BUEHLER TUNICK SPRING BREAK 2022

For SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2022 Artists Spencer Tunick and Phil Buehler bring together their art practices to create a cyclorama that documents a happening that occurred this Summer, organized specifically for the 10th anniversary of SPRING/BREAK and this year’s theme: Naked Lunch. Spencer Tunick is well-known for his stagings of large scale site-related installations with hundreds, even thousands, of nude volunteers; Phil Buehler is a pioneer in large-scale panoramic photography. For this project, Buehler and Tunick have worked together to recreate the experience in the form of an immersive panoramic photograph cyclorama installation to debut September 7th at the Opening of SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Naked Lunch.

A cyclorama is a curved chamber featuring a panoramic image on the inside of a cylindrical platform, designed to give viewers standing in the middle of the cylinder a 360° view. Historically cycloramas were a form of entertainment and featured painted murals of battle scenes and landscapes through the late 1800’s as a sort of pre-cinema virtual reality. Tunick and Buehler’s cyclorama will present the experience, and feeling of actually being in the happening Upstate, of actually being part of the group. As the single clothed participant of the happening, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show attendees viewing cyclorama are also confronted with a mirrored exterior in entering and exiting the chamber, contributing to the sense of self and voyeurism.
Inside the cyclorama one finds themselves surrounded by nude people, covered in thick mud, in a lush green forest. These mud people appear to be acknowledging the viewers in the installation. As a spectator one might reflexively feel that they too are among the mud people in the forest, or a clothed outsider in the midst of an event that they are not part of. Or one might just feel as an invisible presence at this utopian happening. But emerging from the installation the viewer once again sees themself in the mirrored sides of the cylorama.

Outside the installation are 4 other panoramic photos of different settings in the happening made on the same day in Glen Wild, New York in June. In one people feed apples to each other in a lush garden of Eden. In another they stand masked in a field of tall grass—censored, or just reliving the past 2 years? Another one is a different take on the “mud party” in the forest. In the river scene the people stand waist high in a bucolic Upstate creek. These other panoramas are exhibited in a smaller flat traditional presentation in the show, but could eventually find their way in to the larger 8 foot cyclorama in the future.

-Daniel Aycock, Curator