Naked art

A  week — a rather long one — has passed since the Observer broke how Facebook had failed to protect the data of tens of millions of its users, which was then used by British analytics firms Cambridge Analytica to micro-target voters in the US and UK elections. The reverberations of this revelation were felt in India as well, with one Cambridge Analytica whistleblower revealing that the firm had worked with the Congress and another claiming that it had received funds from an anonymous US-based billionaire to discredit all challengers to Bharatiya Janata Party’s winning run.
 
Now, anyone with a social network account cannot help but feel under constant surveillance. Perhaps a parallel can be drawn with post-World War II America, an era of rabid anti-communism symbolised by the House Un-American Activities Committee, witch hunts (depicted by Arthur Miller in his 1953 play, The Crucible), using the Brechtian technique of placing it in a historical context, the Salem witch trials of 1692-93) and widespread censorship of writers and artists. An almost direct response to this claustrophobic, bureaucratic terror was the Beat Generation of poets and writers. In 1952, Jack Kerouac listed the chief members of the movement: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and himself. They were not avant-garde in the sense of the Surrealists or Dadaists, in that they did not have a manifesto or platform — but there was something else that united them.

THE BEAT IS ON: A direct response to the claustrophobic, bureaucratic terror of post-World War II America was the Beat Generation of poets and writers, including Allen Ginsberg | Photo: Christopher Dombres/ Wikimedia Commons

In a letter to Ginsberg, Kerouac explained their motivation: In an era of soul-searching surveillance, their association was fostered by the ability to reveal their deepest feelings to each other. This attitude was contrary to the contemporary culture of concealment, described by Ginsberg as the “Shutdown Syndrome”. The Beats — described by The New York Times as Beatnik in a foolhardy attempt to link them to the Soviet Sputnik — used this confessional stance, evident also in their writing, as an aesthetic as well as moral standard. In doing so, they managed to subvert a deeply regimented society, reclaiming individual freedoms, at least on the page if not in life.
 
One of the most important symbols they used for this purpose was nakedness. As scholar John Tytell writes in his book, Naked Angels (1976): “It (nudity) was to become a symbolic public and private stance, making art and action inseparable: thus Ginsberg disrobed at poetry readings, and Kerouac once wrote that he wanted to be like the medieval Tibetan scholar-monk Milarepa who lived naked in a cave — and as a supreme final statement Neal Cassady was found naked and dead near a railroad track in Mexico.” The nakedness was not only a performance, like Ginsberg disrobing at public readings, but also a choice to not be bullied by the machinery of the state and the industrial-military complex to confess.
 
It was also like throwing down a gauntlet to these oppressive forces. At the House Un-American Activities Committee  investigations, suspects were encouraged to confess their communist links, betray their friends. Some sang like birds, such as theatre and film director Elia Kazan. What the Beats did was the exact opposite: they sang, to borrow Whitman’s term, the body electric. They overwhelmed the surveillance machinery by revealing everything, providing a surfeit of information.
If the eyes of the BIG BROTHER could see your deepest thought, if it could see your naked body, surely it had all the data needed — like Facebook or Cambridge Analytica — to control you, to censor you. Or did it?

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This writer’s debut book of poems Visceral Metropolis, was published in July 2017