Original subtitles

MAN: Right through history, the nude has figured in art

and the reason we identify so much with the figure

is because it is us.

WOMAN: It's a genre that always reinvents and always has an interest

because of its link to the human condition.

HANNAH: Welcome back, folks, to our series on the Nakedy Nude.

You've seen one bum, you've seen 'em all, really.

My name is Hannah Gadsby.

You might know me as a comedian...

..or you might not.

Last week, we turned back time, just like Cher,

to travel through the cannon of art history.

We examined ancient abdominals,

Renaissance ideals

and nude women failing at furniture.

So why is everyone naked at this party?

You know, why...why not?

We also spoke to some of our best-known contemporary artists

to get their take on the nude.

MAN: Having the human body to navigate aesthetically

is endlessly fascinating.

MAN: It is sometimes difficult to disrupt the narrative,

but I do it anyway.

What else has an artist got to do?

Here she is, back for more bods in the nod.

This time, I'm moving on from ye olde days

to look at some more modern art of the starkers.

Hello, 20th century.

This is a story about the male gaze - Z-E gaze, looking -

and how men's views of the muse

eventually led to a feminist art revolution.

The gaze, people. The gaze. Z-E.

Eyes up here.

I'm a woman of the homosexual variety.

So when I stroll around a gallery gay gazing at women in the nude,

just sitting, having bath

or laid out stone cold unconscious,

I feel a little compromised.

It's called A Favourite Custom,

and I think we're meant to believe

that the favourite custom is women bathing.

Like, women just LOVE to bathe.

But I think A Favourite Custom is referring to

men love watching women having baths.

You know, it's about a viewer,

almost always assumed to be male,

looking at a desired body,

which is almost always female.

But the allegory of the ideal nude or the bathing nude is interesting,

because of course, you can look but you can't touch,

and that's the tension that is always felt in these paintings.

Don't get me wrong, I love baths.

Having a bath is definitely in my top 10 of customs.

But one of my real favourite customs

is not being watched while being naked.

This is The Knight Errant by John Millais.

I reckon this is a pretty good example

of the power imbalance implicit in the male gaze.

What are we looking at here, ladies?

You know more about life than me.

Well, he's rescuing a damsel in distress.

Yeah.

But I'm wondering if he actually tied her up.

What about the two guys running away in the back top-right hand corner?

Ah! They're naked too. Aha! And then... Are they?

They've been at it. Yes, look! They're just silhouettes.

There's no way you could tell that. They're naked.

You can't tell if they're... No, they're naked.

OK, alright, building a story.

There's blood on his sword.

Oh, gosh.

We get lots of questions about the painting, you know,

"What's happening in this painting?

"Why is the woman nude?

"Why is the knight tying her to the tree or untying..."

You know, there's an interpretation of his involvement.

So, it's actually quite a difficult painting,

both for viewers at the time and viewers now to read.

How do you find the juxtaposition?

Like, she's a beautiful nude and that's your first reaction,

and then it's like, "Gosh, it's quite a brutal story?"

Yeah, when you look at the story, it is, yes, yeah.

Well, I didn't see the blood on the sword, so I didn't realise.

I've ruined it. I'm so sorry.

Yeah, so you should be. Mm.

In this painting, everyone is looking at this woman in the nude

who doesn't get to look at anybody.

Interesting titbit, though, it wasn't always like that.

Originally, The Knight Errant looked more like this,

with our lady facing the knight, not facing away.

But it did not go down so well with the audience at the time.

This painting didn't sell

because people found it difficult to look at.

The reason they found it difficult to look at

is because she was looking at her knight in shining armour,

which made her active in the romance.

JUSTIN PATON: Millais actually ended up performing

a kind of cosmetic surgery on his own painting

and turning what was formerly quite a bold glance from the woman

into the more coy or retiring gaze that we see at the moment.

EMMA CHAMBERS: The idea of the female nude

is that it's a body to be looked at by men in the 19th century,

essentially.

And, um, once that nude starts looking back at you,

it starts to create

this different atmosphere between viewer and between subject

and become much more troubling

in terms of the associations with modern day situations

in which women might remove their clothes.

Sex.

Indeed, yeah. Yeah.

Good solution just...just...

(IMITATES CREAKING)

Better!

So, in the 19th century,

it was scandalous for a pretend, made-up woman in a painting

to even look at a man,

because it implied that she was of loose morals.

But these rules didn't just apply to the pretend people in the painting,

they also held true in the art schools

where the people learnt to paint the pretend people.

The male models that were used in the academies

were generally soldiers or boxers, athletes,

so classical, heroic, male figures.

The female models, probably working girls of various kinds.

And there were debates about how moral both they were

and the practice of drawing from the female nude model.

Up next, modern art.

Big changes, people. Big changes.

Rules were broken.

Modern art carries with it the assumption

that it destroyed traditional art.

And it did.

But...

..did it?

It's a different language, to be sure.

But it's the same story.

The nude as subject remained but that's about it.

The non-conformists no longer wanted to be burdened

by having to always represent them

as realistic three-dimensional beings

on traditional two-dimensional surfaces.

Modernists didn't need to paint naked people

from stories of the Bible or mythology,

they just needed to paint naked people.

And when I say people, I mean women.

And when I say women, I mean objects.

And this was no longer happening so much

in formal institutions or art classes,

with many of the artists moving to their own private studios

and calling models 'muses'.

The power imbalance inherent in the artist-model relationship

continues to require careful negotiation to this day.

Photographer Bill Henson works closely with his models

to develop long-term trusted relationships,

often collaborating with them from adolescence well into adulthood.

When I find the necessary subject component,

let's sound clinical for a minute.

When things bubble up from wherever

and you start to get an idea

of what you think the necessary subject components might be,

you're able to pick up a camera and go in search of it.

It might be a volcano sticking out of the sea,

it might be a particular face, a particular body.

At a certain point, you think you know what you need.

When you find someone like that, if we talk about human models,

it's a very big deal.

Because I work with people that I photograph for years.

In 2008, police seized key works from one of Bill's exhibitions

and commenced an investigation into alleged images of child pornography.

Six months later, no charges were laid.

There's been controversy, obviously, that's followed you.

It bothers me on your behalf, but that's not my job.

Um... It doesn't bother me.

Well, no, it bothers me in the sense

that I think it's incredibly important

to have that conversation

and to have these bodies exist.

My feeling on it is like,

almost everyone's favourite version of their own body

is the body they had they before complication, you know, before...

Yes. I think, look, there are some unfortunate things

which can distract people individually

and one of the... the sad by-products of that

is that the young human body

has sort of become a haunted landscape, you know.

And that's, I think, tremendously unfortunate.

It's as though it's no longer possible for the public imagination

to be just naturally in awe of the beauty of nature.

For Bill, the process of photographing a model

is very technical, almost scientific.

Usually the sessions are very, very long

and I give great many thousands

of very wooden and specific instructions.

"Turn your eyes that way, put your head that way."

"You've got a cold. Breathe through your mouth.

"Move your chin up slightly.

"Move your body that way. Your feet are doing this."

Things slow down. You know, their pulse rate slows down.

Everything, their breathing slows down.

Even though they're concentrating on doing 50 things at once,

you build it and build it and build it

and by the end, you know...

They're just standing there

and by the time they're doing that the sweat's pouring off

and they're completely self-absorbed

in trying to kind of do what you want them to do.

Given many of his models

have spoken of their close and collaborative

working relationship with Bill,

to my mind at least, it feels the controversy around his work

amounts to little more than tabloid hysteria...

..and a lost opportunity for constructive, adult discussion.

Much of the art of the first half of the 20th century

was defined by -isms and movements coming and going.

One that continues to really capture our imagine is surrealism.

This movement wasn't shy about keeping art real,

but they just did it in a very unreal way.

You know, conceptual.

They were tapping into their dreams and subconscious,

which were quite often filled with naked women.

As we rolled into the '50s and '60s,

the nude became more and more subject

to a language of individual expression

rather than formal art movements.

Brett Whiteley was very keen to add his name

to the list of king hitters of 20th-century art,

so he left Australia and got amongst it in London.

And you'd never guess what he decided to paint

for his first major series.

There you go - a woman having a bath.

What do you call someone who solves mysteries in gardens?

Yeah?

Agapanthus Christie.

His subject was his wife and long-time muse, Wendy Whiteley.

And I wanted to ask her about life as a muse.

People are always saying, "I've got your bum on the wall."

And I'd just say,

"Well, you've seen one bum, you've seen them all, really."

They're stylised, they don't feel that personal,

but then there are others that feel very personal,

and no, none of them would I object to.

What would you call yourself?

Like, 'cause you speak an awful lot for a muse.

Like, muses are quiet, not chatty.

They're supposed to be enigmatic. Oh, yeah, a mystery.

So, I used to think - until I spent some time in group therapy,

I used to think I was very enigmatic.

But when everybody started bursting out laughing at that idea

and saying, "Oh, no, your face shows everything that's going on,"

you know.

But I'm fascinated with the idea of being enigmatic.

Would you call yourself a collaborator in Brett's...

Oh, I was a collaborator, yes, in the past.

Why are you sitting around in the nude?

No reason except that one does.

Especially when you're in the bath.

When Brett did his bathroom ones

obviously it just related to that domesticity thing

of, you know, the wife or something in the bath all the time.

Just, you know, I wasn't in the bath all the time.

I want to ask you about that.

He's just encouraging you to have lots of baths

or did you say, "I'm having a bath," and he's like, "Great"?

I'd never pose for that long for a painting.

He'd make some drawings.

In the 1970s, women began to object to their objectification.

They flicked the woman as an object on her head. Ow!

The Guerrilla Girls said it best.

They let the facts speak for themselves

in the hope that one day, women might be able to.

EMMA CHAMBERS: The period of the 1970s, 1980s,

that was a period when there were real challenges

to the idea of how you represented the nude

and particularly feminist artists using various strategies

to critique the way that women's bodies had been used,

not just in high art

but also in popular culture.

So, there's a really interesting moment

where photography starts to become a really key medium

for feminist artists.

And even though female artists have never not existed,

the feminist movement said it out loud.

These difficult girlies woke up

and moved their own bodies like they owned them

and made art,

insisting on using their own eyes

to stare down the authority of the male gaze.

This one shocked me.

This one...it's shown me how common the body is

but how unusual people look at the components of it.

It's just not your standard nude.

Do you think that she's got an iron on her head

so she doesn't get wrinkles?

Yes, and I think that she's going to give you a straightforward opinion,

if you'd had an opinion about her.

Yeah.

Like, she's not going to muck around.

There's no iron-y. No irony in that one at all.

WOMAN: This is called One Hand Making the Other Hand.

Alright, making...unfinished.

And that's me when I was 23.

Good choice of overall.

Really places you in the political...moment.

Artist Julie Rrap broke onto the Australian art scene in the 1980s.

You should make bells. You know, like - ding!

Yeah, wouldn't that be great? On the counter.

She uses several mediums, but like many of her feminist contemporaries,

her first tool was the camera.

And when I started out, in a certain sense, you know,

I started out as a painter

and it was like I just...I couldn't get beyond a certain point

because everywhere I looked, in a sense,

the females were obviously used as the subject matter,

they weren't spoken about so much in my time as the artist.

So, I was looking at it more as a woman wanting to be

a maker of things,

which, you know, rather than being the model or the subject.

So, I mean, the very first work I did, Disclosures,

you know, was like a kind of essay on that, in a way,

because I was in all these photos naked.

But I'd set the work up with the cameras the way I did it,

that people looking at that realised

that every picture had a camera in it, looking back.

So, it was like this inversion of voyeurism, in a way.

And, you know, it was there to tease people along a conventional line

that's, "Oh, here's a young woman's body,

"you know, here to be consumed," as it were.

It felt like it was something I just had to confront.

And most people came out

and then they realised me, who was clothed,

obviously watching the show,

was the person in the photos.

And we had a dialogue about that,

'cause it was quite confronting for them.

I mean, you use your body a lot.

Like we said, let's call it a medium. It's a tool.

How do you feel about your body outside of your work?

Look, I'm a child of the '60s, so...

We were talking about this recently with some friends.

You couldn't stop us taking our clothes off.

So, it was - it's a different era, I think.

Like, I never had any attitude to it.

But I think it is different

when you're translating your nudity into a space

where you're asking people to look at it,

examine it almost, in a very particular way.

I want to talk to you about Body Double, the piece.

I love it.

'Cause you use the term "your body is a host".

So, basically, it's just two casts of me cast in rubber.

So they're lying on a platform, and then...

It's a funny story, 'cause I had this idea

that I would roll in and out of myself,

but I discovered I'm not good at rolling.

I looked like a baby elephant.

So then I paid two dancers, a male and a female,

who were willing to do it without their gear on.

And so, they did their rolls beautifully,

'cause they're trained to do that.

So...so that work, when you see that work from a distance,

the way it's meant to work

is that you see what looks like an actual naked body

literally lying on the ground.

And it does feel incredibly realistic.

And then, when you come up near it, you...it's like interactive.

So, it picks up your movement.

And as soon as it does that, it sets this sequence of rolling movements.

So, the female figure rolls in and out of both forms

and then it dissolves into the male figure.

For me now, I'm just going to come into my main practice.

I'm just ripening up to the right age.

Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean... (LAUGHS)

You know, like, if I keep going with it, it's going to get better

because I'll get older and it's sort of much more confronting, in a way.

Julie and her international contemporaries

like Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas

continue to subvert traditional tropes

around the female body and the male gaze.

You know, some are a bit grosser than others.

Yeah, yeah? Which ones are gross?

The chicken one. Uh...chicken.

You don't like Chicken Knickers? No.

No.

I've always thought of Chicken Knickers,

by British artist Sarah Lucas,

as kind of a challenge to this painting,

Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet.

But which one do you reckon is the most 'foul'?

Women were not the only humans

who arced up against the male gaze in the 1970s.

Australian photographer William Yang

sought to challenge the hetero status quo

by showing male nudes from his perspective.

It's a male gaze, sure,

but a gay male gaze.

Uh-oh.

The thing that I enjoy most is photographing an attractive male.

It's like flirting with a camera.

And who doesn't like to flirt with an attractive person?

So, this is Sydneyphiles?

No, this is Friends Of Dorothy. This is the gay one.

These are like my first intimate photographs

that I took of encounters.

So, I have a narrative called "The Nude", "The Male Nude".

It involves my encounters over 40 years,

like, sexual encounters.

One night stands and all of that.

And when I first started off,

actually, there weren't that many photographs around at all

of naked men,

not to the same degree as there are now.

There's very much a view

that it's only the female body that can be looked at in this way.

And I suppose that's probably what I want to convey

as a political act.

This is the gaze on the male nude

as the female body has been gazed at through the centuries.

First, I thought that the photographs were terrible

'cause they were usually taken in low-light situations.

I was very conscious about being a photographer in those early days

and some of the images were a bit soft

and I never showed them until later when I thought,

"Oh, these images are really good

"and they've got a quality to them, an intimate quality to them."

And often there was a good story to it

and I'd just write the story on the body, on the photograph,

directly on the photograph.

Almost the body becomes a vehicle for the story.

Yes, that's right.

And my encounter with it.

In fact, the story has become as interesting as the image for me.

This one's called... Homo Domesticus.

(CHUCKLES)

And the other one,

this is very interesting,

I'll just get you another one.

I do have an image called Untitled #1

and it's two people post-coitus

lying on the floor asleep.

And I took that in the '70s.

It was regarded as a pretty out-there photograph then

and it's even more shocking now.

Institutions worry about this photograph,

whether they'll offend people.

What do you think would be offensive about it?

It's implied anal penetration.

It's scary. Yeah.

We're much more afraid of showing penises

than we are of showing tits and bums.

Do you think that's to do with sexuality or fear of being...

..the penis laughed at?

Um...I think it's a combination of things.

I think that the legal status of the penis

is different from the legal status of the naked woman.

Well, you're actually not allowed to show photographs of erect penises,

for example.

It's interesting the conversations I have with censorship myself

about showing this photograph.

For me, I want my photographs seen

but I don't want them banned.

I mean, I don't want to upset people too much

that they're going to have an extreme reaction.

In 1993, shortly after the height of the AIDS epidemic,

William Yang made this remarkable work.

There's another famous photograph of mine called Fear of AIDS.

It was taken on a medium-format camera.

And there was a fridge in the dark room

and I put the photographs in the fridge.

When I actually got around to developing them,

there was like this... imprint of the paper

where it had stuck over the negative.

I was appalled when I saw it at first,

and then I thought,

"Hey, this is a terrific effect.

It was very much of that time, the early '90s,

where you couldn't really have sex without a kind of...

..deep fear, actually.

It didn't stop me, but I had this deep fear underlying all my actions.

This was the perfect metaphor, I thought,

was the contaminated image

and so, I called it Fear of AIDS.

So, as we edge closer and closer to extinction,

where is the nude at now?

Contemporary art is no longer limited

to the rendering of grand myths and history.

We've moved away from the ideal of Ancient Greece

and the reclining women of the Renaissance.

We've struggled with the gaze...

..and artists are feeling freer to depict all kinds of bodies.

WOMAN: These photos here are very interesting.

Yeah. Very interesting.

Yeah, you wouldn't see an old man's naked body very often.

No, not... (ALL LAUGH)

I'm married to one.

It just shows there is beauty in age, doesn't it?

There's not beauty in my age.

I think you sell yourself short.

You now have the idea that a male nude

doesn't have to be young and beautiful and have an ideal body.

Here, he's looking very much at all the faults and marks on the body

and also, something that's quite a taboo subject

in relation to the nude - an old body.

Some artists say we should have the abject body,

some say we should have the grotesque body,

some say we should have the anxious body,

some say we should have the vulnerable body.

And I think that idea of vulnerability is a key

to what the art nude can offer today.

It's a body that is not perfect, beautified, idealised.

It is recognisably like our own

and it's soliciting a kind of powerful

one to one emotional response,

which says, you know, "I am not Psyche, I'm not Diana,

"I'm not some figure out of mythology.

"I'm a real person from the world that you inhabit also."

The nude in art may have evolved

but you don't have to walk far beyond the gallery walls

to see that ancient ideals and the male gaze

are still very much with us today.

For me personally, I like to go into a gallery looking for hope.

The Arched Figure by the late, great Louise Bourgeois,

who was 82 when she made it,

with the help of her young assistant, Jerry Gorovoy.

To me, this is hope in a biscuit.

To create the work, they had to make a plaster trough.

So, he was actually, you know, bent forward,

lying this way, in the plaster trough.

And he said it was agonising

'cause, you know, you've got to stay there for a while,

the plaster gets hot.

And also, he said his feet started to cramp up

as he was doing this gesture.

So, that's what that is, isn't it? Yeah.

And yet, you know, it becomes something very different

at this point.

In the story of the artist-muse relationship,

I really like the shift that this work represents.

Jerry Gorovoy has allowed his body to be manipulated, literally,

because he values Louise Bourgeois' voice as an artist.

Oh! Here we are.

We're almost at the end of our story of the nakedy nude.

And this is where you'd expect me

to tie it all up into a neat little package

of what and how to think.

But I'm not going to do that,

because I don't think it's my story to finish.

The story of the nude in art is a work in progress,

as it always has been for thousands of years.

But we are always questioning the canon, aren't we? You are!

I am. I do.

WOMAN: I'm trying to make them have sex, actually.

The two women?

How do get consent with collage? It's a toughie.

Yeah, it's a... There's so many things that are tough about collage.

MAN: My view is not to kind of keep the male body,

like, legislated and sacrosanct and private,

but to be able to thrust it into public space,

to kind of get those discussions happening.

So, I'd like to leave you with a more open-ended invitation

to be curious.

Be like some of the artists we've met.

Don't be passive.

Challenge the status quo.

Ask questions.

Don't take it lying down.

Don't throw the ladies out with the bathwater.

I'll stop now.

You're welcome.

Captions by Red Bee Media

Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation