Buffalo asked to bare all for art 7/8/2004
Buffalo asked to bare all for art
By TOM BUCKHAM
News Staff Reporter
7/8/2004
It will be the most unusual “all aboard!” ever announced at Central Terminal - a call for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people to shed their modesty and their clothes for a few minutes to pose in the buff for artist Spencer Tunick.
Tunick, who is based in New York City and has become world-famous for his mass nude photographic installations, chose the abandoned East Side train station for the next one - Aug. 15 - after touring Buffalo’s architectural landmarks earlier this year with Albright-Knox Art Gallery Director Louis Grachos.
Grachos, who secured four of the artist’s large-format photographs for the current exhibition, “Bodily Space: New Obsessions in Figurative Sculpture,” hoped all along to interest him in staging a nude performance work here.
Central Terminal appealed to Tunick because of its historical significance and the ongoing campaign to restore the distinctive tower and concourse, once considered among the nation’s great rail passenger crossroads. It helped, Grachos said, that the artist hit it off with his tour guide, Russell E. Pawlak, president of Central Terminal Restoration Corp.
In a statement released by the Albright, Tunick said:
“The Central Terminal installation will be different from every one I’ve done in the past. Rather than working in a flourishing environment, we’ll be in a space that thrived decades ago, but still very much wants to be alive despite years of neglect and deterioration. The people represent that hope. The bodies will evoke issues of rebirth and longevity.”
Tunick’s recent installations include one featuring the naked backsides of people lying prostrate in New York’s bustling Grand Central Station.
Pawlak, whose volunteer organization bought the structure in 1997 and has spent $2 million to fix it up, called Tunick’s choice of venue “an unmatched opportunity to showcase Buffalo’s beloved art deco masterpiece to a wider audience and to tell the building’s story - the hope, memories and affection that fill this empty building.”
Though the terminal fell into decline even before Amtrak sold it in 1979, it remains a local icon.
Between May and October 2003, more than 12,000 people toured the building and volunteered their time to beautify the surrounding property. On June 26, more than 5,000 people gathered to celebrate its 75th Anniversary.
Tunick’s installations - he dislikes the term photo shoot - require “a great deal of trust between the artist and his subjects,” the Albright said. Volunteers agree to arrive at a specific time, shed their clothing and are only briefly nude. With the help of his support team, Tunick organizes and directs the participants as a group into the desired composition.
The moment is documented with photography and video, and the end results are displayed as photographic prints, projected videos and printed video stills. In exchange for posing, participants are given prints of the installation.
Tunick’s art “challenges preconceived notions of nudity and the culturally charged, often negative, connotations that are associated with it,” the Albright said.
Naturally, the format has generated plenty of controversy.
During the 1990s, Tunick was arrested five times for staging nude outdoor public photo sessions in New York City. But since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 rejected the city’s efforts to stop him, authorities have let him work uninterrupted.
The Albright-Knox believes the criticism has been way off base.
Tunick’s work “continues the important tradition of figurative art, evoking the spirit of the historic genre of the nude in the land/urbanscape as well the tradition of performance art,” Grachos said.
“There’s certainly not anything the least bit sexy or provocative about his works,” added Cheryl Orlick, gallery public information officer.
Volunteers who wish to participate in the Central Terminal installation can register online at www.albrightknox.org/tunick.
“This will be an exciting and memorable art event for Western New York, one that provides perfect symmetry to (Tunick’s) recent installation in Grand Central Station,” Grachos predicted.
