Spencer's naked ambition

 

You don’t hear about spencers any more.  They’re now called thermals.  In the 60s, a spencer was mandatory wear, especially in Melbourne. A frumpish, ugly undergarment, its sole purpose was to keep your lungs and kidneys warm.  Hyper conscious as a teenager, the last thing I aspired to was to look like my mother. She also wore a spencer.  The epitome of embarrassment. 

**

 

It’s 3 a.m. on a mid-spring morning in Brisbane city.  Light rain falls as we alight the Uber and make our way on foot toward the Story Bridge.  We’re here to follow every command of Spencer, a New York based artist, who, as a Gen X’er, probably never wore a spencer in his life.  He’s travelled to Brisbane to instruct a throng of people to take their clothes off!  To get cold, intentionally!  Clearly, he didn’t get the memo.

 

With my daughter, Pia, and friend, we cross the threshold onto the bridge.  A giant metal construction, like a colossal Meccano set towering into the dark sky, beckons.  I see the Meccano set of my youth, my younger siblings on their butts on the grey carpet in the rumpus room, heads down, creatively engineering.

 

Less than 150 metres onto the bridge, the crowd comes to a halt. Human traffic meets gridlock.  On tip-toes, I can’t see more than 100 metres ahead.  Pia frowns and shakes her head when I gesture I’m going to climb a concrete structure to get a better view.  Nothing to see, only a sea of heads! 

 Over the next hour, mob grows. We chat quietly, estimating numbers, predicting the weather, and where the hell are we going to put our clothes? Every now and then someone shrieks, the laughter setting off a chain reaction, a wave of contagious hilarity startling the faceless, chatty birds populating the bridge in the wee small hours.  “Listen” I prompt.  In the transient quiet, a great murmur fills the night air, the sound of faint, indiscernible voices.  Reminiscent of colonies of pollinating bees, a low human hum undulates, a hymn to acknowledge a brand new day. This sound is one of two sensory memories I’ll remember for a long time.

 

Smack on 4 a.m. a crackle from the loud speaker breaks the quiet reverie. 

 

… we’ll walk off the bridge, and when I speak, you’ll take your clothes of … then we’ll filter back onto the bridge. I’ll be directing you to strike up different postures - to look up, look across, look down, lie down, squat, kneel, raise your arms. The most important thing though is that you have fun!

 

For thirty years, Spencer Tunick has been photographing nudes in public spaces, in celebration of inclusivity and diversity and on this Brisbane occasion, in honour of the city’s LGBTQIA+ community and allies.  Five thousand five hundred people turn up.  From 5 a.m. the soft glow of morning has already begun to seep its splendour into the imposing metal girders and beams of the bridge, lending shape and definition to the contours of naked human materiality.  We’re asked to lie on the cold, wet bitumen and metal of the bridge, to subject our warm bodies to the insults of unfriendly tar on a chilly morning.  A gasp of horror ripples through the space. This is my second strong sensory memory.  Any previous humour is instantly swallowed, and replaced by a visceral knowing called dread.  I see myself from above, lowering my frame to a squat, and fraction by fraction, letting the soft animal of my body (thanks Mary Oliver!) surrender to the freezing tundra, the elevated wasteland of asphalt. 

 

In our brazen unruliness, undisguised and unmasked, the crowd of nakedness wanders the back alleys of the inner urban landscape, through the funky environs of the Howard Wharves precinct, the New Farm riverwalk, and down Ivory Lane.  Indifference, and a confident sense of safety in numbers is our communal offering to the clothed early risers, gaping in astonishment.

  Image captured as a screenshot from the Spencer Tunick Instagram page

 

Only days later when I look at the breathtaking images from the day do I truly appreciate the scale of the experience. Aiming for an earthly comparison to measure the experience of the visage of a mass of united flesh, and its impact on me, I fall upon a word I’ve never encountered: monad.  In philosophy, monad, an Ancient Greek word meaning unity, is the central element of the universe, and a distinct yet inconsequential outcome of it; that which is one.  I have a mini epiphany, and am reminded of the Buddhist theory of emptiness: there is no such thing as independent existence, all things are interdependent.  Out there on the bridge, we are one.