Artist Ken Nutt, Stratford Ontario

It is not often that multiple pauses are taken to narrow in on how my inputs are being somatically seduced in a particular situation. A request was made to do this for class, so I chose to focus on my role as a figure model. I have been figure modelling for six years now, and it began in a little town in SouthWest Ontario. It started as a mode of liberation from an ex-lover. He refused my right to perform nude in front of a group of respected artists. This is from the same lover who did not want me applying to school. I didn’t understand the threat. How could someone think they could keep me in bounds, and be the only eyes to gaze upon my body? Did I miss this in that fine print in the contract of monogamy? I feel that living with someone and dating them for two years with a cherry on top called repression has ramifications of contentment. Like that felt from the protagonist in Written on the Body, “Contentment is the positive side of resignation. It has its appeal but it’s no good wearing an overcoat and furry slippers and heavy gloves when what the body really wants is to be naked”. (Winterson 76). This was all too literal for me. Similar to Cullwick and Munby’s dynamic, our relationship did not have mutual power and equal freedom and could not be supported as such, (Odonnell 140). So I broke from the chains, applied to art school, and began to figure model. 

Through this transition it seemed as though my body slipped out of the jaws of control and into it’s own sense of power. In class we spoke about the difference between control and power. Six years ago, I took back ownership of my body from my ex. He had unsuccessfully pursued a method of manipulation in hopes to repress my desire to model. The choice to model gave me a sense of power. Power is about critiquing the repression, and power is given by asking permission. 

March 5th Morning 10am-1pm – Toronto School of Art

So with this sense of power pulsing through my vessel, I lay nude, exhibited to a class that was about seven bodies, mixed in gender, and probably ranging from their late forties to sixties. It was 10: 26 am at the Toronto School of Art and I’m on my first five-minute break to stretch my stiff body. I write down my feelings of power and liberation and mull around a quote from a Cullwick and Munby article:“ Power through being the spectacle of another’s gaze is an ambiguous power. It allows one to internalize the gaze of the voyeur and participate in the vicarious enjoyment of their power” (McClintock 157).The early morning sun is seeping through the curtains casting an amber hue on my bare body. The first few times I felt nervous and insecure to show myself, I felt as though it was a voyeuristic act, and anyone could sexualize me. This soon faded when I realized I was solely lines, shapes, volume, and colour. As that amber hue soothed my past trauma’s, we forgot I was a body. I may as well have been a fruit bowl. 

I was experiencing a world without gender, like that of Donna Haraway’s vision. Modeling is a rare time that I feel vacuumed of identity.That word, voyeurism, whether it is mine, or something I picked up along the way, seems to have a sexual undertone. I don’t feel the students are sexualizing me. That’s why I love this job. It’s a refreshing circumstance to be treated as human. I am completely on display, as I pose stiff, still and silent. Occasionally I make eye contact with an artist, and there are frissons, little eruptions of surprise, a nod to my existence. I am a subject under arrest by the gaze, and I pose my body under a panoptic control, becoming principle in my own subjection (Foucault). As much as I am being exhibited as a study, I feel catharsis in my freedom to choose.I am very conscious of my body, and as I lay sprawled on the prop cushions I can feel every limb, every inch, and every scratch. 

I ignore my desire to move my body, because I am under control by this job description, which is, don’t move. I can see the annoyance in the artists face if I happen to have an itchy nose, and as an artist, I understand the irritation. “Each movement, and each moment, every sound, glance and word, the angle of the head and the posture of the body, can all be controlled”(Mitchel 37). I am being controlled whether I like it or not. I could very well be compared to an animal on display for the king in Le Vaux’s menagerie. This space is a safe space though, so I feel powerful, liberated and secure. There is no judgement and every form, sex, and body is accepted. Social constructs of the body completely fade, it’s not about size zero, that’s for sure. It’s about shapes, angles, light, shadows, style, and movement.

March 9th Afternoon 2pm-5pm Toronto School of Art 

I rush out of Dufferin Station only five minutes early for my scheduled time to pose. The taste of burnt nostril hair reminds me I want a smoke. This makes me sad and full of shame and such comfort simultaneously. I want a coffee to wash down my fried taste buds and fatigue. I run in with no coffee and an eagerness to sit down. This is a dressed pose and I am situated with another model. We are placed like feng shui to create the right harmony and composition. I begin my pose, in a sitting position, torso tilted to the left, head tilted to the right, right leg crossed over the left, left hand planted on my side, while the right arm hangs down. No one would naturally sit like this for as long as I am expected to do. When I stand up, tickles and stabs shoot through my left foot. My foot has sensory amnesia, it’s gone numb, I almost fall over. I sit back down, my body a little shocked by the prosaic pain. I settle into position and get comfortable. I am exhausted and I rock into sleep like we do as kids in our car seats. A loud noise brings me back into position. 

We go on a break and I chug the rest of my coffee. I get back into position after wandering around the room witnessing the perceptions of numerous different artists and then settle back into the pose. Happy thoughts flutter. I love this time for thoughts to roam free. I feel like I am having REM without sleeping. This sort of assignment is hard for me because my perception of life is very much married with a constant flow of memories and daydreams in every moment. My “physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal”(Winterson 130). I try to focus on my body, but instead, I daydream of love and what I want to create. Am I able to gather myself and perceive my corporal collections, “or is memory the more real place?”(Winterson 61). Whenever I model I reach a tranquil state, where I forget everything. I feel as though I am floating above my body, I am present, and being gazed at with such adamancy. The fan goes on, I always felt peaceful when the fan was on, like the summers at my parent’s house. There go those memories again. The concept of The Body without Organs by Gilles Deluze seems to have an enlightening undertone, and when I pose, I reach such a meditative state that it feels as though I am no longer a body at all, and I feel my spirit flood through the air and connect and flow with all the energy surrounding me. I feel free from my organs, and the limitations of the body and the senses in which I am experiencing. 

March 7th Evening 6pm-9pm Toronto School of Art 

I am running late for this evening class, and it is the punctuation to a very busy day. I am sweaty and hot, and looking forward to stripping down. There is another model present with a shaved head and a slender, angular Egon Schiele body. She has a robe thrown around her bareness. While I embrace this liberation and strip down and securely walk around naked as Paul the teacher gives some tips to the class. This is a charcoal drawing class, and it is packed. The class is chatty, and the sun is setting, and orange and pink hues bleed into the room. The folds of my clothes left scar like indentations. To suit the cliché of art school, adult contemporary jazz plays and overwhelms my sense of hearing. Black gesso constipates my cuticles. My hair is a mess, my make up is smeared from the conversation prior to this. I had a lot on my mind. I smell horrid. I had been at school all day, and running around in wool socks and Blundstones. I continue to be reminded of the uncontrollable biological functions of my body’ as it attempts to reach homeostasis. It sweats out the unwanted heat, which manifests as the scent of sweaty feet, and a clammy vagina. This reminded me all too well of Manning’s understanding of bodies: But they smell. They sweat. They desire. Despite themselves, bodies are always “too much,”, always excessive, always, in some sense, uncontrollable, unsecurable. Even dead, they decompose, infested, digested (Manning 139).I have an aftertaste of salty Pho and cigarettes. I feel tense, stiff and bloated. I fetishize over my grotesque dry-heave stimulations, perhaps like Culwicks fetish with dirt. This must be what the abject tastes like. My eyes feel sore because I am so tired. On display in my peripherals, I see ten students examine me as Paul, the instructor, maps out my body with green tape, to ground the pose. He is tactfully respectful and never once touches my body, and asks me permission to place his hand with tape close to my bottom, “Tact is knowing when not to touch. Touch is about movement. Tact refers to a certain preemptive declaration that the body should not move” (Manning 137). 

The pose is secured and people start drawing. My eyes roll back I can feel the pressure 3 inches down in the root of my tongue. I take a break to stretch. I crack my knuckles and my blood feels thick from my smoking habit. It was interesting to observe the position of the students. Like a public school dance, all women my age were situated on one side and examining me, while all the men were situated on the other side. I get settled in position, and I am lustfully curious by a girl in front of me. She is about my age, with brown hair in a pony tale and beautiful blue eyes. She is about seven feet away from me, exploring my body, measuring it with her drawing stick, and this kind of turns me on. Her eyes roam around my body collecting my proportions, while I try to figure her out, “I will find a clue to you, I will be able to unravel you, pull you between my fingers and stretch out each thread to know the measure of you” (Winterson 50). I will never know what she was thinking of me, all I know is she cued curiousities and interest from my vantage point. 

After the knowledge obtained by this class, I see that how I feel in this role and how it is treated is completely binary. Simultaneously I am being controlled, while at the same time I feel completely liberated by the shackles of the body. A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved. When I first decided to figure model, it was a sure decision because of my love for my body and for art. I had very little shame of my nude form, and over a few sessions of this job, insecurities that seemed to circulate through me had eventually dissipated. For example, I know when I started when I was twenty- one years old, I sucked in my stomach, I wanted to look pretty, or at least conform to the social constructs that told me what was pretty. Over time these thoughts transgressed into an acceptance of my grotesqueness. To have a bloated belly from the Raman I just ate, or a slouched back was ever the more beautiful, and more interesting to draw. And from now on, I’m in control.

WORK CITED

Foucault, Michel. ”Discipline and Punish, Panopticism.” In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, edited by Alan Sheridan, 195-228. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Australian Feminist Studies 2.4 (1987): 1-42. Web. Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Print. 

Manning, Erin. Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2007. Print. 

O’donnell, Lorraine, and Anne Mcclintock. “Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.” Labour / Le Travail 40 (1997): 310. Web. Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. New York: Knopf, 1993. Print.