Æ
Some of these anxieties
are timeless. Others,
however, have been
reframed in recent years- due to the #MeToo
debate, gender
binaries breaking
down, and so on. Do
you think this is an
opportunity for us to
reinterpret the nude in light of 21st-century identities?
There is definitely a 21st-century perspective that’s worth
exploring here. When we were in the planning stages of these
programmes, the head of BBC Arts said, very firmly: “I want
to know why we’re making programmes about the nude now.
W hat’s different?” That proved to be a ver y important
interjection, because it made us think a bit harder about
the present moment in which binary gender and various
forms of sexuality are being increasingly challenged.
All of those developments mean that we are increasingly
framing the naked body in very different ways. I thought that,
when I’d finished making the documentary, I might end up
concluding that the nude has had its day in a gender-fluid,
non-binary world. And it’s certainly true that most nudes in
the mainstream western tradition have been jolly well binary.
However, the more we talked about it with people in the trans
community, and with people who identify with different
versions of gender, the more we found that there was huge
enthusiasm not to get rid of the nude but instead to rewrite it
and to make it speak differently. So, much to my surprise,
I came to think that more radical views
about gender may not kill off the nude
in art and, instead, might be just what
the form needed.
What new ways of seeing, or new
questions, would you like people to
have as a result of watching the series?
I would like people to recognise thedifficulties that they have with this medium and this genre,
which we are often encouraged to not really look at. We’re
encouraged to take the nude somewhat for granted, even
though we know it’s controversial in all kinds of ways.
I’d also like us to examine what we think we’re doing in
looking at it. I’ve got absolutely no interest whatsoever in
stopping people looking at nudes. But I want people – and
I very much include myself in this – to be a bit more quizzical
about what’s going on when we do that. Why and how do
we let some people look at some things and not others?
Why are there fig leaves on some things but not others?
What are we saying about ourselves when we decide there are
some bodies that we don’t feel very happy about looking at?
It’d be great if we could start thinking about all of
these questions in terms of our current preoccupations with
a ‘normalised’ body image. There was a recent newspaper
report into how good it was to get
teenagers to do life drawing, because
it allows them to actually see what
a real body is like when it hasn’t
been Photoshopped into perfection.
Essentially, if there’s one thing I can
achieve through this documentary, it’s
for people to take another look at both
BR the nude and the human body.
ID
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Mary Beard is professor of classics at the
University of Cambridge. Her BBC Two series
Mary Beard’s Shock of the Nude, is
available to view on iPlayer until
early March: bbc.co.uk/iplayerABOUT THE AUTHORA statue of a mother and
her children from the
Yoruba culture of western
Africa. Such artefacts,
Mary Beard points out,
often celebrate women’s
roles at the centre of
the communityThe crucifixion of Jesus as depicted in a 17th-century painting by
Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck. “The figure of the crucified Jesus,
while not absolutely nude, is often effectively naked – but it still
seems slightly odd to talk about the ‘nude Jesus’,” Beard suggests