“Nude Partisans” opens at Wallach Art Gallery

How did you get involved? nude partisan happen?

When I began my ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon in 1997 to study the relationship between contemporary art and national reconstruction projects, I found that many people actively involved in the visual arts, including gallerists, collectors, and even artists themselves, A lot of people told me to go back to New York. New York has art, they said. Beirut, no. I was confused. We found the gallery open every other week and were surrounded by lots of art. People helped me understand that from their point of view, the activity was all new and not local. “Because as Arabs, as people from the Middle East, they couldn’t rely on the history of homegrown art that starts with life” drawing. They told me that nudity “has always been prohibited in their region” and explained that the current artistic creativity is extraordinary.

Its exceptionality made sense to me. Every artist I studied at Columbia was remembered for their exceptionality in some way. What didn’t make sense were the painted or carved nudes I saw many times in people’s homes, especially in newspapers published decades ago. I chose to study this historyless, this absent or self-absent history of art, and nudes constituted a prominent chapter. Many families who are descendants of artists helped me focus on this study in Lebanon. The research has since expanded, with the help of many colleagues in art history and anthropology, to explore the genre in other modern Arab countries and to explore ‘Arabness’ from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the 19th century. We investigated the importance of nudity in defining 1922 and the establishment of the new Arab nation-states as we know them today.

The name of the exhibition is nude partisanis derived from the name of the nudist movement embraced by Palestinians, Lebanese and Turks in the 1930s. Studying this artwork informed me of a series of deeply interconnected intellectual, aesthetic, and political projects. For example, proponents of nudism advocate viewing nude bodies in public places to practice the moral transparency, self-awareness, independence, and candor that they believe are necessary to counter corruption and antiquated customs. Recommended. It is a work that is also connected to a certain kind of literature, Al Adab Al Uriit was said to be equally uplifting.

Every time I share this material, I learn more from it. my new book, Fantastic objects: Lebanese art and sociality, 1920-1950, devotes a chapter to nudity. But his four-dimensional format for the exhibition allows the audience to encounter the nude genre in life-size, experiencing a visceral reaction and wondering why it is possible to be content to see only spectacular French nudes. You can think.