The Art of Aging

Warning No. 1: Nudity is currently running rampant at Santa Barbara’s Contemporary Arts Forum. Warning No. 2: These nudes are not only quite nude, they’re OLD. Keep the children and lusty preconceptions at home.

Too often in our unabashedly youth-obsessed society, beauty is presumed to be in the form of the beheld. Even as baby boomers carry their cherished ideals and culture into the depths of middle age, and seniors establish their own fronts of activism and demographic pride, it is the young who prevail and show their faces and bodies in public. Kate Moss is everywhere; Kate Hepburn is rarely seen. Such is life.

It is against this sociocultural backdrop that the provocative new CAF exhibit makes its point. “Signs of Age: Representing the Older Body” is a potent group show that celebrates human figures, often nude, that dare to have transcended youth.

Of course, that’s an obvious source of subversion in the art world, taking on societal taboos such as flaunting aging flesh. What is surprising is how elegant and candid this art is, and how it challenges socially imposed values so deeply ingrained in us. Most important, although age is very much an issue in this show, the subjects comport themselves with matter-of-fact dignity.

No apology or special compensation is necessary in the intimate photographs of an 80-year-old woman primping and bathing in her home, in the work of Donigan Cumming. The almost life-size figures in Jacqueline Hayden’s tall, unframed portraits present venerable nude bodies in all their imperfect perfection.

Organized by Nancy Doll, Philip Koplin and Anette Kubitza, the show revels in a sense of affording equal time to the elderly demographic. With a few exceptions, the medium of choice here is photography, and no one states the show’s case with more bracing clarity than that renowned gadfly Juan Serrano (whose misunderstood “Piss Christ” was used as an exhibit in the anti-obscenity tirade against the NEA years back).

With an unpretentious simplicity, Serrano’s large, vivid Cibachrome photographs jump off the wall and into your mind. “Budapest (The Model),” a beautifully composed figure study, finds a nude, wrinkly older woman in a room, with a cane, jewelry and a cigarette, and facial hair. She could uphold society’s standard of decrepitude, but instead gazes off proudly, as if glimpsing an ideal or savoring a memory.

Another strange and stunning color photograph from Serrano, “Budapest (The Lake),” depicts a happy, unclad couple holding hands, their ample peach-colored skin in resonant contrast with the cool blue of the lake. The image boils down to age-irrelevant life essentials: skin and water.

Realities of the flesh in those who have lived long is sometimes the subject, as in Hannah Wilke’s “Portrait of the Artist with her Mother, 1978-81.” The diptych shows the young artist’s bared breasts, on which rest tiny necklace charms, next to an image of her mother’s bare upper body after a mastectomy.

Cross-generational interplay is also a strong theme in the work of Annegret Soltau, who stitches together body parts and faces between women from four generations of a family. In so doing, she touches on the continuum of both time and family, which can cut across considerations of age.

The often desperate attempt to reverse the effects of time is the subject in Anne Nogle’s “Face Lift,” in which the terrible scars around a woman’s eyes are like war wounds in the battle against aging. Skin seems to reveal a process of decomposition in Bailey Doogan’s “Mea Corpa,” with translucent blue veins visible through the nude subject’s skin, in a way reminiscent of Lucien Freud’s painting.

For Sky Bergman, whose recent photographic works have explored the crossover of real flesh and idealized marble sculpture, flesh is putty in the hands of artists, seeking to capture truths about the human adventure by depicting bodies. And, for comic relief, we find a piece by Cindy Sherman, another artist who traffics in art about art: In one of her trademark self-portraits, Sherman appears as a bare-breasted older woman, bedecked with cheesy and pendulous plastic breasts, in a mock-Vermeer setting.

Implicit in this exhibition is the reality factor: There but for the tick of the clock (if we’re lucky), go we. Regardless of the messages telegraphed through mass media and pop culture, aging is the most natural of processes. Even artists chalk up years, a truth addressed cleverly in Athena Tacha’s show-stopping work, “26 Years of Aging (1971-ongoing),” a sprawling mosaic of self-portraits, in various facial and nude poses, taken each year by the artist. It’s a self-examining work-in-progress, like life itself.

A logical companion exhibition at CAF is “Forgotten Dreams: Art After Eighty,” with work by senior artists, including Alzheimer’s patients. These shows pay respects to our elders, who are with us, are us, and will be us.

BE THERE

“Signs of Age: Representing the Older Body,” through Jan. 18 at the Contemporary Arts Forum, 653 Paseo Nuevo, Santa Barbara. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday. (805) 966-5373.