Exhibit Focuses on Nude Form

As featured in The Oakland Press, April, 1999

By Bobbie Crawford

Art is based on what is both most familiar and unfamiliar, and that is the human body itself.

"In a real sense, that exposing of the body is what every artist does. It's almost a metaphor for what the arts are all about," said Hugh Timlin, curator at detroit contemporary gallery in Detroit.

"Unless I, as an artist, have a sense of my own vulnerability, it's almost impossible to create something honest and insightful."

The vulnerability of both artist and model will be on display now through April 11, when detroit contemporary presents a two-week exhibition titled "naked." The show will explore the human body through photos, paintings, sculptures, installations and live performances by Detroit-area artist.

"As humans, we are aware of the body, but we don't really understand it until we study it," Timlin said. "It is probably the hardest thing to master. The nude is a primary form (in art) because it is so complex."

Timlin, who graduated from CCS with a bachelor's degree in fine arts in sculpture in 1977, says until he began studying the human figure, he had no idea how "blind" he was to the intricacies of the body.

"I didn't realize that the movement of an arm or finger changed the whole form," he said.

Viewed in this way, the body is a form of nature - not simply a naked object - but how people perceive nudity is often affected by environment, he says.

A photograph of a naked woman in a magazine is often viewed differently from a painting of a nude woman in a museum.

"Nudity in art is not gratuitous," he says. "It puts it in a context that exists on a different plane.

In the arts, there's a whole category of work called the nude. Thinking that it is gratuitous sexuality can be almost a knee-jerk response.

" But Timlin did acknowledge standards of beauty for women have changed remarkably while standards for men have not.

"Man is the observer and woman is the observed.

As the standards of the observer change, so too, do those of the observed," said Timlin.

Also, historically, what artists painted wasn't necessarily a reflection of their own ideals but that of the wealthy male patrons for whom they worked.

But what of today's artist and the images they create? Timlin said contemporary culture has been created in mass-marketed images based simply on what sells.

"Society today is visually overloaded, creating an artistic blindness. We don't take the time to make spiritual connection with anything.

Looking without seeing is the most gratuitous of all activities," he said. When looking at the famous photograph of the naked young Vietnamese girl whose clothing had been burned off by Napalm and photos of naked corpses from Auschwitz, Timlin wonders how many people stopped and analyzed the devastation to an entire culture those photos represented.

He also points out photos such as those underline the deep-rooted sense of vulnerability in nakedness.

"There are a lot of cultural things to deal with in this country. Americans have an insatiable desire to be titillated, but in Europe, there is nothing like the American Puritanism that artists here have to deal with.

That knee-jerk response is a cultural deficiency," said Timlin.