Nudism, art exhibition combine
PARIS — The most uncomfortable thing about being naked in a museum, it turns out, is the temperature. A half-hour into the first nudist tour of the Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art museum in Paris, I had gotten used to the feeling of exposure, but I hadn’t acclimatized to the cold air circulating through the cavernous galleries.
Standing in a politically themed exhibition by French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa, I began shaking my arms for warmth. Museums, I was discovering, are not temperaturecontrolled for people wearing only sneakers.
The Palais de Tokyo’s Visite Naturiste — the first of its kind in France — has garnered a remarkable amount of public interest since it was announced in March. More than 30,000 people indicated on Facebook that they were interested in the tour, and, according to Laurent Luft, 48, president of the Paris Naturist Association, more than 2 million people visited the group’s Facebook page in recent weeks.
“I was imagining about 100 or 200 people might want to come, not 30,000,” he said in a telephone interview before the tour.
At 10 a.m., I joined the 161 people who had managed to get one of the limited tickets, and we undressed in an ad hoc changing room on the second floor of the museum. For the next two hours, we took part in one of six tours by (clothed) museum guides of Discord, Daughter of the Night, a series of exhibitions spread across the museum, which is the largest in France for the presentation of contemporary art. The shows consist of one large, suspended sculpture and five separately curated but thematically related exhibitions in different parts of the museum, dealing mostly with issues of political strife and resistance.
Beloufa’s contribution — The Enemy of My Enemy — consisted largely of artifacts related to war and to other horrific historical events, like the My Lai massacre and the bombing of Hiroshima, arranged on platforms that were constantly moved around the space by small robots, similar to those used by Amazon in its warehouses.
Marion Buchloh-Kollerbohm, the museum’s head of education, told me that she was mindful of the potential awkwardness of combining nudism with the exhibition’s serious subject matter.
“We didn’t want to make this into a conference on the postcolonial subject, because that would really kill the atmosphere,” she said. Nevertheless, she added, “I am hoping the experience of leaving their clothes at the door will help them leave some part of their identity with it, and experience it with more openness.”