Words by Baynard Woods
Photos by J.M. Giordano
Last Thursday night, before the opening of Artscape, Miriam Ault and Emily Wyatt both felt like little kids before Christmas. “I won’t be able to sleep,” Ault said as she stepped out of J.M. Giordano’s studio at Load of Fun onto North Avenue a little after midnight. “I wonder who will see it here?” Wyatt mused as Giordano pointed up at a spot on the side of the building. Both models had just seen twelve-foot tall black and white portraits of themselves posing nude and the next morning they would be hanging from the side of North Avenue buildings. The more “underground” sorts of artists rarely take the themes of big festivals seriously. But at this year’s Artscape, Giordano, the editor of Gutter Magazine and a staff photographer at Urbanite, took the 1982 theme as inspiration for his project. “In 1982, or maybe early ’83, the Avant Garde fashion photographer Helmut Newton displayed a series of giant nudes” that shook up the art and fashion worlds alike. Giordano wanted to pay homage to that– while showing that it is still controversial. “There’s fashion at Artscape,” Giordano said. “And there’s photography– all of the tugboats in fog– but there is not much fashion photography. I wanted to bring that to Artscape in a different way.”
Initially, Giordano had planned on using billboards to display his series—the nude photographs are paired with clothed pictures of the same model in the same pose— but he did not apply for funding from the city and it proved too expensive. Instead, he had eight of the twelve foot black and white photographs printed on vinyl– the kind used for banners– and on Friday morning he went to hang them. He had permission to use the locations, but an inspector who happened to be in one building, refused to let him access the roof. Two of the images hanging from the Load of Fun were stolen, but Giordano was able to make his point with the other four. “I wanted it to be on North Avenue, which really has very little for Artscape, so that it could be something a little edgier than they would normally have. I also wanted to show that we could do big work here. Other than Gaia there aren’t that many people working really big. Of course, I really did need billboard size if I wanted everyone to see them up against the building.”
It was a bold idea, and it paid off. The Sun printed a story about Giordano’s work within hours of it’s hanging. After the loss of the two prints, Giordano was worried about the fate of the others. Though they were battered by the wind, the photos remained up, unharassed by city officials and vandals alike, until late Sunday afternoon, when Giordano climbed up to take down his giant nudes. He hopes to bring them to a gallery in the near future, so people don’t have to strain their necks to get the impact of these forceful and elegant images. Giordano’s project may have done more than anything else to commemorate thirty years of Artscape, and it wasn’t even part of the official program. But, perhaps that is as it should be—in 1982, everything interesting seemed to come from the margins.
Words by Baynard Woods
Photos by J.M. Giordano
