Street Art Tour: Painting The Public Taboo
Creating Poetic Judgments of the Female Nude in Melbourne’s Street Art
The tour combines chance and planning, meaning that encounters with the specific stops should be unintentional but the framing of expectations is already set (Eck, 2001). It is recommended that for this trip one shall derive alone and cease digital contact that may potentially disturb the process. This aims to challenge the ‘inevitable’ gaze of the female nude as passive, beautiful or erotic (Pollock, 2003). Each stop gives a description of the piece and provides an activity for the different versions of the female nude, starting from the most realistic to the disfigured. This encourages participants to constantly question the involvement of law and society in regards to the competing definitions of art and pornography (Eck, 2001).
Note that the duration of the tour is up to the participant but it is recommended that they meet all the stops within a month. Go go go!
Stop 1 – Misrepresentation
Figure 1: Spray Paint, 91 Kerr Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne (2017), Makatron
A spray-painted figure of a hybrid-animal and woman is trapped behind the bars of a private space. The work displays a striking resemblance to Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; only it took a more negative yet confident appeal. Following the renaissance painting effect of chiaroscuro, arisol as a medium easily defines and contours the figure of the nude, portraying the summit of the artist’s artistic achievement.
While the figure posed confidently in its bare body with its hand uncovering its vagina, the choker and vulture-bone head disrupts the optimistic outlook on the representation of women. In this case the binary representations of the female body is not expected to give way for audience’s arousal but lay empathy upon that matter. It is suggested that Makatron’s poem dealt with the function of the crowd and their association with psychogeographical contours, thus intentionally placing the work in a social territory that could only be accessed through the visual lens (Bassett, 2004).
Question whether you as a visual analyst, are the victim or the perpetrator over such judgments of the female nude?
Stop 2 – Contextual Reproduction
Figure 2: Painted Mural and Tags, 236 Johnston Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne (2017), Unknown
Go through each angle of the artwork: up close, full view, far-left and right, laying down on the sidewalk, or from the reflection of a window and continuously re-read the artwork. Painted on a 10 meter long building, the artist played with the architecture and the environment of the space to censor the genitals of the female nude. The female’s hair also covers her bottom whilst covering the rest of her nudity through her reclining pose. Drifting from the style of classical art, the figure still lays theme to the renaissance period by ornamenting the figure with flowers and nature.
Her authoritative expression oscillates between the two signifiers of her identification as a fille publique (woman on the streets) and a femme honnête (respectable married woman) (Pollock, 2003). Regardless, she is still the subject for the viewer and contestations. The graffiti tags plastered on the mural play a significant role to the re-reading of the image.
How does the spatial context of a street art piece change the way one perceives the female nude? Do the graffiti tags assert ownership of the piece or the subject that’s discussed in it?
Stop 3 – Sex Sells? Law and Commodification
Figure 3: Spray Paint and Stencil Mural, Snider’s Lane, Melbourne (2017), Lush Sux
Photo Credit: Unknown
This stop looks at the rendering of celebrities Emily Ratajkowski and Kim Kardashian’s topless selfie onto a largely scaled street-artwork.
Lush broadcasted Kim Kardashian’s ‘wave of sexual liberation’ onto the narrow streets of Melbourne (Quinn, 2017). While the artist has been stamped as a misogynist due to the subject matters in his artworks, he is simply extending the publication of the female nude presented in social media to the offline platform before the cycle repeats. Lush’s engagement with the female nude as a street art product sought to emphasize Kim and Emily’s intention to shift from the traditional gaze, showing control of their bodies and away from its erotic judgments (Schaare, 2000). It is however difficult to segregate the extent of commercial exploitation of the female nude from creativity, as values are deemed to oppose each other in the systems of subculture (Hebdige, 2002).
Hidden in the work is the existence of municipal law of aesthetic and moral judgments (Millie, 2011). The censorship on their breasts is not only rendered from the original image, but the artist’s subjection to the law. Familiarity in pop cultural subjects paints the female nude through pressing contemporary themes associated with it, and in this Lush represents them on the confronting axis of bourgeois celebrity realism and the audience’s erotic fantasy (Pollock, 2003).
Stop 4 – Making my Mark
Figure 4: Body-paint Graffiti, Melbourne (2017), Zheani Sparkes
Photo Credit: Dailymail
‘60s Czech artist Yves Klein inspired Zheina Sparkes’ naked body art on 20 locations around Melbourne. Using her own naked body as a paintbrush, Sparkes re-contextualized the idea onto the streets. Pressing her body onto the walls on a quite Sunday morning, Sparkes left her mark under the surveillance of the society (Benjamin, 2017).
The physical actions of displaying the female nude through her own naked body allows her to merge with the environment for a split second, before eternalizing it through documentation and media practices. Several media outlets scrutinized the performance street-art with the practice being deemed as both an aesthetic and moral failing, especially by displaying the female nude and knowing how it was made (Hanrahan, 2017).
This stop challenges your edgework skills. Creating an intimate bond with the environment will move you from a street art ‘tourist’ to a ‘resident’. It is encouraged that you leave your mark still within the theme of a female nude. The size, medium, location, time or process is up to you but it shall be made within the public space under the surveillance of city.
If it were a hand or a face print instead of the naked body, would it be different?
Stop 5 - A Distorted Reality
Figure 5: Painted Mural and Paste-up, 356 Fitzroy Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne (2017), Mik Shida
Shida’s work displayed the nude without displaying the nude. The female genitals are camouflaged through the lines of the image whilst retaining the colors of Fauvism. Similarly the texture of the work follows German Expressionism in radically distorting the female nude to evoke a mood. The alien-like characters graced our visual sensuality with its fluidity and strike us through its colors and scale (Suárez et al., 2017). Shida also translates this to this paste-up, remotely creating the artwork before quickly placing it on the streets (Iveson, 2010). However, the foreign nature of his pieces forms a detachment to the imposed standards of the female nude.
Too often representations of the female nude are constrained by the dominant cultural perspective with woman as subject of the male gaze (Schaare, 2000), but Shida’s work challenged this retrospect. With this we impose the question: How does Shida’s street art-work reveal the artist’s intent to display the female nude without inserting an erotic element?
By all means, there is no explicit explanation and frames of reference that is agreed upon for the female nude in the context of street art (Eck, 2001). A white box does not bind the pieces, nor are they neighbored to million dollar collections with permanent lighting and securities. The clear frame of reference is absent and spectators are left with discordant understandings of the correct meaning of the image. Visual taboo in street art is an element that is deeply rooted in its subculture, but the beauties of it reside in the uncertainty, in being questioned and continuously grey, in using the public and private property to create communication.