![]() Texts come on parchment but also pottery, metal, cloth and even casual graffiti as discovered on the walls of Pompeii. The goal of the palaeographer is to identify the location and time of writing. Palaeography is the scientific study of ancient handwritten texts. ‘My simple idea was to use palaeography – their handwriting,’ he said. Though the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 70 years ago, sophisticated computing techniques are now revealing the invisible hands that wrote the famous texts and Professor Mladen Popović at the University of Groningen thinks he knows the answer. But was he finishing his own work – or someone else’s? His work, a copy of the biblical Book of Isaiah from the Old Testament, would soon be complete in the form of a seven-metre-long scroll. 49.Around 2 100 years ago, a Judaean scribe deftly swirled a stylus to dab the final strokes of black ink onto a piece of parchment. There is always one person who can help me get a permit," he said. "My dream is to meet someone in Moscow to make it happen. Tunick always gets permission for a shoot, but he has been unsuccessful in Russia so far. "The place is not always important - what is important is that the body takes center stage. I think that young people would be willing to get involved."Īs for a particular location in Moscow, Tunick is not overly concerned. People are embarrassed to get naked and express themselves in this way. "This type of art is not common in Russia. "I have over a hundred models here."īut are Muscovites willing participants? "I would be interested to take part, but I know that lots of people here would not," said journalist Nina Tomskaya. "I know I could get half of you naked," Tunick said hopefully when he addressed the crowds at the exhibit. Tunick has been trying to set up a shoot in Moscow since 2001 and he stationed small cards printed with the words "sign up to participate" and his website, in the gallery. ![]() When you go to sign up, a form on his site asks applicants to mark the color of their skin on a scale that goes from one to seven, from almost white to almost black. Tunick's first major mass nude work was in 1994 outside the United Nations in New York, called "Reaction Zone," a commentary on the Rwanda crisis at the time.Īll the models in his photos are volunteers who sign up via his website. The project used 700 people and was addressed by the president of Greenpeace. This particular installation was part of a Greenpeace campaign that sought to highlight the fragility of the vineyard and the fragility of mankind with the threat of global warming. In "Burgundy," rows of models are placed between plants in a vineyard, but, somehow, it doesn't look as out of place as you might imagine. ![]() The bodies becomes part of the landscape, another element alongside the rocks and the trees, in permanence. In "Dublin 2," thousands of bare Irish participants lie down, packed like sardines, on a Dublin dock. His work "Dead Sea" shows more than a thousand nude models floating serenely in the famous salty waters. The art and the process give us time to appreciate the body and not to delegate it to a pornographic state." "It is a desexualization of the body," he continues, "I am returning the body to art. The drama in the work, Tunick said, is quiet and understated: "The body can be used as an abstraction, to present a gradual, powerful and subversive wave of beauty." The viewer is struck by the sheer scale of the mass participation in the photos, the natural beauty of the settings and the beauty of the bodies. They form circles and patterns and pose like tourists with city monuments. American photographer Spencer Tunick has specialized in mass nude shots for 20 years and on show are naked bodies standing, sitting, even floating, en masse in different settings.Ī video at the exhibit shows red and gold painted nudes marching in serried lines along the streets of Munich until they reach a main square. Everywhere you look at the new exhibit "Safety in Numbers," at RuArtsGallery, you can see nude bodies. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |