nothing really going on here unless you like stories about going on a road trip with a guy who takes photos of naked people./tms
Naked launch
By t.m. shine
“The conditions in which I create my work are tense, crazed and unpredictable.”
— artist Spencer Tunick
TITUSVILLE — It’s the clash of the countdowns.
Three minutes to liftoff and NASA is doing a final check on the status of Columbia’s liquid hydrogen. Simultaneously, straight across from the Cape on a rickety pier, Spencer is nervously checking one more time with Missy. “Are you wearing underwear?”
Her takeoff will have to beat NASA’s by about a minute if he’s going to get the shot he envisions.
Artist-photographer Spencer Tunick is on the last leg of the Naked States Tour. He’s already been to 41 states, traveling and often sleeping in a 1984 GMC Jimmy van with his girlfriend, Krissy Bowler. As he makes his trek, his work has been getting attention from the likes of the Washington Post and Boston Herald. You might have caught him in an MTV art spot or a CNN profile (“I saw myself on CNN. That was cool,” Spencer says). He’s the guy who, for his art, gets people naked in public.
Quickly.
Sometimes, he only has the seconds between the stop and go of a traffic light as he did in Manhattan when he lined the middle of a busy street with nudes. “That was part of the naked pavement series,” he says.
Usually, the speed of his art depends on where the cops are. In the big cities, he prowls around in the pre-dawn hours scouting out locations, deciding where he wants to place his models and then sets it into motion in a flash to avoid confrontation.
Today, the plan is a single nude in the foreground of a rising space shuttle. His model is Missy, a Florida girl he met on the way to a Phish concert in Maine, where he choreographed a shoot of 1,200 nudes (to be part of his 100-plus naked series). His window of opportunity is shorter than NASA’s — 20 seconds, tops — and then the shuttle will only be a vertical white line on the horizon.
“The only thing we’ve done that I can compare to this is Ol’ Faithful,” Spencer says. “It gave a couple of spurts before it went off.”
Will the shuttle give off a couple of warning spurts?
Nobody’s sure.
The location he’s chosen is ideal, a lengthy pier across the street from a private home in an old waterfront neighborhood. Tourists and locals are strolling by, lapping vanilla cones and staking out their own spots along the water’s edge but no one seems overly curious about what Spencer is up to.
A chilly wind is whipping across the pier and Missy is still clothed in a flowing spring dress, the type one might wear to a Phish concert. Presently on her knees, Spencer has her alternately cradling her hands and pointing to the heavens, still trying to sculpt her into the perfect pose. In his baggy clothes, pants weighed down with equipment, Spencer looks more like a plumber than an artist, only he’s got a light meter in his back pocket instead of a monkey wrench.
As he paces, he pulls a cellular phone from his pocket to talk to his project manager in New York City who has some important news. Some German guy they met in Vegas, who’s now in Fort Lauderdale, wants to pose nude for one of their photos. Wants to know if they’re heading his way.
“Germans love us,” Krissy says.
They need people to love them. This trip, which began July 4, was financed by pre-selling some of the black-and-white portraits that will come from this American journey. They put together $25,000 and hit the road with a tight budget.
“Do you remember if he was heavy?” Spencer asks Krissy about the German guy.
“No, he wasn’t,” Krissy says.
“Ohhh,” Spencer says. He’s disappointed. For art’s sake, he prefers his subjects to be out of shape and ordinary. He likes 300 pounders. Missy, a lithe and energetic bug-eyed blond, isn’t his ideal but she’s a willing volunteer.
On the top of the embankment above the pier, the doors of Missy’s Honda Civic are open, radio blasting, so they can hear the countdown on the local news, but right now “Alone Again, Naturally” is stuttering in the breeze.
Two minutes.
NASA is announcing all is go. In the final seconds, they probably have fewer adjustments to make than Spencer. Final check list. No underwear 3. Phish dresses come off fast so that’s not a problem 3. When she disrobes, she’s to toss her dress to Spencer and he’ll stuff it down his shirt 3. Film 3. Missy ready to freeze her ass off 3.
The radio is muffled in the wind. Spencer is yelling down the pier. “Two minutes! Is that what the radio said, two minutes!?”
That’s what they said, but now it’s closer to one minute.
He gives the command.
Missy’s naked.
Spencer stuffs the dress into his pant’s pocket instead of inside his shirt but otherwise everything is going according to plan. Everything is in place for a glorious event. All his schooling at the International Center of Photography in New York is about to pay off. “I create dreams and I create memories that they will hold with them forever,” is the heart of Spencer’s creed and today will be no exception. Nothing can stop ...
There’s a law officer standing cross-armed at the end of the pier.
Spencer, concentrating on his subject, is oblivious to his presence. Missy is in a yoga crouch, a ball of flesh in the center of the pier but no erogenous zones in sight. The officer isn’t moving, perhaps waiting for her to fully expose herself.
The time is now. She blossoms, pointing to the heavens. The countdown is blaring ... 10 ... 9 ... 8 ... 7...
One hour earlier: A pre-launch lunch
The artist wants Chinese.
“I don’t think I can do this without eating something,” Spencer says.
While Spencer is helping himself to the buffet, Krissy mentions that he gets a little edgy before shoots.
“Afterwards, he goes through red lights,” she says.
She had to calm him down when they were shooting at the 50- foot praying hands at Oral Roberts University. Three police officers were directly on the other side of the sculpture and it got very tense.
“But the hands were so big they never even saw us,” she says.
Spencer has yet to see any of his completed work from this series, which includes everything from nudes with volcanoes in Hawaii to nudes on the Vegas Strip. After they finish a shoot they send the film directly up to New York. “I just hope I get it in focus,” Spencer says as he comes back to the table.
The subject quickly turns back to underwear. “Are you wearing any, Missy?” No she’s not, she tells him for about the third time today.
“Do you have any tan lines?”
Tan lines, tattoos and contemporary hairstyles are no-nos in his craft since they can date the work which he hopes will be timeless.
“Missy, how fast can you get that dress off?”
“Fast,” Missy says.
“Good. I’m going to get some more lo mein,” Spencer says.
Spencer is also always leery of how his work is construed. He doesn’t want his art overwhelmed by the whole naked thing. His mother is an artist and he has always been intrigued by the naked form and how it can be sculpted into its environment. He abhors pornography.
“I turned down $10,000 from German Playboy when they wanted to publish some of my work,” he says.
He doesn’t want to be associated with selling sex. That’s why he goes out of his way to find ordinary people as his subjects.
“In the real world, when you walk into a room, it’s not Melrose Place. People don’t look like that,” he says.
So how does he get regular everyday Joes to strip for him?
Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard.
In Alaska, two of the first people he met at the rent-a-car counter volunteered to be models. “I always carry examples of my work so people know I’m serious and most appreciate what I’m doing,” the 30-year-old says.
In Fargo, the show and tell didn’t go over so well. “It was like they were afraid of me. They’d just look at me and not even respond.”
For larger shoots, their Web site is crucial in recruiting models. They’re currently trying to get “as many as we can” to sign up for a shoot in front of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in the spring, which will be the grand finale of the Naked States Tour.
Making that finale is still a challenge since their budget is crumbling and they’re taking it day by day. They can’t pay their models but they often give them signed prints.
“When we first started, we bought them breakfast but then we couldn’t afford it anymore,” Krissy says.
Actually, the models end up carrying them half the time. In this case, Melissa “Missy” Perry, a 23-year-old theater student at the University of Central Florida, is letting them crash at her apartment.
When they met at the Phish concert, Missy overslept the morning Spencer orchestrated the 1,200 nudes with a megaphone, but she let them know if they were ever in Florida ...
Oooh, fortune cookies. Everybody grabs one.
Missy’s reads: SERIOUS TROUBLE WILL PASS YOU BY TODAY
Good. Excellent.
Spencer’s reads: BIRDS ARE ENTANGLED BY THEIR FEET, MEN BY THEIR TONGUES.
Well ... He’s an artist. He’ll work with it.
Bagels, King Kong’s leg and the Catskills
To ease the suspense, here’s the rest of the necessary information you need to know about Spencer.
Quickly:
l He wears a bear necklace because he likes salmon.
l When he finally got his girlfriend, Krissy, to pose nude for him he decided he wanted her to lie down beside a fallen “No Walking” sign in New York City, but it turned out to be in the meat packing district and they were turned off by all the people pushing meat around. On the way back, he saw a bunch of bagels lying in the street so he got Krissy to pose nude with bagels.
l He grew up in the Catskills where he worked at the Concord Hotel with his dad photographing people for souvenir key chains. So a lot of people out there might have an original Tunick and not even know it.
l The best place to find people who will pose in the nude is at coffeehouses. “The real ones. The ones with couches.”
l Biggest turnoff on the tour: huge pink elephant in Wisconsin.
l In his travels, the only place he’s been overwhelmed by images is Las Vegas. He eventually settled on doing a nude wrapped around King Kong’s leg in front of Circus, Circus.
l On the Web site he describes Krissy, who’s also keeping a journal and interpreting their trip through watercolors, as his: girlfriend/earth goddess/moon child/risk taker/lover/wild boar.
l He and Krissy often sleep in their van (which isn’t really that much smaller than their New York City apartments) in public parking spots. When they want to sleep late they get up and just put a quarter in the meter.
l He has photographed his dad nude. “He insisted.”
l He doesn’t like photography. “I just don’t, really.”
l He liked Starship Troopers.
Blastoff
6 ... 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ...1...
The fumes are pluming, the flames are flying and Missy is grimacing in the chill but she’s holding her pose.
An ice cream truck is hovering behind the officer, the driver probably frantically trying to decide what to focus on — space shuttle/naked blond, naked blond/space shuttle, space shuttle/naked blond/wild boar.
The shuttle rises more slowly than Spencer anticipated, and his 12-shot roll of black-and-white film is spent in seconds.
He drops his camera to his side and steps back to watch the rocket evaporate into the sky.
“Nice roll,” the radio reports, referring to Columbia’s 180-degree rotation into orbit, but this crew takes it as a compliment on a successful shoot.
“Nice roll!”
The cop is still standing sternly at the end of the pier, not saying a word. Now that it’s over, everyone is leery but taking a closer look at him. There’s something funny about his uniform, and where his gun is supposed to be it looks like he has more of a pocket-knife holder than a pistol holster.
He’s a fish and wildlife officer.
Does he have any jurisdiction? Is he in charge of pier violations? Was Missy’s fortune — SERIOUS TROUBLE WILL PASS YOU BY TODAY — just a cheap cookie trick?
Finally, he uncrosses his arms, grins at Missy and says, “Well, I guess I picked the right spot to watch the launch.”
Epilogue:
Spencer is on a rocket high.
And Cuban coffee.
They’re fighting through the postlaunch traffic. After a successful shoot, he and Krissy sometimes have sex, Krissy jokes, but today it was just coffee at the El Leoncito on Federal Highway and a quest for more rocket shots — the town is full of old rockets sitting in front of schools and city buildings. There’s supposed to be a great one at the VFW Hall in Rockledge about 20 miles up the Space Coast. Whether it’s the coffee or the adrenaline from the launch it’s hard to tell, but Spencer is more talkative than usual, detailing a concert he attended where Evel Knievel opened for Beck. “Evel showed all the crash films and then Beck came out,” he says.
And he’s already got future shoots on his mind: “Two women embracing in front of the Citadel,” he says.
“Wow,“ everybody says.
And then he’s speechless. There it is. The rocket, it’s ... “Are those Christmas lights on it?” he says. As the artist, he’d envisioned a much bigger rocket, something a bit more dominant, but ... “If someone had told me it was a missile, not a rocket, I wouldn’t have bothered,” he says.
Actually, he’s being kind. It looks like something you’d find at a fireworks stand in the Carolinas. Top shelf, for sure, but still a firework. Spencer gets out of the car, mainly just to snicker.
He’s acting awfully cocky for someone who has photographed a naked woman in the hole of a giant donut but he’s got the artist’s eye, and he’s filing this Florida rocket away with Wisconsin’s pink elephant.
Not that he’d have the final say anyway. Missy, the shuttle queen, isn’t about to dance with this sideshow projectile. It is so beneath her now. She crinkles her nose, pulls her clothes close to her and says, “I am not getting naked for that.”