As a painter, the only critique I have of this piece is that the producer missed a great opportunity to explore why clothing is harder to paint than the human body. That's a fascinating point.
Pieces about the visual arts are hard to do on radio. So is humor. This piece presented much food for thought -- but unfortunately, too quickly. It needed to breathe more. Also, the humor it contained tended to be unnecessarily broad and cutesy, especially when the producer assumed that I was thinking (wink, wink!) of...you know what (wink, wink, wink!).
Well, I wasn't. I was thinking of something else:
I was thinking about the time one of my art reports was censored on public radio (the only time). It was in the mid-1990s, when I produced a story for a national news program about an exhibition of work by a gay photographer of yesteryear -- Wilhelm von Gloeden.
Even National Geographic Magazine acquired some of Von Gloeden's more chaste photos, of 19th century Sicilian landscapes and village life. But it was his depictions of peasant youths posed against scenic backdrops of Roman ruins and Mt. Etna, playing pan-pipes, wearing veils or leopard skins -- or nothing at all -- that became all the rage at the turn of the last century.
Wilhelm von Gloeden got along just fine with his neighbors in Sicily, and -- honorable man -- paid his models a commission. His nudes were extremely popular; and so they remain, for they are wonderfully sensual and evocative -- and poignant too, for the lads would be around 120 years old by now.
According to modern critics (and this was the crux of my radio report), Von Gloeden's pictures struct a chord for reasons beyond the erotic:
Apparently the Victorians and Edwardians suffered from generational angst brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the First World War, when a generation of golden youths perished in the trenches. These were shattering events, and for some people Von Gloeden's nudes offered not only a certain frisson, but also escape from the present into an imaginary Arcady, a Never-Never Land, a past Golden Age that was so much pleasanter than anything the grim, grey 20th Century seemed likely to offer.
That at least was the gist of my report, but it got yanked from the show at the last minute: the program editor worried that listeners would think the network was condoning...child abuse.
So much for presenting male frontal nudity -- on radio.
Review of Naked People
Alex van Oss
Posted on January 30, 2004 at 08:39 PM
As a painter, the only critique I have of this piece is that the producer missed a great opportunity to explore why clothing is harder to paint than the human body. That's a fascinating point.
Pieces about the visual arts are hard to do on radio. So is humor. This piece presented much food for thought -- but unfortunately, too quickly. It needed to breathe more. Also, the humor it contained tended to be unnecessarily broad and cutesy, especially when the producer assumed that I was thinking (wink, wink!) of...you know what (wink, wink, wink!).
Well, I wasn't. I was thinking of something else:
I was thinking about the time one of my art reports was censored on public radio (the only time). It was in the mid-1990s, when I produced a story for a national news program about an exhibition of work by a gay photographer of yesteryear -- Wilhelm von Gloeden.
Even National Geographic Magazine acquired some of Von Gloeden's more chaste photos, of 19th century Sicilian landscapes and village life. But it was his depictions of peasant youths posed against scenic backdrops of Roman ruins and Mt. Etna, playing pan-pipes, wearing veils or leopard skins -- or nothing at all -- that became all the rage at the turn of the last century.
Wilhelm von Gloeden got along just fine with his neighbors in Sicily, and -- honorable man -- paid his models a commission. His nudes were extremely popular; and so they remain, for they are wonderfully sensual and evocative -- and poignant too, for the lads would be around 120 years old by now.
According to modern critics (and this was the crux of my radio report), Von Gloeden's pictures struct a chord for reasons beyond the erotic:
Apparently the Victorians and Edwardians suffered from generational angst brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the First World War, when a generation of golden youths perished in the trenches. These were shattering events, and for some people Von Gloeden's nudes offered not only a certain frisson, but also escape from the present into an imaginary Arcady, a Never-Never Land, a past Golden Age that was so much pleasanter than anything the grim, grey 20th Century seemed likely to offer.
That at least was the gist of my report, but it got yanked from the show at the last minute: the program editor worried that listeners would think the network was condoning...child abuse.
So much for presenting male frontal nudity -- on radio.
-- Alex van Oss