Christo CrockerTour participants displaying their tan lines at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, in Sydney, as they view Robert Owens’s “Sunrise #3.”
By MARK WHITTAKER
Published: May 1, 2012
SYDNEY, Australia — The people gathering for a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia on Friday evening smiled awkwardly in the way of strangers who had to undress in front of one another. Which is what they were about to do.
Christo Crocker
Stuart Ringholt
The artist leading the tour, Stuart Ringholt, wearing scruffy black clothes and a misshapen porkpie hat, stepped forward.
“Who’s from the naturist community?” he asked.
A bunch of older, rounder men put up their hands.
“Who’s nervous?”
A dozen or so others, including this reporter, barely managed to raise their hands to half-mast. The Museum of Contemporary Art has enjoyed a surge in attendance since it reopened on March 29 after being closed for an 18-month, $56 million refurbishment, but these particular visitors would have the place all to themselves. They were here, after hours, for a tour of museum works that was itself billed as an artwork and had this as its title: “Preceded by a tour of the show by artist Stuart Ringholt, 6-8pm (the artist will be naked. Those who wish to join the tour must also be naked. Adults only).”
Mr. Ringholt, 40, is a Conceptual and performance artist who was recently named one of Australia’s 10 “artists who matter” in the Australian newspaper The Age. He has led tours of this kind in three other Australian cities in the last year, and was able to offer some insight about the experience to come.
“It’s very beautiful,” he told his audience. “We are sexualized with our clothes on — with them off, we are not.”
Not everyone, he explained, was going to be naked. “A couple of M.C.A. staff members will come with us for security reasons, but they will be clothed,” he said. But many employees, he added, “if they have to do the tour two days in a row, often take off their clothes on the second day because they feel very uncomfortable being clothed around so much flesh.” He apologized that security cameras would be recording the group, joking that “the footage will be kept for three months, for the enjoyment of the security staff.”
Mr. Ringholt then led the 32 men and 16 women into a brightly lighted conference room, where the clothes just seemed to fall away.
“Everybody seemed to concentrate very much on what they were doing,” Lance Barton, a 57-year-old Sydney office worker making his debut as a nudist, recalled later. (“I have fantasized about it, but never done it,” he added. “Only a bit of midnight streaking by myself in the parklands around where I live.”)
The first stop on the tour was a 2007 work by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, “Earth-Moon-Earth”: a player piano doing a version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, complete with glitches picked up in the course of converting the music to Morse code, bouncing the signals off the Moon, then reconverting them to musical notes. Against this ghostly backdrop, Mr. Ringholt noted that modern museums strip back architecture, floor coverings, windows and adornments for the sake of foregrounding art, and that in the same way contemporary artists have since the 1980s taken to wearing black.
“There’s this process of reduction going on,” he said. “I asked the question of why the contemporary art community stopped at wearing black. Why didn’t they reduce further and strip back the clothing from the visitor?”
The next stop was an untitled Stephen Birch work from 2005, an installation in which Spider-Man faces off with a primitive, phallic figure. Mr. Ringholt spoke about fear, and most of the visitors agreed that their anxiety had subsided. He said that in his 20s, he was profoundly affected by experiences of extreme embarrassment, a subject now at the center of much of his work. One of these involved toilet paper hanging out of his pants as he walked on the field at an Australian football game with hundreds of people looking on.
“I was wrecked — I went home and explained it to my girlfriend, and she was killing herself laughing,” he said. “I was distraught for a whole week.”
Being a dabbler in performance, Mr. Ringholt turned shame into art. He went to Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and stood in front of a marble fountain for 20 minutes with toilet paper trailing from his trousers. He walked around for a day in Basel, Switzerland, wearing a prosthetic nose with a “gob” of fake mucus hanging from it.
“I tried to understand how fear manifests in the body and how it debilitates you,” he said. Knowing these acts of abjection were performances didn’t make them easier, he added: “It was just as bad. You get a panic attack. You get cold sweats. I realized it was the same fear I got when I rang up a woman to ask her on a date.”
Eventually, he said, he learned to conquer his fear by understanding it. He called the woman and got the date, and he took his fear workshops on the road. That led to the nude museum tours.
This tour finished with a glass of sparkling wine on an open terrace overlooking the Sydney Opera House. Asked if he had any plans to take his nude museum tours overseas, to the Metropolitan in New York, perhaps, Mr. Ringholt became animated.
“Imagine walking in there with all that armor” in that museum, he said. He loves the symbolism of masks, and a whole suit of medieval armor offered wonderful new metaphors.
As for the visitors, they seemed to be divided on the question of whether art was enhanced by viewing it naked.
“Not really,” Mr. Barton said.
But another participant, Tracey, who wouldn’t give her last name because she works for “a Christian organization,” said that “there was more focus on the art.”
“You’d think you’d turn up with all these other people without clothes and you’d be checking them out,” she said, “but I wasn’t looking at anyone.”
Afterward, as the visitors walked back to the changing room, glowing from the wine, a crowd on the street outside looked up at the parade of nakedness coming down the glassed-in stairs. But nobody in the group seemed to mind.
