Spencer Tunick

Spencer Tunick’s installations make people into art

Spencer Tunick was born in Middletown, Orange County, New York on 1 January 1967. During a stay in London in 1986, he photographed several small nudes in public places including in a bus stop. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from Amerson College in 1988, in 1992 he started taking nude photographs in public places also in New York which soon brought him fame all over the world. In 1994 he photographed 28 naked people in front of the United Nations headquarters in midtown Manhattan, an action he considered a turning point in his career: At that moment, his work transformed from pure photography to performance photography. Since the mid-1990s, Spencer Tunick has increasingly realised installations overseas. The artist himself sees his work not as nude photography; the naked models draped by him are rather an addition to the local conditions and equally become a bodyscape themselves. The human being becomes part of the artwork, a circumstance that Tunick likes to emphasise, otherwise the audience would only be left with passive viewing in exchange for admission. 

Spencer Tunick is not short of volunteers

Spencer Tunick is not interested in the individual but consciously dissolves them in the amorphous mass which he arranges and orchestrates differently depending on the project. There is no fee for participating in Tunick’s installations, but all volunteers receive a signed and limited edition photograph of the action which is additionally documented with videos and further photographs. The artist has no difficulty in finding enough amateurs willing to expose themselves: When he sought around 2500 to 3000 volunteers for a project in England, 3200 people registered, whilst 18,000 people undressed for his to-date largest project in Mexico. In 2012, Tunick performed his own version of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung – with 1700 naked participants, their bodies painted in red or gold. 

Naked installations with special messages

Spencer Tunick’s installations, which set him close to the Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft (who, unlike Tunick, only works with professional models), are always linked to concrete concerns. For his art action Dead Sea Revival Project near the Dear Sea, he had the participants painted in white, an illusion to Lot’s wife who was turned into a pillar of sale, as recounted in the Old Testament. But the pale naked bodies also remind us of the pallor of corpses associated with death and thus fit so well to the Dead Sea, which itself is threatened with a creeping death due to the sinking water level. Spencer Tunick wishes to draw attention to this state – and what better way to attract attention than with naked people? However, attention does not always mean success: In 2015, Tunick had hundreds of naked women protest against the nomination of Donald Trump as candidate for president – we know the outcome.