The Static Nude: A Genealogy of the Body Drifting Beyond the Picture Frame (1930s-1970s)

The Static Nude: A Genealogy of the Body Drifting Beyond the Picture Frame (1930s-1970s)

In the 1930s, the London Windmill Theatre produced tableau vivant, in which "motionless nudes" were presented as art during World War II. This form, which took advantage of a loophole in the censorship system, which said that if it moved it was obscene, but if it remained still it was art, became the prototype for what was later called the "frame show. In Japan in the 1970s, the Tokyo Hollies Theater Company reinterpreted this technique, setting up a frame on the stage to control the audience's gaze and elevate stripping to an artistic form of expression. The movement to explore the boundaries between sex and art expanded, with Emma Sugimoto and others experimenting with "stripping without taking off their clothes," in resonance with the experimental theater of Juro Karo and Shuji Terayama. The movement eventually disappeared amid the wave of diversification and restrictions on entertainment in the 1980s, but its spirit continues to pulse through contemporary stage expression
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