‘Site’ and the laziness of naked performance art
If there’s one thing performance artists love to do, it’s get naked. In the early days of the art form, it had the desired effect because the work chimed with the burgeoning sexual liberation movement. But in a post-shock era, it’s long lost its oomph. Nudity is everywhere, and it’s got to the point that artists need to go the extra mile. To be naked, it seems, is no longer enough. This was highlighted by the efforts of Poppy Jackson in 2015, who, in a bid to demonstrate the spatial boundaries of bodies, sat naked on a London roof for hours and overstepped everyone else’s.
The reception was interesting, with even the art press referring to it as an “incident” rather than an art piece. Public decency laws be damned, Jackson mounted the roof of London’s Toynbee Studios as part of a SPILL Festival of Performance work, straddling the building’s triangular structure and gazing down at confused onlookers.
Jackson called her piece Site and was quick to defend its conceptual nature when the media caught wind of it. Over the four-hour period she sat on the roof, bewildered pedestrians found time to make statements too, many to the tune of: “If I did that, I’d be arrested”. In turn, Jackson gave her own explanation to the Evening Standard.
“I think it has confused people because I am celebrating my body in a way that is not sexually objectifying such as we are so accustomed to, whilst also critiquing why and how shame is layered upon the female body,” she said. Jackson referenced the tabloid take on it, and said the “misogynistic” response only proved “why artwork presenting the female body from a woman’s perspective is so important”.
Undoubtedly, more conservative commentators will stubbornly refuse to appreciate the conceptual undertone of avant-garde arts like Jackson’s. The backlash couldn’t have been a surprise. If anything, it was engineered to drum it up – which is why naked pieces have lost their impact over time.
That said, some people were moved by the way she seemed to gel with the building and become one with it. What it says about female empowerment is that she had to be naked to do it is ultimately up to her as the artist. Even those who find Site an inspiring work of female empowerment must question if perceptions would change if it were a different body doing it.
There is something uniquely jarring about a thin, conventionally attractive woman reclaiming her body publicly in such a way and demanding viewers hail it as bold. Site set out to shock crowds who would never be sympathetic to a deeper meaning anyway. Jackson was hardly going to convert the Daily Mail readers on the benefits of collecting other people’s menstrual blood for art, which she did once at Goldsmiths (naturally).
