2 min
Untitled, Cecily Brown The Warm Up
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- Music
Emily:
Okay. Cecily's on the other side and I was like, where is she? We're standing in front of Cecily Brown's piece on the second floor in stairwell B.
Emmanuel:
I refer it to like, as a mess, but like in a really good way, like it's a really nice mess on this wall in stair B.
Emily:
The more you spend with it, the more little details you see I'm going to want to use, I always use the word orgy. Am I allowed to use that word on this?
Emmanuel:
Massive orgy of naked bodies, like a literal orgy.
Emily:
You'll notice different bodies kind of intertwined and inter tangled in each other. Predominantly these male bodies, nude, kind of interacting at interesting angles and some not the most flattering.
Emmanuel:
Whenever I talk about that piece after the Torah has had its Gables. I talk about John Berger's the Ways of Seeing. He's a big art critic, and one of the things he speaks about is the difference between nudity and nakedness. The difference between nudity and nakedness is that nakedness is like a sort of like unawareness that people are observing you while you're without clothing. And nudity is the sort of this choice of wanting to be without clothes. So like, I like to imagine that honestly, Cecily Brown was going for that sort of nudity. The figures that she's painting, they are acknowledging that they're nude, they're enjoying their nakedness. They're enjoying being observed, essentially.
Emily:
She's really interested in previous art movements like abstract expressionism and kind of the idea that those are always such male centered practices and kind of movements within the art history canon. And so she's really kind of interested in taking that kind of male gaze and that aggression that's in them and kind of flipping it on its head. So it's kind of her opportunity to take a chance to say to these abstract expressionists artists that anything they can do, she can do better and kind of using them and their bodies themselves as the stepping stone to do that. Kind of using them as her own subject matter and treating them how they've treated women in the past.
Emily:
Okay. Cecily's on the other side and I was like, where is she? We're standing in front of Cecily Brown's piece on the second floor in stairwell B.
Emmanuel:
I refer it to like, as a mess, but like in a really good way, like it's a really nice mess on this wall in stair B.
Emily:
The more you spend with it, the more little details you see I'm going to want to use, I always use the word orgy. Am I allowed to use that word on this?
Emmanuel:
Massive orgy of naked bodies, like a literal orgy.
Emily:
You'll notice different bodies kind of intertwined and inter tangled in each other. Predominantly these male bodies, nude, kind of interacting at interesting angles and some not the most flattering.
Emmanuel:
Whenever I talk about that piece after the Torah has had its Gables. I talk about John Berger's the Ways of Seeing. He's a big art critic, and one of the things he speaks about is the difference between nudity and nakedness. The difference between nudity and nakedness is that nakedness is like a sort of like unawareness that people are observing you while you're without clothing. And nudity is the sort of this choice of wanting to be without clothes. So like, I like to imagine that honestly, Cecily Brown was going for that sort of nudity. The figures that she's painting, they are acknowledging that they're nude, they're enjoying their nakedness. They're enjoying being observed, essentially.
Emily:
She's really interested in previous art movements like abstract expressionism and kind of the idea that those are always such male centered practices and kind of movements within the art history canon. And so she's really kind of interested in taking that kind of male gaze and that aggression that's in them and kind of flipping it on its head. So it's kind of her opportunity to take a chance to say to these abstract expressionists artists that anything they can do, she can do better and kind of using them and their bodies themselves as the stepping stone to do that. Kind of using them as her own subject matter and treating them how they've treated women in the past.
2 min