The primal instincts

Travelling in Australia should be all about discovering nature and respecting your origins. Then, since more than thirty years the Australians want to prove the rest of the world they directly belong to Asia and that the aborigines are their ancestors. I was always a little skeptic about that, for me the first Australians were some British prisoners who were so violent, dangerous and uneducated that they would be sent at the end of the world! I am a nice person, and sometimes myself victim of clichés, so I do not allow my first impressions to determinate something I didn’t experience personally. So everybody is going to Australia, Nicole Kidman and Kylie Minogue are gay icons, Buz Lurmann is doing a huge film about this country (I mean this continent who should be seen as a new Eldorado), sure why not, and the contact to the nature is something you can’t experience anywhere else!

Wait! I am not so fond of nature! I forgot to say I am French, and I have this theory that French people brought the rest of our western contemporary world a lot of its developed culture. It means for me that when Louis XIV started the actual show business culture giving the most flamboyant balls of Europe in the 17^th century, he just meant to distract those rebel princes with superficial occupations to have less war in the kingdom. Wearing wigs and make up is still a challenge for many men, but you would lose the face in Versailles if you wouldn’t wear the right ones. What I am trying to say is that the international “Grandeur” of my culture is based on the negation of the nature; we made a statement out of superficiality, to prove we had nothing to do with animals. We needed to violently domesticate our surrounding because it was a threat to our justification. “Je pense, donc je suis” means that anything which is not able to think as much as we is not existing! I, once, impressed my restaurant owners New Yorker friends explaining them that in France we would eat so many ugly animals like snails or oysters because we were afraid of them, and eating them was a proof of our domination. I could resume this essential character of the base of French cuisine with: “Eat it before it eats you!” I got some applause!

So I am back, fighting for reasons not to go in Australia, and then I hear always more often how fantastic is the gay parade in Sydney, that they have a French name for it “Mardi Gras” and that everybody is wearing wigs and make up! It is decided, I will try and make the person I love the most in my life so happy, because he loves so much the nature (opposites attracts!).

Mardi Gras was fantastic, even though very different from what I expected (but this is not in this paper, we still talk about primal instincts) and in the program of the two weeks festivities, I hear about an installation from Spencer Tunick trying to photograph as many naked people in the most famous opera of the world. I love my body but I love my clothes too, being naked make sense for me only in a sexual environment. I say also, that I have the most beautiful cock in the world (and I am very proud of it) but unfortunately, I am obsessively attracted by ugly enormous cocks! Here is a challenge (and I love to run them!), being naked in the middle of people I don’t want to have sex, in a place where it is impossible to have sex. Then, why being naked? Just to think about, and analyze our perception of a very primitive fact, being naked, the primal state of facing the outside world, in a very educated place, a recognized temple of western culture. I couldn’t do it without someone really motivating me, but doing it in the middle of people I never met would be easier! There is this Finnish chef, who can apparently interpret the finest Catalonian cuisine, who tells me “Let’s go naked! “ I’m in! We register online, he promises to wake me up at 3 a.m. We have to be there at 4 a.m, and I don’t want to be late. For me the installation is as important as its preparation. How people gather? What is the structure? What could cost to organize such an event? These are questions which are exactly as important as the deep meaning of itself, for my own experience.

I can’t sleep and at 3:15 a.m, alone, I start looking for Toni (I asked him by chance the number of his dorm). I will knock at the door twice, but I am not going to wake up the whole dorm without being sure he is in there. I am psychologically ready to be naked in front of thousands; I don’t need anybody anymore to motivate me! The door opens up, he will be ready in three minutes, the alarm clock didn’t work! We are late and the taxi is the easiest, ten minutes later, we arrive and so do people from everywhere. There is a kind of privileged situation. If you didn’t register online you are not sure to get in. There are intellectual, educated persons who keep their formulary (and feeling like a V.I.P pass) in their hand, who were waiting and prepared for this art performance; and there is some less intellectual and educated who seem to be there by accident (men mostly), to have the chance on peeping some boobs! I have my registration in my hand and very fast I get a sit number for the inside of the opera, the installation number two. Those with the sit tickets are definitely the V.I.P’s! The first picture will be with everybody on the steps of the entrance. The crowd is getting bigger and bigger and the organization looks like a bit behind the situation. Most of the people didn’t sleep, there is too few information about what is going on and everybody start to be cold. Suddenly some appear with hot beverages and the toilets inside of the opera are getting open. I think that it is the moment where the mass starts to take its own identity. There is something happening that everybody is feeling without being able to define or control.

And we are not naked yet!

Around six, with the sunrise, there is finally enough light for the installation, people in the garden can start to undress and join the front of the steps of the opera house. In two minutes thousand men and women are naked, everybody screams, laughs and applause. Some megaphone is giving the directions where to run. Everybody is happy but I cry, I cry so much that I don’t know how to hide my tears. Everybody is having fun but I see repressed images from Hieronymus Bosch and from Auschwitz were masses of naked people run from something awful. I know this is not right, but I know that it is what I was looking for, the confrontation to my anguishes around the nudity! I saw the real fear of my subconscious with being naked!

We are already on the steps and it is our turn, people are so happy to undress, I try to keep my underwear as long as possible, the cold is not very flattering for most of the men.

I can recognize very soon some masses behavior codes from football stadiums: the shouting, the hands movements and the social proximity from strangers. I had my primal moment, I just want to cooperate for a bigger purpose, I am ready to be again a very intellectual person who needs to take on the second level anything happening. Then the whole thing is for me so interesting about communication and perception. The artist has a lot of difficulty to transmit his global view to us and we do not understand what he really expects from us. We should go on the front but where is the front? Eventually we sit, we stand, we lay, we raise the hands and we hug.

The Finnish guy had problems with hugging me naked; I guess it was for him the moment where he was confronting his primal fears. Everybody got something at the end!