Just Act Natural

A few years ago I was working as a model. With full day bookings on average 4 days per week, I could even say that I was one of Sydney’s “top models”. There’s a couple of images of me floating around – in Women’s Weekly and in a Cleo sealed section where I appeared stark naked, cropped, shrunk and juxtaposed with photographic images of other naked models who I have actually never seen outside the pages where our flesh appears to rub together. A jolly jostling lot, juxtaposed with a placard gaily proclaiming “size 16” between my calves. I though I was only a 14. My measurements were those of a dressmakers fourteen – 36” 28” 36”, but oh but, who cares? I only did it for the money, $300 bucks for two hours, and double what the other models had accepted. I was amazed at my haggling chutzpah and amazed that I could earn in two hours of standing in front of a camera, more than what I earned (after tax) in the rest of the week, three full days posing naked for life classes. Cleo were desperate, and willing to pay extra, for larger models. Trying to give a ‘naturalistic’ portrayal of ‘real’ women, they found that somehow most women prepared to bare all for the camera were the sizes, shapes and colours of the rest of the bodies represented in the magazine. Size 10, or 8, or 6. .

“Real women” articles in ‘women’s” magazines, emerged in the 1990’s as a quasi-feminist response to charges of idealisation of thinness and stylised beauty of photographic mannequins. This intensified towards the end of the decade, when Australian fashion was described as ‘in crisis’ , and increasing media and government attention was focussed exploring links between media images of thinness and proliferation of body dysmorphia syndromes such as Anorexia nervosa in young female consumers. They are also an inexpensive way of generating copy – as magazines don’t hire agency models, which usually charge a couple of thousand dollars per session, and more if naked. Recruiting real women or non-photographic models is a challenge, and most articles, feature artists’ models or professional strippers. One artists model said she’d posed in a group with some strippers and found them ‘gross’, scratching their depilated vulvas in public, and adopting coy, slutty, ‘lezzie’ poses in front of the camera. Looking at the images in the size 14, 12, 10, 8 and 6 sections, I could guess, by shaved pubes and embellishments like tattoos, piercings, who was less likely to be working as an artist model. Generally artists’ models present a type of unrefined natural classicism, without extensive depletion, cosmetic surgery or makeup. The ‘natural’ appearance of artists’ models is partly to distinguish the life class from less edifying genres, such as fashion magazines but also soft porn and strip shows and also to emphasise the artists’ own imaginative capacities to produce the idealised nude from a ‘raw’ nature.

While posing for the Cleo shoot I was perplexed by the photographer’s banal mantra of “Just act natural’, act like you’re really happy with your body”. It was eight o’clock in the morning, and I was standing on a cold curved concrete skating ramp, adopting habitual contrapposto poses from the life class, and trying to convince my brain that they weren’t after a Rubens. They wanted me to be upright, curvy, smiley and happy. Hell! What about my famous repertoire of Rodinesque contortions or anguished Goyan heroines? Life class posing is always limited by the time of each pose. The most interesting poses are the shortest and the drawings are generally the less illustrative or pictorial and more like a generalised scribble. My professional vanity was hoping for a pictorial record of my acrobatic expressivity, pulling my foot up behind my head, standing on one leg, cowering in expressive terror, or transforming myself into a renaissance classic, with embellished versions of old ballet stances. Students at art schools usually went along with the ‘expression’ of each pose, and I knew how to structure posed to give an ‘appealing’ view from all sides. And yet, posing for the camera was more revealing, despite the single view of the fixed monocular lens. I realised I sustained contrappostos by swaying backwards, and I realised too, that outside of posing, pretending and playing, I wasn’t ‘happy in my body’ and couldn’t adopt the Colgate smile that early in the day. I couldn't act ‘natural’ because the situation was profoundly unnatural and alien, and I didn’t know the pose for ‘natural’ or ‘happy’. The final image shows me stepping forward awkwardly, with a made up face staring back with the smiling eyes of so many women in my family, a familiar smile, but not mine.

A year later, I had another gig at the Women’s Weekly. This article featured five models, each representing a decade of women’s ageing from women in their twenties to those in their sixties. Apparently they’d had serious trouble finding older models that would pose for the low cash rates being offered. This is less of a reflection of the perceived shame attached to ageing bodies, than the cultural and social capital of older experienced models. There are three female artists’ models in Sydney who are aged over sixty. All of them have worked in performance and two have posed in glamour photography in the past. One of them stated that the rates offered by the weekly were scandalously low, and refused to take the job on principal. I needed the cash, and so posing as a metonymic 30-year-old, I bleached my hair in order to be less recognisable to my mum’s hairdresser or my old classmates or in the country. The Women’s Weekly idea of natural was a little different to Cleo’s. They wanted my eyebrows plucked and legs and armpits shaved. The let me keep my pubes, but after a 2-hour makeup session I was unrecognisable. Unlike Cleo, Women’s Weekly shot on film and didn’t use any digital manipulation of the bodies or backgrounds. Assuring us they were after a ‘classy, arty’ look they also posed the models in ways that concealed our pubes, nipples and even our shaved armpits. During the makeover session, the fashion and beauty editor proclaims that I had “great bone structure” and that I “could really do this seriously if I put some effort in”. I suspect she was trying to flatter me, make me feel included in a visual culture that seemed so alien. (Reform the butch dyke, make her behave, pretty her up). I thought of Calamity Jane with mud on her frock and smiled as I assured them I didn’t have any political objections to shaving my legs or underarms, I just never saw the point of doing it. As a feature on ageing, the article was rather strange. My body looked larger and saggier than the 40-year-old dancer on the following page, but this might have been part of its ‘authenticity’. At least I wasn’t asked to ‘act natural’.

Such ‘natural’ images, in a magazine such as Cleo, twinned with multiple images of thinner idealised fashion models, could also be seen as a continuum of the dualised tradition in Australian visual culture, between a type of authentic Australian fuller figured ‘naturalness’ and extreme bodies of imported models from cosmopolitan cultural centres such as north America and western Europe.
The modern spectral model increasingly became a feature of upmarket fashion parades, even in Australia in 1936 . In Australia the modernist fashion parade, had the added cache of being part of a touring spectacle from Europe. The reception of sophisticated modernist conventions of fashion modelling was not extended to mannequins that remained relatively archaic until the 1960s. . Up until the late 1940’s miniature fashion dolls were distributed throughout Australia, and most store dummies were of the naturalised plaster. This fissure between modernist sophistication and a more prosaic conservatism, was a contradiction that has continued to circulate within the Australian visual culture. The 1920’s saw an increasing cultural anxiety over a distinctive Australian identity. As argued by Peers, figurative art became associated wit a patriotic nationalism of the emerging ‘new race’ of white Australian, and nudity became linked to a neo Hellenic ideal of sport, sunshine and the new national identity. Juliett Peers describes the emergence of this ‘natural type’ in figurative art of the 1930’s. Female artists such as Freda Robertshaw and Ola Cohn depicted themselves as ‘ athletic, lithe but uneroticised Amazons” . Robertshaws’s paintings of beach scenes feature bronzed, active, curvaceous women and men, almost androgynous in their swimwear. This national mythology of naturalised corporeality was important means for legitimating the proliferation of life modelling and life drawing in art and trade schools in the early 20th century . Australians were influenced by English ideas of naturism, and nudity was promoted and linked to the outdoors, physical activity and strength, bronze skin and a non-prurient, no-nonsense approach to self-presentation . Within fashion this national type manifested itself as a fuller figured size 14 ‘healthy’ model. Emerging in the 1930’s, the curvy model embodied the practical concerns of colonial womanhood and served to fuel myths of Australia as a largely rural society, when in fact it has and continues to be one of the most intensely urbanised populations in the world.

Counterposed with the increasingly thin mannequins presented by European fashion houses, the ‘natural Aussie’, has enabled another form of alternating play on the issue of cultural authenticity. This has continued to this day, where images of anorexic wafer models are juxtaposed with features on ‘natural’, or ‘real women’. The “real sizes” centrefold in Cleo, was another deployment of this ‘natural’ model. Despite the nomenclature, and despite the relatively relaxed requirements for admission as a natural model, this genre is as bounded by conventions of artifice and simulation as the most extreme unreal and distorted fashion models. The conventions of appearing as a ‘natural’ model define themselves against other competing genres of physical presentation. This may be against the perceived artificiality of professional mannequins, or against the anachronism of the life class, the kitsch of soft porn, the obscenity of striptease, the elitism of celebrities. All of these perceptions are culturally specific and largely contested within the settings where models pose and are observed and imitated by others.


While artists' models became less significant in consumer based visual culture; they remained a contentious theme within art education, and studio practice. In the nineteenth century, the taboos surrounding the nude figure provided one way of regulating what classes and genders had access to various forms of education and cultural appreciation. For most of the nineteenth century, the life class excluded women students and working class in provincial areas, and in England, paintings, were received into a cultural milieu fraught with ambiguity and debate. The class-based anxieties of Victorian England, projected onto the nude persisted well into the twentieth century. The proliferation of soft core pornography magazines, sexualised advertising in consumer culture, encouraged the distinction between naked and the nude to be deployed by Kenneth Clark in a manner which privileged the scopic regimes of ‘art connoisseurs’ over the less reified, and less allegorised images in popular culture. While social anxieties crystallised around the female nudes, male nudes continued to be produced, although their numbers fell in comparison to female nudes. In the twentieth century, artists models were the sit for many avant-garde innovations, as movements from abstraction to surrealism, expressionism, pop art all used images of models or nudes in which to carry pictorial conventions that were being addressed or challenged by the artworks. Salon nudes became increasing figment of amateur art societies, many of whom adopted a curious pastiche of realist painting conventions, derived from smoothed over idealisation of 19th century academicians and combined with pictorial conventions of photography and soft porn. In the late twentieth century, artist pursued figurative art based on avant-garde theatre, presenting their own bodies rather than using models. What was live performance art in the 1960’s and 1970’s has circulated as video documentation of such pieces, which has itself developed into a separate genre, often involving collaborators or models.


Throughout the twentieth century, artists models continued to work in art schools and occasionally for artist and illustrators for the similar conditions of anonymity insecurity low pay and low status that they had always done. Life modelling provided a form o supplementary income to actors, artists, students and other itinerant workers in creative disciplines. Lower paid than work in photographic modelling, or other ‘body work’ occupations such as stripping, sex performance or sex work, modelling has an aura of quaint respectability as well as a historical association with avant-garde transgression. Artist modelling also creates and reinforces certain social distinctions of the naturalness of cretin body types and perceived agency of its participants.

and have seerpaerate The divergent Modernity produced a strange divergence in models, from reified nudes of academic and salon art, to the commercial proliferation of photographic and catwalk models, providing fetishised icons for sartorial comportment in modern society. While operating in different cultural registers, and having quite distinct gendered social roles, the fashion models and artist models have some rather disturbing contiguities. The act of posing, pausing, the stylised artifice of stillness, is important to the register of both, as are the evocations of death and a stylised alternance between lifelikeness and lifelessness. Both conventions of modelling are formed by amalgam of composites. For the fashion mannequin, style involves a quotations of sartorial remnants, evoking new and old in deathly cycle of not new not old mockery of novelty, such fragments are assembled onto the body of the mannequin, staring, swaying, swaggering and leaning, and whose stares and leers and vacuous impression complete the ensemble. Artist models poses are formed by citation of images, fragments from art history and famous images themselves historically comprised of composite of fragments, excised and reassembled into an ideal. Real people imitation assemblages, the hall of mirrors stretches back and forth in time.