The day 1,700 people stripped off in the name of art
Spencer Tunick on Tyneside, 20 years on
It was 20 years ago today (July 17) – and it’s not the sort of thing you tend to forget – that 1,700 people dutifully donned their birthday suits for a dawn traipse beside the Tyne.
No, you don’t really forget a thing like that.
On the other hand, I can imagine some participants given to moments of sudden stunned uncertainty: “Did I really do that?”
There is pictorial evidence, for this was Spencer Tunick’s latest venture – a nice little earner for the American photographer, no doubt, and guaranteed mega-coverage (in contrast to its completely uncovered participants) for the newly spruced up Newcastle and Gateshead quaysides.
They were heady times back in 2005, pre banking crisis and austerity. There was public money for regeneration and pumping up civic pride. Baltic, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge and The Glasshouse (then called something different) were shiny and new.
NewcastleGateshead had gone for the European Capital of Culture title (no longer open to us, post-Brexit) and been pipped, predictably in retrospect, by Liverpool. But after many months of ramping up ‘the buzz’, there was a euphoric hangover.
With carefully laid plans and money to spend, a new body called Culture 10 had been formed to make the Tyneside culture stuff happen anyway… and not a few years hence in 2008 (sod that! The Scousers could have that) but now, in 2005.
Which is why, at 3am on July 17 of that year, I stripped off on Baltic Square, having been ordered to do so by a man up a stepladder with a megaphone.
I wasn’t alone, you understand. There were 1,699 others.
Some lads near me seemed to have headed straight for the Quayside after a night on the lash. The clothes were off in a blink, the inner caveman released with hollers and whoops.
Others, more tentative, neatly folded their clothes before putting them into the black bin bags provided.
It was at this moment I realised we’d all been lied to.
You will be naked for short moments, they’d implied, just long enough for (the aptly named) Mr Tunick to focus and get his desired snap. Then clothes back on and onto the next location to do it again.
With the clothes in the bags – 1,700 identical bags – and the route explained (over the Millennium Bridge, along Newcastle Quayside, a brief diversion up The Side, over the Swing Bridge and back to Baltic Square via the now vanished carpark beside The Glasshouse) that ‘short moments’ pledge vanished with the night.
The kittiwakes up above seemed to be laughing at us: “Hey, suckers, prepare for the long haul as nature intended.”
By the time we reached the Swing Bridge, surely even the cavemen would have sobered up enough to feel self-conscious.
We traipsed over the ‘blinking eye’ bridge, eyes already adapting to the task of avoiding certain anatomical regions. Never can random encounters have featured quite so much unwavering eye contact.
We lay in a row along Newcastle Quayside, looking up at the sky where at any moment a shrieking seabird might wheel away in celebration of a direct hit.
Somewhere in the line, a girl was suddenly convulsed. “It’s all the willies,” she explained, snorting between giggles.
The willies, mercifully, were lying low.
Up The Side (I still exchange a knowing look with the manhole cover which briefly had knowledge of my bare feet) we were ordered to crouch. Somewhere – goodness knows where – the Tunick lens was primed.
Not far from the Guildhall I bumped into a couple I’d see in the playground, dropping off their kids. “Hello. You well? Nice day for it. Oh, well, best be going…”
To cross the Swing Bridge – in accordance perhaps with some ancient by-law, never explained – we were all handed a plastic hoodie (see-through, of course) and flip flops, to be discarded on the other side.
It would have been a surreal moment but frankly it was all so surreal that no particular moment could be described as such.
I still fondly recall the young lovers, full-clothed leftovers from the night before, gaping in astonishment as a naked crocodile filed past; and the cheerful waiter, on a late or early shift, entering into the spirit by raising his glass from a restaurant window while wearing only the broadest of grins.
Beneath the new music centre, we were ordered up onto the terraced bank beneath. You could back then, the weeds yet to claim it. Show-offs shinned right to the top; the less nimble lined up at the bottom.
Two shots as the sun rose on our massed exposure, one full frontal and one bums to the fore. The man with the camera told us to look over our right shoulder.
He got picky with his final shot, a complicated set-up in the aforementioned carpark. The girl with the dyed blue hair, a beacon among the natural tones, was banished, as was someone with a traditional British tan (which is to say all parts bronzed around a pallid ‘vest’ of flesh).
Goodness knows how this would have gone down in this age of tattoos, piercings and rainbow hair – none of which was in abundance back then.
Tunick’s schtick was about natural flesh tones merging to form an undulating landscape, the individuals subsumed within the mass.
Then it was time to be reunited with our clothes. Time to find one bin bag among many. Small scenes of panic ensued. It’s one thing to be a nude in a nude crowd; being nude all alone is quite a different matter.
Later some of us were interviewed by Lauren Laverne (dressed, should you be wondering).
What did we say? What did I say? Can’t remember exactly, but relief and disbelief would have been in the mix, along with some guff about the merits of cultural regeneration.
And later still, some people provided an encore, posing for one more late shot on the Millennium Bridge.
Some people, you see, really, really got into it. One or two may well have remained to this day, had they not been dragged away or deposited into the river next time the bridge ‘blinked’ open.
All participants got a small print in a brown envelope by way of thanks – plus dining out conversation fodder for years to come.
Early in 2006 there was an exhibition of Spencer Tunick’s photographs at Baltic. I have to say it was a little disappointing, the pictures not quite conveying the magnitude of the event.
So where is everyone now?
There have been no reunions, or none that I’ve been invited to.
I still see some of my acquaintances who took part. It’s a thing shared between us. But as with any group brought together randomly, the stories and the memories are now scattered to the four winds.
Some participants will no longer be with us, sadly. Such is life.
A small number, unwittingly participating inside their pregnant mums, can have no memory of it at all – unless it be the subconscious imprint of some embryonic tremor caused by exceptional weirdness outside.
Spencer Tunick went on to do many more naked photo shoots, becoming (to my mind) gimmickier as time went by. In Hull, during its UK City of Culture year in 2017, participants were painted blue. At least we were spared that trauma.
I look back on it as a positive experience, a reminder that, for all hang-ups and pressures to conform, there really is no such thing as perfection or a human archetype.
Everyone’s special, in fact unique. Spencer Tunick aimed to turn humanity into an amorphous landscape feature but underlined the fact – at least to those who took part – that it’s a kaleidoscope of difference.
All the photos in this article (apart from the one by Spencer Tunick) were taken by Mark Pinder. Spencer Tunick was commissioned for his NewcastleGateshead installations by Baltic in collaboration with BBC Three and with funding through Culture 10.