DEXTER MIRANDA
Exit
Claudia says, spreading her legs and
slouching forward to illustrate for
the entire coffee shop. “He was very
nice, but I didn’t want to be manga!
That’s my face on there! If I don’t
like the work someone makes, I
won’t model for them again.”
Still, even with less overtly
sexual positions, the tension can
be as palpable in the room as the
paint fumes.
“Yeah, I’ve slept with a few of
the artists,” she dryly states, with
neither embarrassment nor hubris.
One tryst occurred during a contemporary version of Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2,” in which Claudia was
climbing up and down said staircase, naked, for hours. She pauses,
continuing with a hint of uncharacteristic sentimentality: “There is
not much of a story. We bonded. We
saw each other for a little while.”
While there is a certain romance to this image, it also borders on an old-world muse and
master power play that feminist
artists and activists have been
working hard to move beyond. Yet
from Claudia’s perspective, the
artmaking process is a collaborative one, and not dependent upon
restrictive standards of beauty.
“Some people choose me because
ART
of how I look, but others turn me
down. Some say, ‘she is too thin.’”
In Claudia’s eyes there is no ideal
nude model. “Many of the artists
I work with aren’t even drawing
me as a human. There are architects and animators who find the
shapes hidden in the bodies.”
For Claudia, one shoot for artist Spencer Tunick—who photographs large-scale nude installations, with hundreds, even
thousands of bodies at a time—
nicely captured this sentiment.
“There were so many different
types of bodies; everyone was so
happy. There was one man in a
wheelchair. There was a young girl
who was clearly anorexic—she had
long, fine hair growing all over her.
Someone had brought her there to
show her all of these people with
all of these different bodies. It was beautiful.”
HUFFINGTON
11.04.12
“Claudia B.
in Repose,”
by Dexter
Miranda,
September
2009