Getting to grips with naked
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Barry Hill
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What is it to be naked? To others. And to ourselves. I suppose most of us know nakedness from various experiences of loving and being loved. Or from some childhood memory, perhaps going back to the moments of birth. Or from the experience of illness – a nakedness that comes from being helpless in the hands of others.
Nakedness involves more than a sense of exposure, of being looked at. It's a matter of being seen in ways tantamount to touch. It is being touched – lookingly – with penetration. When this is permitted, nakedness is an entry into a realm of trust. When it is not, nakedness is some kind of violation.
Nakedness is inseparable from the sense of inhabiting a material body. Nakedness has weight. Gravity becomes us, in our bodies. We descend, maybe even condescend, to be touched – albeit with the careful pride of warm-blooded creatures. Our nakedness can have the weight that we often feel is possessed by our erogenous parts – think of those explicit Japanese prints of lovers, where their genitals seem to have been swollen to a psychological significance for them and for us.
At the same time, there is the metaphysical body, which looms within and beyond itself and has that ‘unbearable lightness of being' of which Kundera wrote, offering us a phrase that even the secular took into themselves. Religious or not, it is the metaphysical body to which Rilke's angels gravitate, a space that speaks of infinity.
While Eros is unimaginable without the material body, desire can know no bounds. The temple that the body might be is open to the cosmos so that Eros is both carnal and divine, something that Western art has never really enacted as a unity. You have to look East. Is there anything more divinely at ease than those figures from the ancient temples of southern India? So free, so complete, so erotically celebratory of a sacred order.
A couple of years ago, I saw them again in the exhibition of works from the Chola dynasty at the Royal Academy in London. Moving among them, it was impossible not to feel their beautiful truth, a truth and beauty with a depth of naturalness that so reconciled the physical and metaphysical body that nakedness ceases to matter. Nakedness – as in a rare exposure that tests or threatens the individual – falls away, becomes flotsam to the oceanic dance embodied by the figures. The West has never realised such unutterably carnal transcendence.
This exhibition, small but ecstatic in its own right, was upstairs at the Academy. Downstairs at the same time, as it happened, was the monumental retrospective of Rodin. His fecund masterpiece, The Gates of Hell, was mounted in the courtyard, its naked figures writhing – like the progeny of Michelangelo – in all their glory. Inside, all manner of Rodin's mastery of the body was on show, the figures of anguish and sheer beauty and explicit Eros; a treasure trove of nakedness. It was something to commemorate, yes, this apotheosis of Western consciousness of the body. But at the same time it was so riddled with anxiety that I found its overall impact oppressive. Better the reality of a snake pit.
Each epoch, as with each individual in their time and place, must engage with nakedness in its own way. The means of that engagement come from the modalities of daily life, which might include the epiphanies that belong to extreme moments to do with mortality, relationships, art.
To tell the truth (truth is inseparable from nakedness) I had not much thought about this before coming upon the work of Lucian Freud.
FOR SOME YEARS NOW, I have been working on a book of poems called Naked Clay, a response to the work of the painter often described as the greatest living figurative artist, or realist, of the twentieth century. Looking back, my work with Freud started with my hardly knowing it – which is, come to think of it, how many of us live in our bodies, even when we are naked. I'd opened up a big book on Freud and found myself astonished by the bodies he had painted – their fleshiness and scale, their angularities and intimacy, the depth of their nakedness, their incomparable candour.
Among the first of my shocks was generated by Naked Man with Rat, painted in 1978. He is a stocky, red-headed man lying back on a settee with his legs apart, his scrotum fully on show. One hand is near his head, and he is looking towards the ceiling in what might be a startled way; the other hand is at rest near his hip and in it is the rat – a ‘Japanese laboratory rat', I have since read. From one side of the hand the head of the rat protrudes; from the other its tail, which drapes over the man's thigh, almost touching his cock.
The following year, Freud painted Naked Man with Friend, where the red-haired man appears again: the same settee and nakedness except that his cock is partly hidden by the trousered leg of the man stretched out beside him. Both men seem to have fallen asleep while posing. There is no rat. The picture exudes a warm yet unsettling atmosphere of trust – between the two sitters and, presumably, the painter. The sexuality of that warmth is emphasised, obviously, by the fact that one man is dressed and the other not.
I don't want to over-emphasise the sexual, however, which is what I realised as my gaze settled on the naked women Freud had painted in this same period. Instinctively, they were of greater interest to me: at the most general level, their nakedness unavoidably lives in the realm of desire. But this is misleading. Freud's torsos of women – the necks and breasts and bellies – leap forth, along with the sense that these women are individuals in their own right; yet it is nakedness itself that seemed to be offered as a subject. Nakedness rather than sexuality, I mean. The power comes from what is singularly matter of fact, something given about how these figures are in their bodies. And what is true of the women is true of the men, which is a double lack: the feeling you get is that there is nothing to celebrate, and nothing to be anxious about – a double negative that produces a weird unease that we have come to this.