Being exposed

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there is a final outcome of this analysis of bare life that has an impact on theclarity of political positioning. ‘Once their fundamental referent becomes barelife, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left,liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligi-bility and enter a zone of indistinction’ (1998: 122). If the fundamental referentof Spencer Tunick’s photographs is the exposure of bare life, then these imageshave entered a zone of indistinction where it becomes very difficult to makeclear-cut distinctions between Left and Right and this helps to account for theoscillations in reading that are communicated by Tunick’s Nudes Adrift (to recitethe title of an early series). 20 All in all, Agamben’s intervention of ‘bare life’ does much to navigate thecompeting claims of the liberating and fascist interpretations of Tunick’s project. 21 Yet, the staging of naked bodies and the exposure of being in common do notalways have to be framed within the terms of absolute liberation or totalitari-anism. For example, Slavoj Žižek’s affirmation of Jacques Rancière’s The Politics ofAesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible provides a more nuanced reading of thisissue. It is important to note that the title of Rancière’s book in French Le Partagedu sensible engages Nancy’s concept of The Inoperative Community – the conceptof partage at the border of sharing and splitting. Žižek (2004: 76) asserts that the‘Lesson of Rancière’ is that one should ‘be careful not to succumb to the liberaltemptation of condemning all collective artistic performances as inherently “total-itarian”’. 22 (Conversely, one should not be so naïve to assume that such perform-ances deliver what was promised by the hippie generation.) Interestingly enough,Žižek looks to the tactical media of the present and his analysis of the flash mobresonates with the practice that goes under the name of Spencer Tunick: 23

Is not precisely the ‘post-modern’ politics of resistance permeated withaesthetic phenomena, from body piercing and cross-dressing to public spec-tacles? Does not the curious phenomenon of ‘flash mobs’ stand for theaesthetico-political protest at its purest, reduced to its minimal frame? Peopleshow up at an assigned place at a certain time and perform some brief (andusually trivial and ridiculous) acts, and then disperse again – no wonderflash mobs are described as being urban poetry with no real purpose.

The application of Žižek’s analysis to Tunick’s happenings and thinking itsalliance with the ephemeral sharing and splitting of the flash mob does muchto recast them in terms of their aesthetico-political dimension and ‘how we areto continue to resist’ (Žižek 2004: 79). Nevertheless, such an aesthetico-polit-ical analysis also demands a resistance to valorizing Tunick’s photography in thename of art or of an artistic formalism (i.e. what I have marked as the aestheticcover-up). Substituting Rancière and Žižek’s aesthetico-political discourse forone that turns around questions of sociality and community, the lens of Jean-LucNancy and the ontology of being-with provide another way of framing Tunick’sperformances and their exposure of the naked truth and the truth of nakedness.