We did it all on instinct."ĬB: "I don’t want to be part of the illusion that it was all wonderful, but I went along with it and at times I think I was really unhappy. JB: "At the time there was a big crossover between what we did as artists, and what we did in life. On what it was really like being a Neo Naturist… It was part of a whole thing about seeing how far we could go." Then we thought ‘let's get even more extreme and just not dress’. For a year I dressed as Marie Antoinette. WJ: "We’d been through the punk thing, which became a bit negative to say the least, then the New Romantics thing, and we were dressing more and more extremely.
CENTRAL AMERICAN TRIBAL BODY PAINT HOW TO
There wasn’t much talk about careers or how to get recognised." When you left art college you didn’t really know what to do. Jennifer Binnie: "I think also, there wasn’t any other way for us at the time. I remember thinking ‘that’s really not fair, how come those men are allowed to go on stage and just have fun showing off, and I’m not allowed to?’ That was one of the things that led me to performance art." I remember going to the Black Cap and seeing these men on stage with their bosoms Sellotaped together to give them cleavages, and coming on stage, having a lovely time, and just showing off. One of the inspirations behind starting Neo Naturists, for me, was transvestites. But with us, we'd all paint each other: it’s not just about being a painted body, but the process of how we get ready and what we do with it afterwards. So we were turning that around."Ĭhristine Binnie: "In Yves Klein’s work he had models painted, but they were just models, and it was his art. Historically in art the woman is the model and the muse, and not the person who’s actually making the work about their naked bodies. Wilma Johnson: "Part of the thing of doing the Neo Naturists was using women as women, rather than their being a sort of object. Among their associates were leading lights in the club kid gay scene, from filmmaker Derek Jarman and dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, to performance artist Leigh Bowery, as well as art world characters like Grayson Perry, Jennifer’s boyfriend at the time. What’s more, the Neo Naturists lived as alternative a lifestyle as their artwork would suggest, living in squats and parading around in clubs like Heaven, Taboo and The Blitz. Together, they broached political ideas around society, austerity and the female body in the most joyous way imaginable. “Then I painted her.” Both Jennifer and Wilma had studied fine art, at Portsmouth University and Central Saint Martin’s respectively, while Christine turned to craft, focusing on pottery. Christine was a life model, and when Wilma set about drawing her, "it only took half a day for her to be painting my body, and not just a picture of me," Christine explains. It all came about fairly organically, the trio explains. Over the course of a five-year period in the early 1980s, the Neo Naturists took their naked, painted bodies out onto the street and into nightclubs, creating their own unique brand of performance art. The group’s main members were Christine Binnie, Jennifer Binnie and Wilma Johnson, and its raison d’être was deliberately bold and hippyish – a daring move at a time when to be a hippy was deeply unfashionable. Anarchic, nude and vitally, vibrantly fun, 1980s performance group the Neo Naturists were a glorious tits-out reprise to Thatcherite Britain, to stiff upper lips and to art world po-faces.