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The Poetry of the Nude |
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 by Alfred A. Yuson
The nude takes pride of place as inspiration, subject and genre in the visual
arts.
From cold Grecian statuary to shimmering Impressionist paintings, from primal
carved figures to slinky millennial models posed, drawn or photographed against
skyline or light-bathed cyclorama, the nude as art enthralls, draws in, never
repels.
Curves and soft valleys, curious mounds and haunches, flanks — on a ripple or
daubed with oil — the nude’s components bespeak innermost recesses, even as they
leap out of imaginary borders, the clothing of territorial privacy.
As the paradox gains extension, this sense of privacy is not entirely absolute.
She and he have been taught to stay robed in public, that is, within sight of
other than the mate. Anyone else might be repelled, or drawn in at risk of
rejection, jealousy or orgy.
The beholder too has learned that beauty lies in one’s eyes, and what those eyes
can command the mind to imagine. There is that thrilling ascent of sly
seduction, when visual speculation often gives greater pleasure than quick
appraisal of favors, as an outright given. The bated breath works wonders. This
happens in real life.
Art has its own givens. The borders are dismantled in one swift stroke, the
essence of figuration laid bare. What can produce as copious a set of angles and
curves, humor and surprises, than the human body?
This is the principle of the nude in art. Where cleavage excites with
prospective parameters, the body laid bare in art is instantly lovely — prone or
supine, upright or seated — offering an elongated back, half a torso, a
suppleness of thighs, severed shoulder or well-rounded knees, maybe even a
fetishist’s delight of toes…
Languid look, atrocious pose, mystic smile, somber pout –- a woman wearing only
tresses is an infinite source of good rude joy, especially when the art is good,
this art of the nude.
Apropos a painting exhibit, the formidable art critic Cid Reyes wrote:
“’I used to leave the face until last. I wanted the expression to be in the
body. The head must be just another limb. So I had to play down expression in
the nudes.’ Thus remarked the British artist Lucien Freud (grandson of the great
Sigmund), whose array of nude paintings carried the weight of solid themes: the
scourge of age, the burden of human flesh, with every naked vein, wrinkle and
hair lifting an accusing finger at mortality.”
What remarkable descriptions of the human body at its stage of epilogue, or when
crossing the slough of physical despond.
I am tempted to reprise an exercise the late divine poet Jose Garcia Villa
conducted, when pure poetry ran out on him. This was to select, not at random
but attended by wizened taste, words and phrases in the most ordinary passages
he read in magazines, then make of the fragmented selection a literal paraphrase
as a poem, or at least something that resembled verse.
Cid Reyes’ prose, defining the ravages of time on a human body, stands in severe
contrast to the exaltations evoked by this body in its prime. And that’s the
stuff of poetry.
Poetry and nudity have long been coevals in the artist’s hierarchy that is not
unlike a tiered altar flowing with attar of roses.
Villa was expelled from the University of the Philippines with the publication
of his “Coconut poem” where he likened a woman’s teats to coconuts, its nipples
to the nut’s twin eyes. With a metaphysical more than juvenile sigh, he
professing: “I want to kiss the coconut because it is the nipple of a woman.”
Obscenity? Of course not. We recall that Galileo too was faulted when he pointed
to the sun as the lord and center of our galaxy. It just takes years, centuries
before narrow-minded tight-asses realize they cannot go on clinging to stringent
old beliefs that confine man’s exploration of oceans, universes, innerscapes.
In his story “Candido’s Apocalypse,” Nick Joaquin creates a memorable character
that is inexplicably rewarded with x-ray vision, so that he sees everyone in a
state of undress. The young man thrills to this gift, as much as he is bothered
by it, because he cannot select whom to see unclothed. It is a fictional conceit
that defies traditional gravitas, that seriousness of narrative with a preferred
adherence to reality.
We are mere mortals who cannot see beyond our turned-up noses because we may
find the smell offensive or the nakedness ghastly. But if we were Superman, or
Candido, our personal apocalypse hangs by a thread, dangling from the frayed
sleeve where the inner heart hangs.
John Labella, a young poet teaching literature at the Ateneo, shared a recent
poem by e-mail. He acknowledged trying his hand at poetic ventriloquism, that
is, assigning oneself a voice not his natural own, or appropriating the identity
of a persona entirely divorced from that of the poet, and thus coming upon
stances, stanzas, lines and undulations of thought and insight that are the
projected voice of someone else. Labella’s poem, “Versions on the Bath,” proves
remarkable for its naked truths.
“Like a thought with crude hair/ (as on the skins of heathen fruit)/ ripens the
mind about/ a nipple. Caftan slips,/ or frayed towel, and there: nipple. //
Pearl of great price,/ bare as an exegete going bald, resisting/ wave after wave
of his own blush,/ the undressing of reason before the pink/ of a recollected
mother ”
Six decades have passed from Villa to Labella, so that we are not shocked
anymore by such subtle celebrations of deshabille
More from Labella’s poem: “…Deprived of scenery/ the hyperconscious have-not,/
visiting, avidly reads onto the surfaces/ (tiles lined with talcum,/ buttery
soap dish, teething mirror)/ all kinds of metonym,/ and delights in the
unsayable./ He notes for instance how/ the ‘obscene’ reproduction is hung/ near
the work of pale ceramic/ that enthrones him, to distract/ from the human
banality/ against which the image is glassed in,/ kept dry.// … It is not so
much the mirror in the painting,
illusion repeated betraying itself, that moves the viewer/ as the illusion of
the body’s brilliance.// Turning away from obvious sunlight,/ the nude
reflection bends/ about to towel her toes, lift her thigh./ She forms a curve
that could be eternal.//”
Exquisite. Wonderful.
Again, these lines draw breath from the intelligent, impassioned reader with an
imagination that dares approach the heretofore forbidden. The kind of mind and
spirit that “delights in the unsayable,” that will place the word “obscene”
between quotation marks, as if to wink at it and whoever hears or reads it, also
whoever sees things with equal gallantry. We
can shake our heads only at examples of “the human banality.”
And in this poem the nude is but a “reflection” that “bends” to accomplish her
ministry of towel and toes and thigh, even as her shape approaches eternity.
If ever I conspire again with like-minded poets and artists as I did in 2001
with the outstanding visual artists Bencab and Pandy Aviado, when we put
together the groundbreaking book EROS PINOY: An Anthology of Contemporary
Erotica in Philippine Art and Poetry, surely Labella’s poem would gain
inclusion, in fact lead off the sequel.
In that anthology, why, we had all sorts of excellent nude art from distinctive
contributors such as National Artists Napoleon Abueva, Ang Kiukok, Arturo Luz
and J. Elizalde Navarro, plus Pacita Abad, Gus Albor, Nunelucio Alvarado,
Angelito Antonio, Marcel Antonio, Agnes Arellano, Salvador Arellano, Antonio
Austria, Plet Bolipata, Elmer Borlongan, Santiago Bose, Eduardo Castrillo, Danny
Dalena, Fernando Escora, Kiko Escora, Jeannie Javelosa, Raul Lebajo, R.M de
Leon, Julie Lluch, Red
Mansueto, Justin Nuyda, Onib Olmedo, Ramon Orlina, Rod Paras-Perez, Alfredo
Roces, Ronaldo Ruiz, Ephraim Samson, Juvenal Sanso, Wig Tysmans and Macario
Vitalis, and of course the co-editors themselves, Bencab and Aviado.
Such exalted company it was, of Filipino painters, graphic artists, sculptors
and photographers, their stunning works arrayed between covers, interspersed
with Philippine poetry in English that dealt with the nude, the naked, the
amorous, the love and lust and lilting life born of the erotic.
To be sure, prudes and hypocrites will cry foul, manifest offended sensibilities
over visual and verbal exaltations that dwell on eros. They simply have to get
on with their lives, get a pleasurable life, as it were, to fit into the
evolutionary cycle of aesthetic appreciation as conducted by the rest of the
human race.
Since Playboy magazine introduced Marilyn Monroe in her birthday suit, and
monthly featured the glamorous, contemporarily mythical nudes of Vargas to
complement the centerfold tricks in those halcyon days of the ’50s, it has been
a steady march for libertarian permissiveness that may yet bring us all back
full circle, into Eden.
Why, sometime in the future a great artist will produce “beaver shots” on canvas
and get away with it. But why get away? Perhaps it would be best to say that he
would have carried the art of nude portraiture into the next obvious realm,
where orifices, genitalia, pubic matter, take precedence within a frame, for
entirely public delectation.
Here of course it takes more time before the cloying sense of the cloister can
dissipate when it comes to regarding nudity, even in art. We still recall that
in the ’70s, a bureaucrat in the Manila Post Office expressed the opinion that a
reproduction of the celebrated Maja Desnuda or The Naked Maja by Goya was not
fit for local mail.
Perhaps he can still be forgiven, benighted as the officiousness was. In all
likelihood, he had not been aware that the Venus of Willendorf, with her
voluminous drooping breasts in archaeological stone, had been carved as early as
30,000 years before Christ. Or that naked female forms in marble attended the
glory that was Greece. That Boticelli, Raphael and Durer had painted nudes years
before Magellan and company first feasted their ocean-starved eyes on naked
women of the Visayas. That Titian had lavished his genius with oils on a
recumbent nude similar to Goya’s, if decidedly more elegant, with his Venus of
Urbano, well before Catholicism took hold on our once heathen islands.
Why should the human form in all its naked glory be considered unpalatable?
Well, some might say, it depends. An exception might be strolling up a nudist
beach exclusive to sexagenarians. But then again, it can be argued that the
forms of aging men and women are still fascinating — the folds, the droops, the
bilge, the withered shell… — for they were shells that once contained something
more prideful, when unclothed.
They too can be fascinating subjects for art, as witness Juvenal Sanso’s
pen-and-ink sketches of oldies but goodies in unique versions of copulation.
On exhibit since last Friday at the Mag:net+ branch at The Loop are paintings by
Romeo Lee, “The Wild Thing,” that celebrate women in grotesque, faux-repulsive
mode, maybe just a little wildly removed from Onib Olmedo’s blue nudes or Alan
Cosio’s flaming red ones.
Always there is the basic triumph of nakedness, the bare essentials spelling the
essence of woman and man. There is even the felicity of stark figures in
once-shocking poses, so that our newspapers have taken up the challenge of
fashion parades on television with their own weekly fare of bare-breasted models
on a Spring or Summer ramp abroad.
Just like the famous public sculpture of Claes Oldenberg, of a giant spoon
reclining on a lawn, the nude is simply a celebration of the ordinary, with the
image magnified only in the eyes of the beholder, thus turning extraordinary.
A good thing we can cling to the notion that it may be the nude portraitist,
like the poet, who will legislate the future of our world.
**************************************************
Posted in Gutom.org with permission from Alfred A. Yuson
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Posted on Tuesday, June 28 @ 18:51:52 CDT by don |
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