The Great American Nude as a Study of the Rejection of Excrement by Contemporary America

In his series the Great American Nude, Tom Wesselmann cuts open the commodification of American Culture. His subjects, extracts from the vacuous magazines and posters that surround each and every one of us, constantly attempting to appeal to baser instincts, are reduced to monotone planes of flesh, horrific in their lack of emotion. Wesselmann is a man who understands the true extent of cultural and moral decay.

Wesselmann's women are commodities, used to sell products, their very flesh and blood, their bodies prostituted to sell the fripperies of modern society, a society charged by the misguided energy of nationalism, hence the prevalence of red white and blue within his work. Against the background of decadence, leopard skin sheets and bedside tables displaying fruit and flowers, Wesselmann's women recline eyeless. Blind to their manipulation by commercial forces greater than themselves, their gaze is all the more penetrating to the viewer by the virtue of coming out of nothing. There is an intensity to their fixation on the observer, as if space itself is looking back out of the painting. And yet something ominous, demonic is hiding beneath the surface; these women with their blank, emotionless gazes echo Guillermo Del Toro's monstrous Pale Man from El Laberinto del Fauno - just as the Pale Man is the diabolic echo of the Captain at the head of the dinner table, Ofelia's fascist surrogate father, the women here echo society's inherent inability to comprehend itself, instead blindly following whatever is presented to them, and this has made them abominations, hideous and unsettling monsters. In this instance one in tempted to apply Freud's definition of the uncanny, the disturbing merge of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and it goes a long distance to explaining why these nudes have somehow lost all eroticism and sexual appeal. While legs are spread and moist vulvas gape like yoni hungry to devour the Penetrative Member, the viewer only feels disgust, and this grotesque portrayal of the sexual is transferred to the consumerist world; the true order has become perverted, been artificially altered into the unsettling, lacking all beauty, sensuality or eroticism, and all that the viewer can be left to feel is the despair of the abyss.



Therefore we come to the title of the piece, the rejection of excrement. In his seminal biography fellow artist Salvador Dali decries the American consumerist rejection of excrement in favour of commodities. It appears that he and Wesselmann are on the same page in this regard; Wesselmann's subjects are the eventual and inevitable conclusion of this process of faecal rejection - by abandoning any attachment to their own filth they have lost all defining characteristics, becoming definable only by their own superficiality. The oranges on the tables and the flowers are the commodities that excrement has been exchanged for; in a pure world the women would find themselves prostrate next to welcoming, perfumed toilet bowl, but instead the decay of commercialisation has rendered them nothing but bland and statuesque shades, lacking in any dimension. Their only identity comes from their sexualised nudity, yet as discussed prior this has failed them, there is no appeal to their nakedness, not even the ceaseless slapping of flesh on flesh that comprises the most base and animalistic fornication. They have no depth, their sexuality is a paradoxical impossibility, and they are a reflection of us, the dead generation, in this regard.


The tan lines that form these lonely women's only embraces hint at a life beyond the tableaux they have forced into, likely drugged and at gunpoint. It is a life of Sun, of being outdoors and free with nature, of vitality and of natures great sustenance, excrement. Each of these women has once known shit, and yet they, like us, chose to reject it. Why? What was the seduction that caused this fall from an excremental Eden? Fast Cars, Drink, Drugs, Money? It is irrelevant, now, though they still bear the mark of their previous piety like the circumcised Jew who abandons his brethren, they have become lost, and spiritually corrupted. It is ambiguous whether there can possibly be a hope of a return to the heaven of association with filth, but the slack lipped, drugged smiles of the models indicates an utter disassociation with reality, and an unwillingness for expiation. Truly, Wesselmann is the great nihilist of the modern age, a man who sees the truth of the reality of decay and despair, the indomitable absence of shit and the all encompassing pollution of capitalism. Perhaps he is subtly hinting that greater forces are at play, a Merovingian conspiracy by the sons of angels to dominate creation, or perhaps all there is the degradation of mundus, and all life is evil. It barely matters, his women still lie there, smiling and eyeless, nipples stiff in the cold of his ice world, and there is no respite for man, or woman either. Wesselmann is the regeneration of the spirit of Ecclesiastes, and as he paints he weeps and raves and cries, and his shouts take form, the music of the angels, and all hear him now speak in his divine honesty:

"Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher, "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity." - Ecclesiastes 1:2