Museum’s Visitors Exposed to Art
PARIS — The most uncomfortable thing about being naked in a museum is the temperature. A halfhour into the first nudist tour of the Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art museum in Paris, I had grown used to the feeling of exposure, but I hadn’t acclimatized to the cold air circulating through the cavern- ous galleries.
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. Over 30,000 people indicated on Facebook that they were interested in the tour. “I was imagining about 100 or 200 people might want to come , not 30,000,” he said.
At 10 a.m. on May 5, I joined the 161 people who had managed to get one of the limited tickets, and we undressed in a room on the second floor. 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, the largest in France for contemporary art. The shows consist of one large, suspended sculpture and five exhibitions dealing mostly with issues of political strife and resistance.
French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa’s exhibition — “The Enemy of My Enemy” — consisted of artifacts related to war, including the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the bombing of Hiroshima.
Marion Buchloh-Kollerbohm, the tour guide who is also 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 post- colonial 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.”
Other museums have organized similar tours for temporary shows thematically connected to nakedness, including a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in Montreal and a show of male nudes at the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
Laurent Luft, 48, the president of the Paris Naturist Association, said that it was “actually more pleasing to me to find something that had nothing to do with nudity.”
Mr. Luft and I walked into a small room in one corner of the exhibition where Mr. Beloufa was exhibiting an Iranian propaganda video from the Holy Defense Museum in Tehran that showed a simulation of a bomb attack on a marketplace. It felt insensitive to be watching a video of an atrocity (albeit a staged one) while standing in nothing but my running shoes, but Mr. Luft saw it differently. In his view, the exhibition confirmed his belief that nudity was a great social and political equalizer.
“If world leaders had their meetings naked,” he said, “they’d stay a lot calmer.”
There were more male attendees than female, but there was a mix of ages, and many newcomers to public nudity — like Junyu Deng, a 29-year- old Parisian.
Ms. Deng, who seemed exhilarated by the experience, said being nude allowed her to have a more “intimate” interaction with the art.
Nothing comes between artwork and its admirers.