A naked man in Berlin

[imomus]

Here's an image, shot from a Berlin S-Bahn carriage, of a billboard advertising daily newspaper Die Zeit, currently running a series of articles entitled "What is manly?" You can see it in the context of the newspaper here. The naked male model is splashed across the front page, his pose Michelangelesque, a few teasing millimeters of penis visible in the chink between his legs.



In case I gave the impression, in my Trussed thrust piece the other day, that I have something against expressions of male sexuality, I want to say that I find the Zeit image a much more positive one than the O2 image of the mobile phone user making a fist-thrust gesture while watching soccer highlights on his "handy". Here's a list of reasons why I prefer the Zeit image:

1. There's no football involved.

2. The guy's a passive object, put there for our aesthetic contemplation.

3. Absence of "aggressive normality" in the Zeit image.

4. It seems to be part of a feminist project: that the objectification of women as sexual objects (which, let's face it, is not going to go away) would be a lot more acceptable if men were also objectified as sexual objects. Feminism, broadly speaking, has two projects: making women equal to men, and deconstructing patriarchy. This second project, it seems to me, is the more radical one, and has been neglected.

5. This is a recognizably European image, and I mean continental Europe: an image from Italian, French or German advertising of the last 30 years. (It could also be Scandinavian.) The UK and US, though, are still a bit puritan when it comes to naked men showing a chink of penis on billboards. This is the kind of image that says to an American tourist "You've arrived in another cultural zone".

6. There's a strong nudism-naturism component in German culture. A hundred years ago, the Berlin Expressionists of the Brucke school were heading out to the lakes surrounding this city and painting the naked people they found there in canvasses like Bathers by Otto Mueller and Bathers at Moritzburgm by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (himself, I think, rather a beautiful man, and a big hero of mine when I was younger; a photo of him appears on the sleeve of the first Momus EP). This is still a country where children play naked in city parks. The UK, to put it mildly, is not.

7. Unlike the O2 image, the Zeit image avoids what I call "Dionysus in the throne of Apollo" Syndrome; the encouragement of laddish, selfish, druggy, irresponsible behavior in consumers. I reject this because those authorities who encourage us to be Dionysian -- to lose control, but in a controlled way, strapped into planes or herded into football stadiums -- are not Dionysian themselves: they simply want to keep the control element, the rationality which underlies power, to themselves rather than see it spread through the population. Authorities who encourage us to be irresponsible (within limits, and in conformist ways) are contradicting the basic Existentialist message that we should each be responsible for our own actions, and control our own lives.

8. I persist in thinking there's something usefully Utopian in images of nakedness. I think there's a correlation between positive images of nakedness and humanism. I do think there will eventually be cities where we all walk naked, but I think it's at least a hundred years in the future, and it depends on humans liking humans more than they currently do, and accepting themselves better. We all need to become happier with -- and in -- our own skins.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

there is, however, in america, a strain of decidedly apollonian advertizing. most ads for investment plans/companies promote reason, balance, and disciplined foresight. they depict individuals (or the sober-minded investor with his nuclear family, the beneficiaries of his sobriety and sound judgment) removed from the madding crowd (enjoying a vacation or early retiremnt on, say, a crusoean beach). perhaps, however, the message is that the company offering its service will relieve the client of his apollonian burden, allowing him to indulge in more aggressive, cautionless epicureanism. ads for lite beer may be read, in my opinion, either way. almost always, they depict semi-naked people with nice physiques particpating in one or another sort of revelry, which would seem to be a celebration of dionysian behavior. but their success is contingent upon appealing to their viewer's sense of proportion, to his/her wish for a modicum of productive inner discipline (w/r/t certain types of consumption). my gut feeling is that if reasonableness and discipline were found to facilitate, to encourage consumption, the powers that be would promote apollonian values strictly. another example of apollonian advertizing is the rash of university ads that dominate nyc subway cars (many are for new universities). i'm thinking of ads for SVA, in particular. SVA is selling itself as an overseeing authority, as an ordered environment that allows creatives (ick) to harness, to discipline their creativity. i think business is less ideological, more opportunistic and mercurial than marcuse and adorno would have us believe (one could, i think, pretty easily, transform something like 'a thousand plateaus' into a business school text). of course, pringles commercials are totally dionysian.

as for number four, my experience suggests that the deconstruction of patrirachy and the elimination of objectification itself are coextensive. so, while i strongly endorse most tenets of feminism, i find part of that *movement* to be misguided, pre-raph (in all that school's bad ways), and slightly puritanical (or aggressively judeo-christian (even negatively cartesian) in its angry devaluation of the body)). this is a huge can of worms.

while i love the art of kirchner and el greco (and harbor a grudging respect for schiele), i think that their attitude toward the body is, while celebratory, too determined by the idea of subjectivity and confluence to be associated with the use of the body in mass marketing media (if i were moe awake, i might put this more clearly and concisely. sorry). unlike freud, neither kirchner nor el greco (nor schiele) are representational painters. they portray bodies, to my mind, that are registers (sites of registration) of the following: (subjective) perception, interiority/emotion, and the symbiosis (cumbersome word) between the social and the individual. el greco's bodies are god's play-doh. to use von bingen's phrase, they're feathers on the (sometimes scorching) breath of god. the tensility one sees in them *represents* the angst of faith, etc.. hence, el greco's bodies (and kirchner's, in a different way) are highly subjectivized anti-bodies. but you didn't mention el greco. in short, the torque, fluidity, and registrativity (new word) of most painted bodies distinguishes them sharply from the photographed bodies used in ads. (hals (whose bodies tend to register the pleasures of decidedly non-lite ale) and sargent may be different.) - blainerunner