Buffalo Central Terminal

Tunick’s vision extends beyond the bare necessities
By TOM BUCKHAM
News Staff Reporter
8/14/2004

Spencer Tunick, atop ladder, prepares to photograph fully-clothed models in New York in 1999. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Tunick to photograph naked people under the Williamsburg Bridge.

Hey, you wearing the nervous look and the long coat over your birthday suit. Drop your inhibitions, step right in and join the crowd.
After weeks of intense buzz throughout Western New York about who might or might not dare show up, one of the most anticipated events in recent memory is at hand: photographic artist Spencer Tunick’s mass nude installation Sunday in Central Terminal.

Oddly, it will also be the least public of happenings.

At least 1,000 of the more than 2,300 people who signed up via the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Web site are expected to to briefly shed their clothes and lie en masse on the dusty floor of the concourse, seen only by Tunick’s crew and a handful of reporters, while the scene is captured by still and video cameras.

The crowd may be larger. Anybody wishing to participate will be welcome at the door, whether or not he or she applied online.

The more the merrier, as far as Tunick is concerned. Bodies and location mean everything to him.

“When the crowd gets over 1,000, people are enjoying the moment on a new level,” he said Thursday while scoping out the massive lobby of the abandoned East Side terminal.

Tunick, 36, who is based in New York City, chose the derelict space, which is slowly being restored, as a counterpoint to an earlier mass nude installation in Manhattan’s beautifully refurbished Grand Central Station.

He hopes to juxtapose the two railroading icons in a future exhibition of his work – possibly at the Albright-Knox. (Since the Buffalo installation was announced last month, the museum’s Internet home page has featured an image of the Grand Central event).

It is shaping up as a hassle-free session for Tunick, who was arrested several times for doing the same kind of installations in New York City during the 1990s – a harrowing memory that has stayed with him.

Not only has Buffalo received him warmly, but he welcomes the media attention he once avoided because it was a ticket to jail.

Tunick credits the Albright-Knox and Director Louis Grachos, who urged him to plan a mass nude installation in Buffalo after securing several of his works for the current exhibition, “Bodily Space: New Obsessions in Figurative Sculpture,” for championing his cause.

In 1998 Tunick did his first nude installation in an American Museum at New Mexico’s Site Santa Fe, where Grachos was then director.

It was a turning point for the artist, who had fled New York because of the unfriendly official environment, even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled he had every right to work with nude subjects in public spaces.

Tunick said it was Grachos who first referred to his projects, which are part performance art, part documentary, as installations, and who first suggested that he invite reporters – unaccompanied by photographers – to cover them. The same ground rules will be in effect for Sunday’s session.

“The fact I’m working with the Albright-Knox is going to open doors that were previously closed,” Tunick said. It gives him “kind of a chill,” he said, to work with a world-renonwed museum that has advocated the photographer since the early 1900s, when it put Alfred Stieglitz’s pictures on display.

“What a grand tradition,” Tunick remarked.

After completing an intensive one-year program at the International Center of Photography in 1990, Tunick began working with individual friends who volunteered to pose nude on the streets of New York. But his lens soon began attracting crowds.

“I accumulated a lot of people; I wanted to please everyone,” he said.

And though he still frequently works with subjects one-on-one, his unique approach “has become something that is shared on a much wider basis,” he said. Tunick has done mass nude installations the world over – most recently last June in downtown Cleveland, where more than 2,700 posed.

He said his dream is to photograph about 300 people in the nude at the base of Niagara Falls, a project he plans to initiate next winter or spring.