issue in a big way and pushes away the red tape.

It certainly forces the issue, one way or the other.
I’ve done over seventy of these installations, and every time good things come out of it; politicians and social workers and small business owners are all talking about it.

Your online bio states that the nude bodies in your work “do not underscore sexuality” yet it is an obvious element. What is the role of sexuality in your work?
Obviously, the work is dealing with the nude, which can be sexual or it can be horrible, like the controversy with the recent [Iraqi] prisoner abuse scandal, with the nude bodies positioned in a totally horrible way. When you look at those pictures you don’t see the sexuality. There can be an aggressive naked body, a tortured naked body, or a beautiful naked body. In my work, the body is used repetitively as a medium to create a living sculpture to deal with the humanity and the vulnerability of the body, juxtaposed to the public space and the concrete world. It’s not so much sex or sexuality that is involved.

I have this saying, “Venue is Destiny.” How important is venue to your work?
It’s part of my final product. I’m not only doing an installation, so the background is like the background of a landscape painting. So for me venue is landscape. It can be a cityscape or a naturescape.

Do you usually work with permission, or do you ask forgiveness? You know the old saying…
I always work with permission. There’s nothing romantic for me about being in jail. Maybe five years ago. Now it’s good for me to have breakfast with the participants afterwards. Yet, I still do my individual work without permission; I just don’t want to go through all the red tape to do small scale work. But not on a large scale. In Israel, and the Czech Republic to Buenos Aires, we get up early, find an interesting location, and work.

With an artist like Christo, who does large-scale outdoor public works, his art has all the bureaucratic paperwork and community interaction, the legal maneuvering...
I think Christo has a more difficult time because his work is not temporary.

But his work is only up for a couple of weeks, usually.
Right, but he has to deal with architectural issues, and there’s a lot of red tape in that and everything is owned by corporations and governments. With me, the only issue is how many people can fit in one space and that the people are nude. The nudity is obviously the biggest issue.

What is the final outcome of your work? Is it a photo, a performance, or the community action?
It’s an installation that I document with photography and video. So there’s a projected video installation that’s a loop of of images 3-4 minutes long which is projected in a room, along with the photographs, which I take.

If you are not creating a photo as a photographer would, what role does the resulting photo play in your work? Document, souvenir, evidence, calling card?
No, I make installations and the final result is a video projection and the photograph. If I didn’t make video projections, then call me one thing; if I didn’t make photos, then call me another. I’m in between an installation artist, video artist and photographer. And when you work with nude bodies, you’re immediately called a pornographer or a fashion photographer.

Where will this take exhibition of the documentation take place? In Cleveland?
I’m not quite sure. Maybe in front of the [MOCA Cleveland] gallery at some time. Everyone who poses gets a photograph for posing. But I’m not sure it will be the same photo I will chose to blow up big; I make these things regardless of whether there will be an exhibition or not.

I would think Clevelanders would want to see the site & the people.
Right. There’s a big difference between the 8X10 photos that we give out and the big images that I make. And a huge difference between the photos I take and what the media takes.

What kind of problems did you have in securing a location in Cleveland?
It was hard getting an indoor location in Cleveland because it is difficult, difficult, difficult to get indoor locations in this country, because corporate America is not like corporate Europe. I was interested in working with Gund Arena, but we were turned down, even though the Gunds have a connection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York [Agnes Gund is President of the Museum of Modern Art]. Even though I thought it was a strong connection between art, sports and the body, like a frieze around the ancient stadiums… the connotation and connection is quite old. When we couldn’t get that location, I was in Geneva and saw the concert halls that had massive nude reliefs all over them, and we saw that the nude body and music go hand-in-hand. So we approached Severance Hall and asked to do it there. And the board of Severance Hall just flat out turned me down. And I was so depressed about that, and I would think the musicians would be depressed about that. Shame on them, you know, shame on them. The nude goes hand-in-hand with this wonderful history of concert halls. And so, this was a big blow, then we tried for other locations, and the numbers started to increase. So we had to go outside. Then I had some choices of locations and I picked one.

You’ve got over 4300 volunteers in Cleveland, is that how big the event will be?
Those are people who have signed up on the internet. I try not to give that number to the press just because it's only the people signing up and wanting to find out more information, or for curiosity. You can write this down. The real number is that amount cut in half, then I usually cut that again. I would assume that a little over a thousand would pose.

How does that compare to other installations?
I find it difficult to work with 1000, I like to work with 300-400 or over 1500. One thousand is a difficult number to work with.

What’s the most you’ve ever dealt with?
The most was 7000 people in Barcelona, Spain. People right now can still sign up online. And please tell people to set two alarm clocks, as the shoot begins before dawn.

In a way, your work can be seen as performance art. And with the size of your participant groups, that’s larger than typical “audiences” for most performance art pieces. But there are some critical differences. For one thing, performance art draws a distinction between the art act and the remnants or documentation, and with your work obviously that’s critical.
We used to call it installation performance, but we took that out because of the press outside the art world. People might think they could come and watch. But this is not something we want people to watch. By calling it an installation, it solves that problem. To make work on a large scale with nudes in the public and to survive is one of my most difficult challenges, and I don’t wish it upon anyone. And I’m really influenced by performance art, my biggest hero is Chris Burden. I’m his biggest fan. And Robert Smithson, too.

Right. You put those two together and you’ve got Spencer Tunick.
After the installation happens, can you change your site that so that people can go to http://www.SpencerTunick.com to sign up for future events. In the meantime, you should put up a past photo. People really respond to the photos.

Can we borrow images from your site?
Sure, but don’t take the one where everyone is cheering from Chile. But use the one from Montreal, Canada.

'''Visit http://www.MOCAcleveland.org/tunick.htm to register to participate in the event. For more info on Spencer Tunick, visit http://www.SpencerTunick.com.

Interview by Thomas Mulready
Photos by Spencer Tunick (:divend:)