The naked truth

1865 Olympia by Édouard Manet.

Where would art be without the human body?

Art originates from humans needing to express themselves. The first cave paintings are collections of handprints. As kids, some of the first artworks we create are stick-figures of ourselves, sometimes holding hands with our caregivers, dancing with our friends, or setting stuff on fire. Depending on what kind of kid you were of course.

The Western ‘canon’ of fine art is the core collection of works which are considered brilliant and significant, many by the white-guy rogues gallery known as the “Old Masters.” It’s filled with works using the human body as a subject. Examples include Van Gogh’s self-portraits, Vermeer’s fly-on-the-wall studies and Goya’s uncanny grotesques.

Many of these works are nudes.

Nudity in art has always been controversial, even for history’s most acclaimed works. In 1865, Édouard Manet’s Olympia, which has the nude subject staring directly at the viewer, shocked spectators for daring to depict its subject as both naked and confrontational. A year later, Gustave Courbet painted The Origin of the World, a naturalistic close-up of a vulva. It was not publicly displayed until 1995 and was censored on Facebook as recently as 2011.

Since then, Facebook has amended their guidelines. Their website now states that in addition to breastfeeding and post-mastectomy images they, “also allow photographs of paintings, sculptures and other art that depicts nude figures.”

But this clarification isn’t very helpful. Even Facebook agrees, on the same page they state, “the execution of our policies can sometimes be less nuanced than we would like.”

1866, The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet.

Defining art is basically impossible, so applying any of this correctly is basically impossible. Therefore, Facebook enforces its guidelines by holding certain forms in higher esteem than others. The older and more acclaimed a work is, and the more classical the art form, painting, sculpture, sketch, the less likely it is to be removed for violating the guidelines.

Nudity is removed based on reputation most of all, so while video and photographic nudity is banned, The Canon gets off pretty much scot-free. And The Canon is filled with chaotic white guys using art to express their feelings about their often-troubling relationships with women and girls.

Paul Gauguin, a Post-Impressionist active in the late nineteenth century, spent ten years in French Polynesia producing some of his most acclaimed paintings and engaging in extremely inappropriate relationships with teenagers. Egon Schiele was very briefly imprisoned for his sexual relationship with a seventeen-year-old. The less said about Picasso, the better.

A lot of the bias in favour of The Canon comes from a Eurocentric attitude regarding the perceived ‘purity’ of women in classical artworks by men. There’s a loud contingent of Twitter users who spend too much of their time posting ancient artworks next to photos of modern-day celebrities and influencers, alleging that women have become corrupted, impure and that we should all look to the muses of past centuries for inspiration.

It's all very misogynistic and colonialist and white supremacist-y. Many of the women depicted in these famous works had very little agency, and this perceived agency is what they consider so desirable.

Female artists, who have always existed and have always depicted nudity, are routinely excluded from conversations about censorship. In 1985 the Guerrilla Girls, a group of female artists and activists, created the poster featured.

1985 poster by the Guerrilla Girls.

It’s been nearly forty years since, and there’s still more work to be done.

Ruby Perring is an Ōtautahi-based artist currently studying at UC’s Ilam School of Fine Arts. She describes her paintings as sitting in the “realm of realism” with “nods back to Victorian aesthetics.”

Subject-wise, her work, “definitely centres around female bodies and female experiences.” “I’ve always felt very, privileged and just really, really lucky to be in a position to almost, kind of reclaim some sort of narrative, I guess, over the female form […] and our representation.”

Perring mentioned the essay “Medusa and the Female Gaze” by Susan Bowers. She summed up one of its core statements, “the male gaze seeks to possess, whereas the female gaze sort of lives and let’s live.” She said that with fellow artists, this gaze difference is evident, “We always, kind of, joke about how you can look at a piece and you can tell whether it was by a female or a male!”

“Last year I did a portrait of myself, I think it was about five portraits of different women and one of them was myself… they weren’t sexual, but they were quite vulnerable and voyeuristic scenes.”

She spoke about audience reactions, “What I found, as well, is that most femme-bodied people who saw the work […] they do tend to see it as something, like, overwhelmingly positive? Whereas with the reactions I’ve had to my work last year from men, they did tend to view it immediately as something sexual.”

This is a key element of art censorship. Nudity is not inherently related to sexual activity or arousal, and sexuality isn’t inherently “inappropriate.” But debates about where we allow nudity are not debates where we will get clarification on anytime soon.

In the absence of clarification, the presence of images, breasts, penises and vulvas, can provide an easy answer to the problem. But placing a black bar over the crotch of Michelangelo’s David just feels wrong. So, we make exceptions.

But when censorship focuses only on preserving older works and banning newer ones, it can allow bad habits to continue. With current internet regulations, many of us only see the nude bodies of porn stars and paintings of centuries-old teenage white girls. That doesn’t need to be the case.

The solution can come from all of us. Female artists shouldn’t be given all responsibility for fixing hundreds of years of misrepresentation, objectification and exclusion. “For me at least […] there is a little bit of pressure to correct something that’s been so damaged” said Perring.

I asked Perring if it’s possible for male artists to ethically create artworks of nude female bodies. “I think, like, definitely there has to be so much transparency and so much communication with the subject. Like, so, so much. Probably to the point that like, they might as well be painting it” she said.

“I think it is, I guess, important that they can still paint us, but they don’t have to take over our voice.”