During Lady Gaga's entertaining Thanksgiving special she joked about her brief gig as a life model for singer and visual artist Tony Bennett.

Gaga recounted:

"I walked in and said, 'Well, Tony, here we are,' and I dropped my robe and I got into position. I felt shy and thought, 'It's Tony Bennett. Why am I naked?"

Lady Gaga had come face to face with what Kathleen Rooney describes as the "spine-tingling combination of power and vulnerability, submission and dominance" of nude modeling in her marvelous book "Live Nude Girl : My Life As An Object."
Rooney's book provides an introspective look at the history and challenges of art modeling from the model's point of view. Rooney's meditative prose leads us to a point of connection between muse and artist.
Why after centuries of images in charcoal, paint, stone and silver print do artists still feel the need to depict the human figure? For me it is our shared connection as sentient, sexual, and spiritual beings.
By taking the time to deeply look at and into another person we move closer to finding the ghost in the human machine. At our core we are all naked.

Highly Recommended. ( )

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. Towards the end of the book, she says, "I haven't made any single Big Self-Discovery or arrived at any exclusive Life-Changing Knowledge over the course of my art modeling career... So I don't know how good of a story my experiences make, lacking, as they do, both a clear climax and a natural endpoint."

At this point in the book, I wondered why an author would write a story when she herself admitted to a lack of climax or resolution. But really, Live Nude Girl is not so much a story as it is ruminations and stream of consciousness. 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. And there are a lot of ideas presented, from the "nude model vs. loose woman" debate to the "artist's perception of the model vs. the model as she really is" debate. 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.

Truncated from full review at:
http://aartichapati.blogspot.com/2009/02/live-nude-girl-my-life-as-object_17.htm... ( )