Imagine standing in a room full of naked people displaying their bits without giving a damn and looking at you with brazen confidence or outright joy.
Yes, that could be the stuff of nightmares, or at least the stuff of acute embarrassment and nervous foot shuffling.
Shepparton Art Museum’s latest exhibition, Yearbook, displays more than 700 vinyl-printed studio portraits of young artists, mostly naked, which cover the Lin Onus Gallery from floor to ceiling. The curious thing is, far from intimidation or unease, the overwhelming sensation is wonder. What a remarkable thing is the human body. Here it is in all its wild and wacky diversity. Skin that is rolled, taut, tattooed, brown, black, pale, smooth and scarred. Hair that flows and rolls or is fluffed or shaved. Rings through ears, nipples, noses and lips. I have never been in the presence of so many penises, breasts, buttocks or pubic hair in my life. But nowhere is there prurience, voyeurism or salaciousness.
Everywhere, there is vitality, humour and joy.
New Yorker Ryan McGinley spent 10 years, from 2009, photographing young artists living and working around his neighbourhood to create his Yearbook of a generation.
“I started with just my friends, and then those friends would recommend other friends, and it sort of became like a web,” he says.
A lot of his subjects are from the LGBTQIA+ community — queer, transgender, non-binary — but spend a few minutes in their presence, and the labels drop away until there is only one badge left: human.
The images are carefully arranged around the walls; some overlap, others stand alone to create a single flowing mural of colour and movement helped by McGinley’s use of studio lighting and simple backgrounds in reds, yellows, blues, greys and whites — techniques used in fashion and lifestyle magazines, but in this case the images are personal. Intensely personal.
McGinley’s collection has travelled the world from Korea, Spain and Denmark to Tokyo and the United Arab Emirates, where he had to carefully cherry-pick photos to show just faces.
“But that was also exciting because I only chose queer people, which was sort of a little bit subversive,” he says.
Of course, the nude is nothing new in art. From the ancient Greeks and Hindus to the Western Renaissance and modernism, the human body has been sculpted and painted. However, it was only quite recently that the nude became a real person. When Édouard Manet displayed his Olympia painting at the Paris Salon in 1865, showing a nude woman reclining on a sofa, it scandalised the world because she wasn’t an anonymous ideal — she was a real woman. More than that, she was a known prostitute, and she stared unashamedly out of the canvas at the viewer as if to say, “Yes, I’m naked. So what?”
McGinley’s photos follow Manet’s shocking precedent but with humour, verve and style.
His first major solo exhibition in Australia comes to SAM as part of the PHOTO 2024 International Photography Festival, with support from the Victorian Pride Centre and Photo Australia.
SAM chief executive Melinda Martin and board members must be congratulated for their bold decision to bring this exciting and life-affirming show to Shepparton.
It may be confronting for some, but it will open doors and shine a warm light of acceptance for many others, which is what all good and important art does.
The Yearbook is at SAM until July 14.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News