“Nudity is Good For You”

Catalogue text by Bill Arning for the exhibition:  “McWillie Chambers Paintings 1997”, Tricia Collins Grand Salon, New York 

Nudity is good for you. Improved health is a direct result of letting the sun shine on your naked flesh.  Sure, this notion may seem a little simplistic, but throughout recent history naturist movements, from the early twentieth century cult of the body to the Woodstock nation, have drilled into us the image of smiling buck nekked folks partaking in this charming collective delusion.   And even if it really isn’t true, so what?   It would be an altogether nicer world if the simple act of shedding ones inhibitions with ones underwear, and just breathing deeply and stretching could cure whatever ails you.   

In Amsterdam one summer – At first I didn’t know my hotel was by the section of Vondel park where nudity was de rigueur.  I strolled into the park and there before me was a blinding sea of thousands of butts.  “Cool” thought I, and ran back to the hotel, grabbed a towel, my address book and the stack of postcards I had bought earlier.   I ran into the middle of the field, shucked my clothes as unclumsily as I could manage given my nervousness, settled down and began writing postcards back to New York – “I am sitting stark naked in the middle of a crowded city, Feels great, Wish you were here, Love Bill” each one said.   After about ten postcards I began to notice one little problem with the field, bumblebees hovered everywhere.  I obsessed over the unimaginable thresholds of pain of a genital sting.  I tried rolling over on my belly – somehow I didn’t think my fuzzy butt was the right way to make a first impression on the good citizens of Les Pays Bas so I cut my nude holiday short.   But I had achieved my ultimate Amsterdam experience if only briefly.   

It is difficult to figure out why the simple act of exposing one’s body in a communal setting feels so profoundly like liberation.   Intellectually you know that there really is no revolutionary power in it anymore, if there ever was.   The empire does not crumble at the first site of pubic hair.   But perhaps getting back in touch with the simple school child’s pleasure of mooning some figure of authority refreshes whatever beaten down spirit of desublimated contentiousness has managed to survive in our overly practical adult selves.   

Which brings me to the recent paintings by McWillie Chambers.   They celebrate male pulchritude with such innocence and playfulness that it is easy to forget that his sources are often queer porn and that more than a few of his models sport major un-ignorable woodies.   

We know all the problems with porn and gay culture – gay men are overly branded by our sexuality, to the point where straight friends assume that at anytime we are out of their sight we are hanging around in a sling with a perfect stranger’s fist up our butts.  But while the debate rages about whether we are too sexual, by whose definitions are we judging the meaning of “too sexual”, whether the dominant culture lets us have our sex clubs, bath houses and cruisy parks as a way of distracting us from achieving real political clout, etc. … I am still drawn to the notion of gay men as “An Army of Lovers”. 

Porn culture has a lot to answer for – as its ubiquity, and the depths to which we absorb its messages in to the inner crevices of our psyches, makes the apotheoses of the Chelsea Boy identity – muscles, shaved chests- seem unavoidable.  (Thankfully there is significant rebellion against this norm today, See anti-Gay ed Mark Simpson 1996) 

It is difficult to explain why upon leaving Chambers studio my first thought was of innocence and sweetness, for I knew intellectually that many viewers of his work will remember nothing about the paintings except for the glistening muscles and boners,  I wish now that I had installed on my computer the pornographers thesaurus’ 2000 slightly comic, dysfunctionally euphemistic synonyms for erection).   

Chambers sources range from photographs taken by him or others, including clothes catalogs and soft core porn.  Perhaps to me the porn image is so much the vernacular of urban gay life, that a Chambers painting is no more shocking than landscape or a vase of flowers.   When I ask Mac Chambers about the general similarity of body types in his work, given how much politization has occurred over the issue, he just smiles sweetly and attributes it to his taste.  The men are generally young of tight but not overly buff muscularity and pretty hairless.  Well, no, this does not exactly challenge oppressive Chelsea Gay culture ideal, as masculine ideals go, this one is art-historically grounded and familiar from queer artists like  Cadmus, French, Tchelitchew etc. – even if today’s body ideal is less epicene in its curves.   

Then I realize why I am perceiving innocence in Chambers’ paintings.  While the sources include the dreaded Chelsea-Shaved-Chest-Muscleboy, the sensibility and the delicately colorful paint handling is definitely reminiscent of the pre-Stonewall era as it exists in the collective memory of those of us who are too young to actually remember it.  Even the porn erections remind me not of (overly-cited) Robert Mapplethorpe, or nineties practitioners Patricia Cronin, Lee Gordin, Robert Clarke or Keith Boadwee, but of Duncan Grant and Charles Demuths private drawings, ones done for personal or only slightly shared pleasures rather than public display.  Or the homoeroticized Eakins swimming hole, or even such ferreted out gay icons as Frederic Bazille.   

I have a particular love for pre-Stonewall male nudes with the scintillating seasoning of repression.  Despite Jim Shaw’s excellent and comprehensive archaeology of thrift store paintings, his investigations ignored my favorite sub-genre.   There are many abandoned paintings in which you can smell the painting’s reason to exist was the only conceivable way to get the model out of their clothes.   I enjoy fantasizing about the putative artists talking the model out of their shirt first, pants second and then practically begging them to shimmy down their shorts.   

A slightly awkward academic sketch remains the only evidence of a blow-job that may have occurred thirty years ago, after which the artist/seducer had to comfort the model/idol that no, coming in a guys mouth did not mean he was queer.  My boyfriend Erik brought home an excellent example of this genre, a crotch up charcoal sketch of a particularly butch model, signed Christof and dated 1965, which made me just a little jealous until he pointed out the models resemblance to me.  

Many of Chambers outdoor scenes take place on the beach.  I was watching Longtime Companion on TV – I had not seen it since it first came out – pre-AIDS gay life is frequently depicted as more than just being at the beach, it’s being embodied by the beach itself – an endless summer day – nude, or barely covered, on a towel, lubricated with a thermos of Margarita’s and an enviable choice of available sexy men.  As the movie ends, three survivors walk down the beach again and imagine being alive for the cure.  Suddenly hundreds of men come running down the walkway including all their friends that have died.  The end of our nightmare is literalized as a return to the beach.   

I am sometimes amazed that gay men can possibly be so resilient, so strong that after fifteen years of the constant presence of death and intense suffering surrounding the most basic joys of life, our sex lives, our love lives, our creation of caring families, that we can still feel pleasure, that we can celebrate our bodies.  But we do, perhaps because we must, because if we don’t no- one will.   

McWillie Chambers as he lovingly moves his brush over our collective breathing loving and cumming bodies reattaching us to the great narrative, the great tradition that is gay men’s history of corporeal knowledge and bonding.   Because the first time an eithteen year old finds the local gay beach or swimming hole, gets over his nervousness, realizes his beauty – and shimmies his shorts down and sits bare-assed amid the other gay men, and knows he is part of and connected to a wonderful and timeless tradition it is something that deserves celebrating in art.  We can thank Chambers for doing just that.