The Australian: My Life in the Nude – review
See article in its original context here by Chris Boyd for The Australian.
Shock of the nude: Maude Davey’s mature body of work still awes audience
“FEMINISTS,” academic and art historian Anne Marsh wrote in 1994, “are lining up as either anti- or pro-pornography.”
Marsh’s article on the “sex war” debate in the premiere edition of World Art magazine in March that year triggered a debate in inner-city Melbourne three months later. There, academics and artists politely slugged it out in front of a tiny audience.
When it was Maude Davey’s turn to speak, the 30-year-old performer moved her chair to a point midway between the panel and the audience and declared: “I’m not a pornographer, I’m an artist.”
After a pregnant pause, she told us she wasn’t wearing any undies and impishly flicked up her flouncy black skirt to prove it.
She then delivered an impassioned defence of the explicit and, simultaneously, demonstrated how she liked to masturbate.
For close to 25 years, Davey has managed to balance sex and discourse, mind and body. She aims to shock the intellect rather than merely shock our sensibilities. Remarkably, her performances have never degenerated into sideshow acts. They’re never lurid or tawdry or fake. On that score, she’s more Karen Finley than Annie Sprinkle.
My Life in the Nude is a retrospective of Davey’s most significant and most notorious routines, including the oft-performed My C … and the rarely revived act that earned her the Strawberry Girl moniker in 1991 (let’s just say that product placement is key in that particular routine).
The one significant omission from the line-up is the 1994 lecture-demonstration.
My Life in the Nude is an excellent introduction to the artist, and a delightful reminder of just how sustained, powerful and smart Davey’s work has been for those who have followed her career.
Now 50, Davey is all too aware of the way her mature body has hijacked her acts. Her bare flesh now speaks of wisdom, experience and mortality instead of beauty, desire and hope, she tells us.
Perhaps surprisingly, Davey holds back on some of the key events of her life. Her abrupt transition from sex-positive lesbian feminist icon to heterosexuality and motherhood rates a single line: “I was in love with a man.”
And Davey’s breast reduction as a young woman rates only a glancing mention. Details such as these have the potential to anchor the show and to give it shape, dramaturgically.
Perhaps it’s enough that Davey awes her audiences. And she does that, no question, once again.