Art gallery’s two nudes will be a test for today’s prudes

For a society oozing with smug progressiveness, busily trumpeting the virtues of polyamory and gender fluidity, we’re actually far more prudish than we once were. Everything today can be a harassment lawsuit, or decried as sexist or exploitative. Clothes had best be kept on. In the Seventies, however, there were adverts for the likes of Fisons industrial fertiliser (industrial fertiliser!) appearing in the most respectable of broadsheet newspapers featuring naked women. Whole swathes of Soviet Europe went about starkers – in saunas, at swimming holes, you name it.

Today, certainly in Britain, nudity has become shocking again. Which is why I was tickled to see the Royal Academy’s audacious decision to unleash a spot of old-school anatomical frankness. A retrospective of experimental artist Marina Abramović, 72, is to occupy the central galleries in 2020 and will see a repeat of an installation she first aired in Bologna in 1977. Called Imponderabilia, the exhibit features two naked people, one man and one woman, standing facing each other in a doorway while visitors squeeze through a very narrow space between them. In the words of Andrea Tarsia, the Royal Academy curator, it is meant to be “a confrontation with nakedness, with gender, with sexuality, with desire”.

Indeed. At the performance’s launch in 1977, some were shocked. But, as Tarsia then put it: “Some went through. Some fairly charged through. A few went through a number of times, actually.” I’ll bet they did.

The Royal Academy is now seeking young men and women for the job – Abramović herself will pick them out from a series of workshops. The workshops will be packed, I am sure, with actor-types happy to strip off for the sake of art. My question is whether the visitors of our prissy age will be able to cope. The Royal Academy clearly wonders too: it’s allowing for an alternative route between rooms for those who can’t face the narrow passage between body parts.