17 indices on nakedness

17 indices on nakedness*

On ‘The Naked Soul’ by Syd Krochmalny

Lucas Soares**

1. In the time of Cronus and in the reign of Zeus, there was a law according to which men and women who had lived just and pious lives were sent on their deaths to the Isle of the Blessed to live in perfect happiness; in contrast, those who had lived unjust and impious lives were confined to Tartarus, prison of unending expiation, punishment and grief. As so often even with the best laid plans, there were problems: judgment was often defective and the dead were sent to the wrong place. In response to calls by Pluto and by the guardians of the Island of the Blessed, Zeus took a key decision to guarantee the justice of decisions as to the final destination of humans after death: ‘I shall put a stop to this. At the moment the judgments are not well given, because the persons who are judged have their clothes on, for they are alive; and there are many who, having evil souls, are apparelled in fair bodies, or encased in wealth or rank, and when the day of judgement arrives, numerous witnesses come forward and testify on their behalf that they have lived righteously. The judges are awed by them, and they themselves also have their clothes on when judging; their eyes and ears and their whole bodies are interposed as a veil before their own souls.  All this is a hindrance to them. Their clothes, and those of the judged, are the obstacles that hinder justice. What is to be done? In the first place, I will deprive human beings of the foreknowledge of death, which they possess at present. In the second place, they shall entirely stripped before they are judged, for they shall be judged when they are dead; and the judge too shall be naked, that is to say, dead.  For justice to be done, let the judges only employ their souls to examine the souls of others immediately after their death, when separated from all family and after leaving all possessions behind on Earth’. The mythic, poetic and visual potential of this image is strong: naked and dead, Minos, Radamanthys and Aeacus, sons of Zeus and the three judges of the dead in Hades, judged the naked and dead, whose souls were sent according to the just or unjust lives they had led to the Isle of the Blessed or to Tartarus respectively. One of the most interesting aspects of this myth, with which Plato closes the Gorgias, is the idea of clothing as an obstacle to judgement as to a person’s moral condition – whether just or unjust, pious or impious. In the first instance, The Naked Soul may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct this image obsessively. By means of a ‘work against the current times’ (Nietzsche), Syd Krochmalny appropriates, deconstructs and reconstructs this image in order to realise a contemporary reworking of the Platonic myth in the image of the English activist, Stephen Gough: in it, the latter becomes the judge who will judge us and our clothes, in the wake of his solitary crusade across the British mainland. Krochmalny fashions the Gorgias into a logos with which to think through the question of nakedness, and more specifically, the physical, epistemic, political and legal discomfort, that nakedness produces in the onlooker.

2. Nakedness reveals all the contours inscribed on our bodies over the course of our lives: folds, wrinkles, wounds, scars, cares, illnesses.  All is visible: the crooked and the straight; the noble and the base. What is it that clothing conceals? The imprint of the soul on a naked body and the imprint of a body on a naked soul. Letting the veil of clothing fall reveals all the marks left by our behaviours and actions. In The Naked Soul, clothing becomes a physical and spiritual obstacle to the ends of sociability and free movement, and to the rediscovery of our most primitive self-determination and liberty.

3. Our appreciation of Stephen Gough’s act reveals the prison of our own habits and customs, while, at the same time, reinforcing the pristine liberty of his own being.  His crusade for nakedness gathers force with each viewing.  From this tension emerges his care of self. In this sense, The Naked Soul extends Stephen Gough’s gesture. For, among other things, the idea is to sow the idea of nakedness in the mind of the spectator.

4. From Adam and Eve to our times, nakedness supposes being seen by another. Being naked always supposes being naked for someone else. Through the figure of Stephen Gough, the nakedness proposed by The Naked Soul seeks to transcend this other, establishing itself as an autonomous nakedness, self conscious, and free from the ties that would enslave it to the conservative gaze of others, and from a gaze that will only tolerate it when exhibited for a spectator-consumer. Krochmalny’s Gough does not disrobe for a spectator, but for himself.  This is his technology of self. And this is what makes Krochmalny’s appropriation of Gough’s act truly disruptive in aesthetic, political and legal terms.
   
   
   
   
   

5. In Ways of Seeing, Berger identifies a difference between ‘nakedness’ and ‘nudity’: ‘Nakedness reveals to itself. Nudity is placed on display. ....To be naked is to be without disguise.  To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.’ The Naked Soul does not aim for nudity, but for that nakedness that in the very moment that it reveals itself before others, reveals all of its contours to itself. Nakedness as a way of seeing the world.

6. There are then two types of nakedness; one that conceals and one that reveals. The first is an atavistic nakedness: nakedness as spectacle, devoted to exhibitionist values, and dedicated exclusively to a consumer-spectator. When we consider nakedness in the media, in pornography, on the beach and even in art (the large-scale nude shots of Spencer Tunick for example), the aftertaste of clothing is present in all of them. Here there is no tension. Here there is no trace, properly speaking, of nakedness, but only its atavistic and impersonal appearance. It is precisely this anonymous and serial appearance of nudity that turns it into another form of clothing. The Naked Soul, in contrast, evokes an inopportune and troubling nakedness that reveals and, without being conceived either originally or exclusively for a spectator, makes the latter nervous as the crusade for naked life that Stephen Gough personifies casts doubt on the preconceived ideas, contaminated by Puritanism, that we all hold around nakedness.

7. What is it that we know when we contemplate naked corporeality? Such would be one of the philosophical questions posed by The Naked Soul. If we heed the story of Genesis, what is known as a result of nakedness, is the knowledge of nakedness. ‘Then the eyes of [Adam and Eve] were opened, and they knew that they were naked’. Krochmalny’s Gough endeavours to restore nakedness to the rank of the first object of knowledge. Epistemologically speaking, this work is a truly eye-opening experience, making the very springs of the control society in which we now live visible.

8. What is troubling about the nakedness that Stephen Gough personifies is its elusive, irrepressible nature. As Agamben puts it ‘The nudity of the human body is its image - that is, the trembling that makes this body knowable, but that remains, in itself, ungraspable. One could define nudity as the envelopment that reaches a point where it becomes clear that clarification is no longer possible. The matheme of nudity is, in this sense, simply this: haecce! there is nothing other than this.’ The Naked Soul unfolds for us a sublime experience of nakedness, one that points to a radical disjuncture between the magnitude of Stephen Gough’s act and the narrow tracks of a sensibility moulded by liberal Puritanism. The infinite, unfinished and incommensurable character of Stephen’s nakedness attests to the impotence of all law and every regulation. For it is precisely a nakedness that transcends the limits of our sensory and intellectual understanding. A sublime and baroque nakedness that both enchants and discomforts through the chiaroscuro, through the fear and trembling. A naked corporeality that, by revealing its own confusion, awakens our own. The pleasurable fear of nakedness.
   
   

9. According to Berger, Dürer believed that the ideal nude should be constructed by taking the face from one body, the torso from another, the legs from a third, the shoulders from a fourth, the hands from a fifth and that the result would glorify humankind. Each one of the takes of Stephen Gough’s limbs that we see in The Naked Soul constitutes the artistic representation of Dürer’s idea, through which Krochmalny attempts to establish the enormous aesthetic, epistemological, politico and juridical potential of nakedness.

10. In contrast to the hypermodern theology of clothing, The Naked Soul raises the possibility of a morality of nakedness.

11. If the clothes make the person, The Naked Soul tries to show what nakedness does to one; and especially the extent to which nakedness restores an archaic, more child-like image of nature as a form of nakedness. State of nature and nakedness.

12. What Krochmalny’s Stephen Gough highlights through his crusade is that nakedness does not represent a state, but rather an event that is never complete. As Agamben emphasises: ‘We can therefore only experience nudity as a denudation and a baring, never as a form and a stable possession. At any rate, it is difficult to grasp and impossible to hold onto. As an event that never reaches its completed form, as a form that does not allow itself to be entirely seized as it occurs, nudity is, literally, infinite: it never stops occurring’. What is troubling about the nakedness unfolded by The Naked Soul is that it can never be grasped. Krochmalny highlights the enigmatic outline of nakedness. Because ultimately nakedness reveals an enigma.

13. All of the power of Stephen Gough’s naked ramble resides in his individual undertaking. He is the individual apart from the masses covered by the fig leaves of puritan tradition. The entry way to mystery that his nakedness reveals leads into a reconsideration of all that – religiously, epistemologically, juridically and politically speaking – is camouflaged by clothing. For while the latter springs back on us and provides cover, Stephen’s nakedness raises a storm of troubling questions.

14. What this is about is understanding and –thereby- neutralising the mechanisms of control and discipline that exist around the nakedness that must be covered. With the repressive controls over the naked body deactivated in this way, nakedness regains its positive character. Because for Krochmalny we need to stop thinking about nakedness as inherently defective (as the absence of clothes).  The Naked Soul is an apology for a world of nakedness without shame.  A return to child-like nakedness and to the happy lack of self-consciousness that conveys our right not to wear clothes. ‘They were both naked, and were not ashamed’.

15. Through the richness and complexity of his individual gesture, Stephen Gough’s nakedness highlights several symptoms of the current era: the co-existing fear and desire provoked by the naked body, the limits imposed on its free circulation in public space, and the teleological dead weight that still subsists in the dressed/ naked dichotomy.  Outwith its biological and sexual functions, what is important here is the subversive power that naked corporeality can come to assume, which power is being diffused by the contemporary zeal to overcome all its deficiencies.  

16. Nancy points out that: ‘The body is an envelope: and so it serves to contain what it then has to develop. The development is interminable. The finite body contains the infinite, which is neither soul nor spirit, but in fact the development of the body’. Through its appropriation of Stephen Gough’s crusade, The Naked Soul brings to life the interminable development of nakedness.

17. Cartography of nakedness. Evolution of a Stephen as Adam, as indigenous person, urban warrior, naked flâneur, a persistent offender who nourishes, reads and lives his freedom through the archaic strategy of his action.

*Text included in the catalogue.

**Lucas Soares is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires and a poet. Here he explores the theme of nakedness, drawing on Plato, Berger, Agamben and Nancy in a review of Argentinian artist and sociologist, Syd Krochmalny's, site-specific video installation, 'The Naked Soul'. The video is a poetic and philosophical meditation on nakedness, loosely inspired by the case of Stephen Gough, 'the Naked Rambler' who spent six years cumulatively in prison in Scotland for his naked walks, and who is now a prisoner in England. The inspiration for the video was the myth of the origins of justice or ‘The Naked Souls’ recounted by Plato, which is also the starting point for Soares’ text. The video’s voiceover also includes texts from the Bible, Hume, Descartes, Mill, John Locke, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Merleau-Ponty among others, which together interrogate the imaginary and affective foundations of conscious rational subjectivity and the radical pressure of puritanism on liberal modernity. The video was first projected in Edinburgh's Old Calton Cemetery, which contains the tombs of, and monuments to, David Hume and Abraham Lincoln, as well as Thomas Muir and other campaigners for universal suffrage transported to Australia, in May 2013. It was also shown at the Augustine Central Church in Edinburgh on the same day, in the School of Communication of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, at the Oakland Underground Film Festival in September 2013, and at the  International Sociological Association, Yokohama, Japan in July 2014.

Agamben G (trans. Kishik D and Pedatella S) (2011/ 2009) Nudities. Stanford: Stanford University Press, at 84, 89, 90; 65.

Plato, The Gorgias (Project Gutenberg e-book http://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/7/1672/ Asscher S and Widger D (eds.))

Berger J (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin Books, at 54.

Nancy J-L (trans. Rand, RA) ‘58 indices on the body’, in J-L. Nancy (2008) Corpus: Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press pp. 150-160, at 151.

Nietzsche F ‘On the utility and liability of history for life’ (1874) in Pearson, KA and Lodge D (eds) (2006) The Nietzsche Reader. Oxford: Blackwell at 125.