T Magazine: Iggy Pop: Musician, Icon — and Now, Live Nude Model
Ever since James Newell Osterberg Jr. emerged from a Detroit trailer park and reinvented himself as the snarling, bleached-blond, Dionysian rock god Iggy Pop, he has been one of the most iconic figures in music. With his sinewy frame and defiant stare, Iggy’s image has been immortalized by the likes of photographer Mick Rock (on the cover of his band The Stooges’ third album, “Raw Power”) as well as the artists Peter Hujar and Gerard Malanga. “I knew him from the imagery before the music, actually,” recalls the Turner Prize-winning British artist Jeremy Deller. “Even in photos you can tell he has a presence and is clearly quite a character.” For Deller, it was Iggy’s baring of his torso and soul onstage that struck him: “He’s not stopped performing,” Deller says. “From the age of 20 to 69, it’s been a continuous piece of performance art and documentation of his body. It’s interesting to me for a man to parade his body so much, and parade it as it changes.”
Now, Deller has cast Iggy in a startlingly different light, with his latest exhibition, “Iggy Pop Life Class,” which opens at the Brooklyn Museum this week. For the show, Iggy sat as a life model for a four-hour life drawing class this past February in front of 22 students culled from New York’s art schools. The resulting 53 drawings are paired with selected art objects from the Brooklyn Museum’s historical collection that focus on the male body: sculptures from ancient Egypt, Africa and India, as well as pieces by Egon Schiele and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Deller initially conceived of the idea a decade ago as a homage to an installation at the Louvre titled “Profundeurs Vertes,” by one of his favorite artists, the late Mike Kelley, wherein Kelley reacted to six paintings from the Detroit Institute of Arts. But when he approached Iggy about it, he initially declined. As Iggy notes in the book accompanying the exhibition, “I thought I didn’t have the weight. Now I feel like a lot has happened with and to my body. For some reason, it felt important for me to just stand naked for a group of human beings and have an exchange.”
As Iggy has devoted a lifetime to breaking down barriers between himself and the audience, Deller’s two-decade-plus career has been dedicated to collapsing traditional walls between art and the larger world. His multimedia work — which spans music, film and ephemeral public events — emphasizes the power of collaboration. “I’m interested in working with groups of people — the work is so much more important than me,” says Deller, who has in the past done everything from commissioning a brass band to play cover versions of acid house classics to staging an exhibition of fan art of the band Manic Street Preachers. “I’m interested in when art and life rub up against each other; it’s messy and good.”
For the exhibition, Deller wanted a cross-section of artists of varying ages and from different backgrounds — “like a cross-section of America looking at Iggy, which I found quite moving.” The resulting portraiture surprised Deller. “He’s got quite a tough look, quite serious. In a way it doesn’t look like him, but he really was! Drawings aren’t lying — that’s how he looked on that day.”
Paired with the artifacts from the museum, the drawings humanize the myth of Iggy. Says Deller: “There’s a humanity to it you don’t get with a lot of photography and film. There’s a vulnerability there, but there’s also a position of power at the same time. It was quite a brave thing to do.”
