Cork in 50 Artworks, No 49: Spencer Tunick's nude installation at Blarney Castle
People holding up roses during the nude installation by photographer Spencer Tunick at Blarney Castle. Picture: Dan Linehan
No one among the 1,100 people who gathered in the grounds of Blarney Castle in the early hours of Tuesday, June 17, 2008, quite knew what to expect. They were at the famous Co Cork location as they had volunteered to be photographed naked.
The occasion as part of Cork Midsummer Festival was the first shoot in Ireland by the American photographic artist Spencer Tunick, who had already made quite a name for himself shooting large groups of naked people in public spaces in New York, Montreal, London and Amsterdam. Whatever about those major international centres of culture, it was hard to gauge what Ireland’s second city would make of such a happening.
Like many of Tunick’s projects, the event in Cork came about by invitation. “It was Mary McCarthy, the art curator at Dublin Docklands, who contacted me first,” says Tunick, via Zoom from his office in New York, of the organiser who is now director the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork.
“Mary thought to make it a two-city project, in Cork and Dublin, and brought Cork Midsummer Festival on board. People think I can choose where I want to work, but it’s not as if I can get up and say, ‘hmm, I want to photograph 1,000 people in a volcanic crater in Hawaii.’ In reality, I need a team on the other side, helping me. And it was Mary who established that team in Ireland.”
McCarthy’s crew worked with Tunick on selecting locations for his shoots. Blarney Castle appealed to Tunick. “When you think of a castle, you think of swords, you think of dreams, you think of battle and war," he says. "But you might also think of the rose. I tried to combine a lot of different ideas or fantasies about the castle and connect them to the body. But there were also a lot of grounds around the castle, so I could have different set-ups and positions to shoot in.”
When Cork Midsummer Festival put out a call for volunteers, it was inundated with applications. Those chosen were of all ages, and from all walks of life. “I think sometimes people associate my live works with young people. But there’s often a lot of people over 50, and into their 80s, at this great unifying event that touches on the idea of group photo gatherings from the 1920s. When you see a big haul of people lined up, undressed of course, it combines group portraiture with abstraction and the naked body.”
At Blarney, beginning around 5.30am, he shot the crowd in a variety of poses on the castle lawns, facing towards and away from the camera, then lying on their backs as they each held a single rose aloft, red for the women and white for the men. He then photographed a small number on their knees in the river that runs through the grounds, and a smaller number again kissing the Blarney Stone.
This writer was one of the naked mob in Blarney. Like many of the participants I spoke with, I had various reasons for being there. Some saw it as an opportunity to challenge the general disapproval of nakedness that prevailed in the Ireland of their youth. Others saw it as a way to make peace with their body image. For myself, as an arts buff, the primary motivation was to experience arts in the buff.
I arrived in Blarney around 2.45am. I was alone, and wouldn’t meet anyone I knew until much later in the morning. There was an awful lot of waiting around. It was around 5.30am before we were finally asked to throw off our clothes, and at least another half an hour until we were photographed.
I participated in at least three set-ups. One required us all to lie on our backs, holding roses aloft. It took ages. I’d been asked to write an article on the shoot for the Irish Examiner, and later that morning, I would describe how I’d worried that I might suffer what romantic novelists call “an excitement”, but what I’d experienced could more accurately be described as “a boredom".
Another set-up required a bunch of male volunteers, myself included, to stand in the river. By the time the camera was in position, the women had already dressed, and we, still naked, had to walk the gauntlet past them; the flower of Irish manhood. They jeered heartily, of course.
Later that morning, Tunick photographed about 50 naked volunteers covered in foam at White St Carpark in Cork city centre. “As a kid, I was always fascinated by the bubble scene in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the film," says Tunick. "So, I wanted, in a whimsical and surreal way, to amplify my memories of that. But I also wanted to work with the history of the area, so I infused Murphy’s beer into four bubble machines and created a snow globe effect with the nudes. That was beautiful.”
Looking back on the photographs now, one is struck by how most of the bodies are white. If it is true that Cork has become far more ethnically diverse a city in the past 14 years, one must also wonder if Tunick’s call for volunteers appealed to a certain demographic.
“I always ask the organisers to do community outreach in different areas, so we can get more colour and ethnicities into the work,” he says. “But sometimes it doesn’t really resonate, and sometimes the population is not there, you know. And often, where that population exists, it might not be connected to the body in contemporary art. But I’ve always tried, and now I insist that the organisers make an extra effort.”
Tunick’s shoots at Blarney and White St attracted lavish coverage in the media, a reflection perhaps on how they coincided with a change in the public perception of nudity; the project would almost certainly have caused an uproar even twenty years previously. Participants described a sense of joy and liberation. Was Tunick aware that he might have recorded, or even helped effect, a slight shift in the zeitgeist?
“This was definitely pre-Instagram, right? And now when we’re on Instagram, we think the whole world is accepting of nudity in public, but back then, there was not that same outlet for my images. But there was that documentation by the press, and through that, I think people realised that something had happened that went against the grain in a positive way.”
Four days later, Tunick photographed 2,500 naked volunteers on the South Wall in Dublin. Again, the event attracted headlines, but already, it seemed, the culture had moved on, and there was not quite that same element of surprise and delight as there had been in Cork.
Tunick has done many projects since. Some of his favourites include those in Hull in 2016 and on the Dead Sea in 2011 and again in 2021. “I like working with props. In Cork, I used roses and beer foam. But now I like working with body paint. In Hull, we covered around 4,000 people in four shades of blue. The blues were those of the water I saw in a number of paintings in the Maritime Museum in the city. I asked Pantone to replicate the colours, and those were the blues we used. Not many people know that.
“My projects in the Dead Sea were partly about showing how the salt in the water could elevate the body. That created a very interesting, otherworldly effect in the photographs. But they also aimed to raise awareness of how the Dead Sea is disappearing because of irrigation to serve the need for drinking water by adjoining countries such as Israel and Jordan. It’s a very difficult situation.”
Many photographers found their work curtailed by the pandemic restrictions of the past few years. Tunick too was forced to postpose photographing groups of people on location, but he did find a way to go on creating. “An art collective called Studio 333 in Mexico asked me if I wanted to do group works on video chats, and offered to manage it technically. So we started making group works with people from all walks of life, all around the world. We had someone in Saudi Arabia posing with someone in Israel. We had people in Australia, people in Europe, people all over the world. I think the only place we weren’t able to work with was Antarctica, but who knows? Maybe that’s in the future.”
The resulting images were published online, on Tunick and Studio 333’s websites and social media accounts, under the collective title Stay Apart Together.
As for the future, Tunick would love to work in Ireland again, he says. “It’s always been my dream to do a work in Northern Ireland, maybe with 100 or 200 people on the Giant’s Causeway? I can’t have too many, because then you wouldn’t see the rocks. Northern Ireland, the Giant’s Causeway… that project’s been on my mind for a long time, so hopefully some museum or curator will invite me to do it.”
