Wanted: Irish volunteers to join strip club

HIS artworks of mass open-air nudity have caused a stir across the globe — now he’s coming here.

American artist Spencer Tunick is renowned for his temporary installations of hundreds, if not thousands of naked people — volunteers that strip off en masse to be photographed naked.

For his first Irish work, to be photographed in Cork on June 17, the artist is looking for 800 volunteers to take part, while a

“This is going to be an Irish artwork, made by Irish people,” says Tunick. “I’m just sort of a catalyst.”

Working with nude subjects for more than a decade now, New Yorker Tunick has caused controversy from Montreal to Melbourne, London to Lyon with his huge outdoor artworks.

The biggest piece he has done to date used 18,000 naked volunteers in Mexico city last year.

But it is for his smaller-scale pieces that he has got into trouble, work done on the hoof without permission, with just a single naked subject in a city street.

“In New York I’ve been arrested five times,” he says. “And I’ve been behind bars three of those times.

“I think people are used of seeing nudes on cable TV. But you can turn a switch and turn it off. It is not walking in front of you. I think nudity in a public space brings up certain issues.”

Issues such as pornography and indecent exposure in public are all charges that have been made against Tunick and his work.

However, the artist is adamant his work is not of a sexual or titillating nature.

For this creative maverick, this is art — pure and simple.

“My objective is to create an artwork with the body in time and space. The body is not violent. It is not a crime. It’s not dirty,” says Tunick.

For William Galinsky, festival director of the Cork Midsummer Festival, which is bringing Tunick to Ireland for the first time, the work is “a celebration of the human body” and of “the landscapes that surround us”.

What landscapes Tunick will be photographing in Ireland is as yet unclear, as the locations for his Cork and Dublin installations will remain secret until just days before each event.

However, if you volunteer to take part (at www.spencertunickireland.ie), you’ll not only find out the secret locations before anyone else, but you’ll also get a valuable limited edition of the resulting photograph for your trouble — as long as you’re over 18, that is.

And with any luck, it’ll be a warm day.