Discussion of the Nude or Inverse Self-Portrait

The painting or drawing of nudes constitutes a significant part of art history as well as art education, and in fact as a relationship between mostly male painters and female models. I wanted to turn the history of the nude as a form of male pleasure around, and to place the man in the position of the woman. I find it symptomatic of our phallocentric culture to arrange poses of naked women under the pretext of art. I found the work of these genre painters of spread thighs, especially turn of the century Viennese artists, i.e. Gustav Klimt und Egon Schiele, to be very curious if not repugnant. It seemed to me more interesting to be the naked model myself, discussed by women who themselves had been models. I also did not want to paint the nude, but rather to dissolve the classical conflict between visual representation and verbal description, by replacing the visual representation with verbal description. With the discussion of the nude, language is used as a medium of absence, to envision the absent body (of the painter) that remains distant in the act of painting the nude. The goal of the verbal description was to identify the visible observer discussing the model, namely me, with the observers of the video screen. Because the viewer sees a woman in front of the monitor who sees me as a naked model, but who only describes this act of seeing verbally, the viewer also looks indirectly at me. The act of seeing as an observer of a second order (the viewer of the video monitor) continues the act of seeing and speaking of the observer of the first order (the viewer in the video monitor) – a hall of mirrors in terms of perception and desire. (Peter Weibel)