Overview
Art has prevailed in the battle to fill a Melbourne rooftop with naked people. Spencer Tunick has staged his latest mass nude photography work on the top of a car park in Melbourne's inner southeast.
Seventeen years after assembling 4500 naked volunteers for a snap near Federation Square as part of the 2001 Fringe Festival and eight years after he photographed around 5000 nude people in front of the Sydney Opera House during the 2010 Mardi Gras, the polarising artist amassed another contingent of naked (and pretty brave — it was less than ten degrees in Melbourne this morning) folk for a new work titled Return of the Nude.
The shoot saw a few hundred Melburnians grace the rooftop covered in nothing by sheer red sheets — from a distance, the participants looked like a little like hooded handmaids. Footage from the shoots shows the subject standing underneath the sheet and lying naked on top of it.
This is what it looked like:
A separate shoot over the weekend saw people painted blue, yellow, orange, red, green, pink and purple.
Tunick's newest work has had quite the tumultuous journey — first the New York artist was given permission to hold a mass nude photoshoot on top of the Prahran Woolworths car park as part of Chapel Street Precinct's Provocaré Festival of the Arts. But then the store said that it wouldn't like to participate. The supermarket then reversed its decision a week later after a petition spearheaded by the Chapel Street Precinct Association (CSPA), the festival's host organisation, gained some momentum in the community.
The official photographs of the shoot is yet to surface, but are expected to be be released by Tunick soon.
Images: Munich by Spencer Tunick; Melbourne by Provocaré Festival.