Naked by Amnon Wolman

Naked includes three works from different periods that are all collaborations with naked performers.

These videos are released by AKOH and XI, in both a book format, an audio version and this audio/visual version.
The video versions are available here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/nakedbook

The first piece that asked for a naked performer was Exit, and it came about during my research into the Fluxus Movement and the works of different artists active with in it, specifically with the early works of Nam June Paik. This all happened at the height of the AIDS pandemic, when we lost family members and friends, at one point during the Shiva of my nephew in the bay area, the topic of conversation was how many funerals each of us attended that week. At the beginning of my interaction with the pandemic, in the nineteen-eighties rumors were flying: even a person’s breath or touch was dangerous and possibly life threatening. The gay male body the potential for love was also a possible agent of harm and death. It was all brought back to me at the onset of the Covid pandemic when friends and even family members suddenly became a possibility of contamination.

The second discussion was made more prominent in the piece The Red Bus Stops Here which was created in 2000 based on interviews with my friend HD Motyl. The piece deals with promiscuous sex and no-strings-attached encounters under the cloud of AIDS. (My friend Riccardo was the last of my friends to die of AIDS, he died in December 2000.) In the electronic part HD Mtyl relates different anecdotes of his sexual escapades in semi-public places. These are presented in the context of ever evolving slow moving distorted recordings of noises, and raw recordings from an American airport. The visual part of the piece includes an empty chair and a scrunched-up pair of jeans that appears as if someone just stepped out of them, three naked men, and three mannequins. The men rarely move, they change positions a few times, slowly transforming from standing like the mannequins to finally sitting on chairs deflated. In the performance of this work there seemed to be a sense of heightened tension before the performance, and as a result as the piece starts there is a sense of an attentiveness and focus. This enhanced alertness leads to, I believe, a more acute state of listening. I found this realization useful and interesting, I was interested in the challenge of trying to have the music and the sounds help seduce the audience to maintain this type of focused listening.

Exit (2) was written almost as a nostalgia piece; I was asked by a tuba playing friend of mine to create a version of the piece and the result is more of a variation on the original piece, than a transposition. Working with these materials again allowed me to see to how the dichotomous relationship between dressed and undressed parallels other discussions that have been relegated into dichotomous violent opposition, rather than opened the door to the multitude of possibilities that exist between two extremes.

Amnon Wolman is a sound artist and composer. His music works employ acoustic instruments, electronics, images and texts in pursuit of a sound world in which social interactions are part of the musical information provided to the listeners, and part of the composition process. He is interested in the peculiar and subjective listening of an individual.