Naked in the street

I was standing there, in the University Square, with the world’s embarrassment on my face. They were six, they were naked and painted over the whole body – the brightest and shiniest of improbable colors, and around them, a growing circle of spectators. Hienas – first, they tried to come closer and closer, to almost touch the rainbow on these artists, and then perhaps they felt it too unbearable, the stares and the silent game that actually had started long before the spectators became aware of it.

Besides the coloured people, a few wards in colonial suits were marching, looking around with the blankest of views. The coloured six also walked for a while – some of them watching at the spectators, with defiance or at least with a challenging attitude. Eye contact with few, but mostly looking down at us, as if they were the guards - and us, the naked ones.

As we were in a circle around them and I was taking photographs, I had a great view of the people the other side of the circle. They were watching the naked actors with such a curious mixture of feelings, that I instantly understood we were, in fact, worthy of contempt. No sign of restraint, no control over our emotions of seen people naked in public – on our faces, the lewdness, the concupiscent curiosity, the downright measuring from head to toes of those pink women as if they were meats in a market, with the cheap jokes whistled among friends in the audience, and then the fear projected towards outside, envy and lust, I-am-better, every possible thought one might hold when encountering a naked, painted body. In the street.

All these feelings were there, on the faces of my fellow spectators, bigots in their self-righteousness, a terrible show for the actors to watch while they were being watched. And I instantly remembered that paragraph from Adam Smith, when he was talking about actors and singers and why do we pay a ticket to see them and applaud in the end, but wouldn’t be caught dead doing the same on a stage as they did. Smith said, there’s an incorporated despise from us to them – and an underserved one, since we could never do the same thing they do. We couldn’t for the lack of skills (well, that’s not necessarily true for some of today’s art), but also because of our dignity and image of the self. There is a fragility, a weakness in exposing yourself or in putting yourself in such a position as to be regarded with the kind of pity or contempt actors and other performers often are regarded with, when we, the spectators, confuse them for the characters they play.

And we don’t want to go over our comfort zone and explore any further.
But what about these people watching nakedness in all its forms? We had in front of us a teenager, three women of various shapes and sizes and an elderly man – by far, the most interesting figure for me, with his wild hair and pink eyelid rims. My ears caught various threads of conversations, some of them, terribly disturbing. In front of me, a 10 yo, with his mom and dad, the kind of hunky, good boy, said three things. The first I didn’t recall, although it sounded strange to my ears, but the second one, when the big-breasted woman appeared, was terribly inappropriate: Acum chiar că m-au dat pe spate/’Now they really knocked me over!’. And the third, when the blossoming-tit teenager appeared, was a comeback to his age-appropriate innocence; he asked his mother – rather loudly, as if he was asking himself and the audiences at the same time – whether that’s supposed to be a show with adults or with children? I sort of understood his inept remarks in the end of the show, when the father, the accountant type, uttered the same type of badly placed humor.

And yet, the show was not about nakedness. Nor about wards and prisoners or any other kind of abusive relations, as it seemed to be, when it all started. The colored people started to ooze something out of various recipients, a foam engulfing various parts of them. As the foam cooled, they became statues, and the guards helped them by cutting the foam and then removing them from the scene, in a cart.

The show was, by no means, cheap or fortuitous – I found myself dwelling in various interpretations, as the metaphors were waiting for me us to uncover them. But the same thought was lingering – related to my embarrassing position at the beginning of the show, when everything seemed to be just utter exhibition of nakedness. That is, before the ‘action’ started to create some meaning to the whole thing, for the spectator.