Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object [Hardcover]

Kathleen Rooney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 26, 2009

Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object is a lively meditation on the profession of art modeling as it has been practiced in history and as it is practiced today. Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artists’ model, as well as the famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Through a combination of personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Life Nude Girl reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Author, award-winning poet and professional artists' model Rooney (Reading with Oprah, Something Really Wonderful) uses everything from Roland Barthes quotations to sitcom episode synopses off the internet (specifically, fortunecity.com on Growing Pains) to explore the myths and realities of nude modeling. Despite the fact that it largely consists of sitting still for hours on end, Rooney keeps work stories compelling: "with the sculptors continually approaching... to rotate you slightly... it's like you're on the world's slowest and most boring Teacup Ride." Posing for an advanced sculpting class working on life-sized renderings, Rooney merges her experience with a look at China's ancient Terra Cotta Army; elsewhere she tackles semantics, quoting art historian Kenneth Clark on the difference between "naked" and "nude." Happily, Rooney is perfectly willing to satisfy readers' curiosity upfront in order to move in more philosophical directions, going from awkward first impressions ("the first thing they ask is, 'Like, naked?'") to questions of safety and empowerment ("I feel safer from sexual predation naked in the art studio than I do... clothed on the street"). This esoteric, organic meditation on life as an art object is itself a model of personal writing, perfect for those on either side of the easel.
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Review

"Ms. Rooney seems as compelling a talent in her future off the pedestal as on"

Huffington Post



"a compelling memoir that blends observation, personal revelation and scholarly inquiry"

Los Angeles Times





“Kathleen Rooney boldly and bravely dissects what it means to disrobe in the name of art—and money. For anyone who wants to know why a woman would prefer to be nude rather than naked (and what the difference is), read Live Nude Girl and find out.”

—Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of Best Sex Writing 2009



“Though the title of Kathleen Rooney’s Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object seems to promise an external approach to the subject, modeling nude for art classes, the book itself is surprisingly introspective, learned, and thoughtful. While revealing what a nude model does, how she does it and why, what she feels and thinks while doing it, Rooney explores what her profession means to her personally and what it means and has meant to others. The writing is enticing, engaging, inviting, and the anecdotes it tells are irresistible.”

—Peter Stitt, editor of The Gettysburg Review



“If Live Nude Girl caught your eye, promised, beckoned—good. Follow the enticement and you’ll encounter the thrill of a rigorous and questioning mind in motion.”

—Lia Purpura, author of On Looking

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press (January 26, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557288917
• ISBN-13: 978-1557288912
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #935,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nude but Not Naked: Eroticism Ritualized, February 21, 2009

By 

Mark S. Snyder (Boca Raton, Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (Hardcover)

Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artists' model, as well as on the stories of famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Combining personal per­spective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Rooney reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.

As an actor who has performed naked on the theatre stage professionally and as a teacher of actors who has trained actors to work without clothing, this book immediately caught my attention because it is a subject that those who have worked in the nude rarely discuss publically. It is not that we are ashamed of what we do or have done but simply that to the non-artist to work without clothing or to be nude publically seems not an act of or a part of art but an act of, at best exhibitionism and, at worst pornography. Rooney lifts this veil and invites the public into experiencing what it feels to be naked publically and to be "the object of the gaze of a spectator" as well as to attempt to explain why she chose to do so.

While Rooney does go on at some length and possibly in too much depth for this type of book in balancing the life of "Phryne" -- a modeling sensation of ancient Greece -- with Madonna's nude photos for Lee Friedlander, and explains at length Greek versus Judeo-Christian approaches to nudity and highlights the difficulty people have distinguishing art modeling from prostitution ("There it is again," she notes, "this conflation of selling images of your body with actually selling your body itself."), thankfully, Rooney doesn't shy away from the personal. In fact, "Live Nude Girl" is best in these moments, when Rooney allows herself to be truly naked. Despite her intellectual swagger, she is moved to model by a desperate need to be seen not unlike the reason an actor takes the stage.

"The first thirty seconds of nudity are always the most jarring, charged for me and for those who are looking at me," she writes. "The disrobing is a gentle shock, a surprise, a kind of eyewash, and the instant is electrified, more vivid than those that preceded it and those that will come after. My nudity feels hyper-real, as if this person is the most three-dimensional object in space, vulnerable in her nakedness, but powerful in her command of the entire room's studious and uninterrupted attention."

It is this facing one's own self and that self's selfconsciousness that is, as any actor knows, one of the first steps towards a psychological enlightenment that, in the case of the actor, allows for the stripping away of the layers that prevent one from truly knowing who they are, and allows for the continual process of "becoming" someone else. But this too cannot take place until one is able to substitute truth for vanity, understand the distinction between ritualized eroticism for the erotic, and accept one's body for what it is.

Thus her initial obsession with looks in the book is not vanity but insecurity. Rooney is caught in a love-hate relationship with her body that she can't escape. Yet even as she uses modeling to prove her worth, she knows what she's doing. "Art modeling itself, in a way, is an adolescent pastime," she admits: "you are frozen forever in the process of becoming. You are never fully formed."

Though nude modeling (as Rooney rightly emphasizes) is decidedly not a form of sex work, this book will be shelved alongside a number of increasingly high-profile looks at, and firsthand accounts of working in, the sex industry, and that is unfortunate because throughout the book, Rooney presents the distinction between nakedness and nudity as the key to understanding the uniqueness of nude modeling, and by extension, the way we view bodies in general. "There's power that comes with nudity," she writes, "a naturalness, and an intimation of public acceptability, as opposed to nakedness, which is more personal instead of professional, and for me is best kept private." If not an original argument, it is a resonant one.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Live Nude Girl, February 17, 2009

By 

Chapati (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (Hardcover)

Live Nude Girl challenged me in ways that I haven't been challenged since high school literature classes. Rooney quotes ancient Greeks, references Leonardo da Vinci, sets her book to a soundtrack of indie rock bands, and shares her own thoughts on what it's like to be a nude model for artists. The book is much more about people's perceptions of beauty and of art than it is about Rooney's experience of being a model. Rooney seems to be trying to figure out why she wanted to be a model by writing the book, rather than share the actual experience with readers.

For example, there is a lot of talk on how Rooney wants to be perceived as "pretty" by the artists she poses for. And then she wonders why she wants them to see her as pretty. And why people, in general, want to be perceived as pretty. And then shares quotes from famed and esteemed philosophers and writers. It sometimes made the book difficult to read, as I would go into and out of quotes and deep thoughts and all the rest. But it was interesting, nonetheless.

I don't think this is a book one can read all at once- it may be slim, but it is dense. Each chapter can stand as an essay on its own, and in retrospect, I recommend reading the book in that manner so that you can better mull over the ideas Rooney presents. It's a thinking person's book- and it was fun to read it and be challenged by reading again, in ways I haven't been for so long.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fellow Art Model, March 17, 2011

By 

Daniel H. Hawkins (Fort Worth, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (Paperback)

I have been a model for drawing and painting classes since 1984, so I was really interested in reading a fellow model's point of view regarding the profession. It is amazing how many parallels there are between the author's experiences and my own, especially in areas that brought us to modeling in the first place. Of course, I'm male, and the author is female, so our experiences differed quite a bit in certain areas. I usually only work for classes or groups while the author expanded into working with individual artists.

The book is full of anecdotes about the history of art modeling, specific classroom incidents, feelings regarding posing for a new group or artist, and what it's like to drop the robe for the first time. Once I finished, I immediately contacted a fellow art model with whom I have worked before and told her that she really ought to read this book. I'll be loaning it to her the next time I see her.

And on a personal note, another interesting parallel: the book was published by the University of Arkansas Press. I began my modeling career at that very university back in November of 1984...