Spencer Tunick in Fribourg, Switzerland

The anatomic theater is the essential stage of scientific humanism, because only there is humanity exposed in its organic truth. Knowing we are built with the common matter of the living world makes us more understandable, but also more human, because our own nature lies in this substantial fraternity with the animal. The rotten corpses by the Chapman brothers provoke an emotional impact not very different from that of the bodies dissected and plastinated by Von Hagen; if they seem exhibitionistic, perhaps this is due to a time that turns everything into spectacle, where the artist expresses his organic condition dressing his body with an animal ribcage, and where the actress promotes her vegetarian creed displaying her nude body marked for quartering. Tunick has portrayed our defenseless animal nature with his urban landscapes of naked bodies, docile and vulnerable as those caught in prison nightmares; but the New Yorkers trapped in a blackout and the Liberians massacred in a cruel conflict give a real world, clothed replica to his naked comments on technical and social fragility; and the piled up extras in a perfume presentation offer a caustic coda about the kidnapping of critical art by advertising and fashion...[+]