Friday, March 25, 2005

Go Naked for a Sign -- Hakim Bey.

When anarchist writer Hakim Bey, wrote the phrase "Go Nake for a Sign" he might not have realised that artists would take him seriously. As an avid reader of his seminal tract, "The Temporary Autonomous Zone", I soon discovered a new poetics of the body that translated into the immediacy of a situationist uprising outside of the South African National Gallery in 1997.

However my career as a naked artist began really as a child. I was simply born naked and refused to put on my clothes. In fact my family who were into fashion, were always telling me to put something nice on. I refused. Finally after years of being suppressed and victimised by well-healed acolytes of the establishment, I disrobed outside of Cape Town's monument to apartheid arts, culture and planning. Of course there was also Tracy Rose, ensconced indoors, inside a glass box, and David Blaine, suspending himself much later over the Thames.

Various experiments with public nudity have occured recently, some like the Selfridges Naked ART show by New York Born artist Spencer Tunick, involving masses of nude people.

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