2010.05.30 The Guardian
Writers, luckily, are invisible voices: we can only be grateful that Philip Carr-Gomm is not on television. To judge from the photograph on the jacket of his book, which mercifully stops at the neck, he's a jolly, ruddy, probably burly fellow, with a shock of greying curls. But he has the soul of a sanctimonious flasher, and is convinced that the sight of the rest of him – adipose middle-aged belly flab, jiggling genitals, a bum that has doubtless gone south – would be good for the world, helping to usher in a new age of spiritual renewal and political revolution.
Carr-Gomm is a hippy who, rather than growing up and outgrowing the 60s, has discarded his tie-dyed garments and cantered off to worship orgiastic pagan deities. His bibliography includes half a dozen books on druidism, along with a disquisition on Celtic mysteries which has Paco Rabanne as its natty co-author, and his research for A Brief History of Nakedness – apart from a few Google searches and a random scanning of the TV listings – included dancing naked with a coven of witches. Try to imagine Gok Wan in quest of God: that's Carr-Gomm.
He begins by recommending that you should stop reading his book – which, coming as it does in the very first sentence, is advice to be heeded – and start disrobing. I kept my clothes on and, more's the pity, continued to turn his anecdotal, glossily vapid pages. I trained my eye to ignore the grosser exhibits in Carr-Gomm's illustrations: the jungly groins of John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the cover of their first album, or the Blairs stripped bare for an Iraq Triptych drawn by the Royal Academician Michael Sandle; the magus Aleister Crowley showing off a yogic breathing technique that didn't help him to suck in his gut, or the elderly female editor of Naturist Life haranguing Trafalgar Square from the fourth plinth. Queasiest of all are the Australian exhibitionists Puppetry of the Penis, who twist their tubes and sacs into tortuous caricatures.
My mind was at peace before I learned that Elton John shaves his pubes, or read about Annie Sprinkle, who invites strangers to probe her cervix with a speculum and defines the procedure as performance art. Carr-Gomm's book may lack ideas, but it certainly contains too much information. In one case, however, an act of exposure does count as a genuine revelation. Lyndon Johnson, when a liberal journalist asked why he continued to bomb Vietnam, apparently replied by unzipping, and lengthily dragging out a penis whose nickname was Jumbo. Has American foreign policy ever been more succinctly defined?
Cheerfully indiscriminate, Carr-Gomm's "Brief History" romps through religion, politics and aesthetics. At times he is woozily mystical – he seems to take seriously the fertility rites performed by adherents of Wicca – though he's equally likely to veer off into salacious flippancy. He wishes he could have bluffed his way into the opening of the Perfume Shop in Mayfair in 2006, when guests were blindfolded and teased by models strutting on a catwalk, naked except for their high heels and the scents they were wearing. "What a temptation there must have been to tear off the blindfold!" he muses. Well, I suppose the suburban witches with whom he cabbalistically cavorted in the woods were not quite so nice to sniff.
His besetting problem, when he tries to theorise about the phenomenon, is that bare flesh has no intrinsic meaning. The unclad body derives its significance from an observer who in effect clothes it in his or her own assumptions. We are naked when we're alone with our bathroom mirrors, but nude when we show ourselves off to others. The genitals, Carr-Gomm dozily says, are "symbols of power and vulnerability", but how can they be both? The vulva keeps its secrets; the extroverted male organ means one thing when erect and the exact opposite when it detumesces. The penis is a floating or perhaps a floppy signifier, and it defies Carr-Gomm's efforts to make it into the magic wand that will end war, reconnect us with nature, and bring the gods back to earth. His personal hydraulics are his own concern, but his book suffers from intellectual dysfunction syndrome.
