At the outset let’s define exhibitionism. It’s en vogue today to display everything: your half-fried eggs on fancy earthenware, your pet (preferably a cat or a dog), the rose growing in your single pot on the window sill, the sunset (although similar to all sunsets), click the post and await the response which in the subtext of social media means you scratch my back, I scratch yours so you get as many likes as people you know but you probably got the drift when I wrote social media.
On a more serious note, exhibitionism besides being the act of attracting attention to oneself can also mean an act of genital exposures such as nudist art of Ancient Greek. Polykleitos’s sculpture Doryphorus, Hermes and the infant Dionysus, the Youth of Marathon circa 325 century BCE and Venus de Milo in her unclothed glory-have all stood unabashedly through the centuries. The middle ages nurtured a more strict moral code, which caused the nude to briefly disappear until its re-emergence in the Renaissance –with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, and Donatello’s statue of David in the 1440s. Whether it is Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, showing Venus emerging au natural from the sea, Goya’s nude Maja (1798) and Manet’s Olympia (1863) the artists captured-to use modern lingo-an organic quality in the female form, minus the heavy mantle of perfection borne by nude muses today. That is exhibitionism at its purest, without the quest for being flawless.
Source- Pixabay
In the modern age, since people are less intrigued by a state of undress, exhibitionism has metamorphosed into the unveiling of one’s emotions, one’s demons, or even quirks through art. Social and cultural shifts, emotional and sexual freedom and contemporary warfare became the recurring trope of modern masters (for example Chagall and Franco) and the artist became a social commentator. Being exhibitionistic no longer means the display of nude angels or wholesome beauty, but implies instead an expose of the evils plaguing mankind, personal or otherwise. To address the subject of this piece; I believe that art is an intensely personal experience. You don’t have to necessarily like it, but if it remains inside you and alters the way you perceive the world and its people, art has left its mark on you- the artist can take a bow. If Rembrandt’s Danae with her matronly figure can be recognized as an authentic depiction of female nudity compared to today’s poster girl, and even if Diego Rivera’s communist ideals in Man at the Crossroads clash with the better established capitalist ideologies, they succeed in making you aware of both the physical/ emotional aspects of another human being and the inevitable flaws in a widely accepted social system.
Bring it on I implore the artists, purge the unadulterated, depraved, even disturbing sides of yourselves, because the layperson can be too wary of the reality to address it. It’s time to put down the magazine with its glossy photo shopped unreal imagery and walk into an art gallery.
Source- WIkicommons
Author- Sominee Desai
