Spencer Tunick interview

BY RUTH MACLEAN

Special to The News

“I’m not as famous as you would think. Not my face,” says Spencer Tunick.

“Andy Warhol’s famous. Damien Hirst is famous. I’m well-known. No one stops me on the street.”

Tunick is “well-known” for his photographs of huge groups of nude people in prominent architectural sites around the world.

From 700 naked people sitting in a theater in Bruges to 600 on the Aletsch Glacier, the U.S. artist has pushed this idea to its limits. In 2007 he photographed 18,000 people in the fetal position in Mexico City’s Zócalo, setting his own record.

And now he’s in Mexico again for his new exhibition, “Citadinos,” at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco. The works are part of a different project of his: photographing nude individuals in various city street scenes.

Promoting his new show at the Zona Maco art fair on Saturday, Tunick explained to The News why he opted for individual portraiture now.

“It’s a very personal series. .It’s nice to be able to work and communicate on a personal level. In the large works, I don’t get to physically embrace the participants.”

In one of the photographs, a woman lies in a truck full of oranges, her head flung back, her face out of shot, and her body prostrate, reflecting the early sun with an incongruous glow.

In another, a gawky man with long blonde hair sits on a bench on Amsterdam in Col. Condesa, his elbows on his knees and a large, shaggy dog that looks very much like him by his side.

HOMAGE TO MEXICO

Tunick describes his group shots as a “flesh architecture complement” to the major architectural structures of their settings.

He similarly pays homage to Mexican painting with 12 photographs that visually allude to works in the Colección Blaisten at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco.

Tunick points to a photograph.

“There was a painting with horns with a man holding horns in a tribal dance, and so I used horns here.”

A man with deer’s antlers on his head is poised, mid-run, in the middle of a deserted street.

“A lot of the works were in barrios and on streets with certainly a Mexican feel,” he said.

“I like that the people here are born with art in their blood and they live around and with art in their homes. Art is everywhere; it’s part of the dialogue of everyday life.”

EXCHANGING GIFTS

Participating in contemporary art to the extent of publicly taking off their clothes, does not come quite so easily to most people.

His models’ reactions to what they are doing are of particular importance to him.

“I think people really go through something when they pose for me, even the hippest of hip people who think they won’t experience anything,” he said.

“It might seem so easy and blasAc in your head but once you actually do it, out in a public space, it transcends a lot of your preconceptions.”

In return for posing for him, Tunick gives every model – that’s nearly 100,000 people – a free print. He says his gallery would prefer he weren’t so generous, but he sees the exchange as artists trading work. “They’re giving me a gift and I’m giving them a gift. I think it’s the greatest thing you can do.”

Does Tunick ever get tired of working with nude models in public places? He says he’s perfectly happy.

“If you said to me, ‘I’m going to pose for you, Spencer. Let’s do that tomorrow,’ do you think I’d be bored with you? … I’m not bored. It’s always exciting working with people. It’s great.”