It's 6.40am and I'm sitting in the passenger seat in my sister's car. We drive over the bridge as the sun begins to rise over Lake Burley Griffin. It tunnels through the clouds in neon threads, lacing them with purple. Kate reaches for my hand. Suddenly we're nervous, electric, giddy. We're laughing as we drive into the bowels of the NGA.
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A security guard hustles us up some stairs and into large hall. It's already full. There are older couples holding hands and drinking tea, clumps of art students, young women talking softly to each other. Artist Stuart Ringholt enters the room. He points out the bags at one side of the hall. We're to place all our possessions in those bags, seal them and leave them here. All our possessions, and all our clothes.
The older men strip off first, shedding their suits like cicadas shed shells. They stand with their hands on their hips, bellies thrust out, chatting idly. I turn to look at Kate, and find her in a corner, wide-eyed and grinning. She's taking her dress off, and there's a fully clothed security guard behind her, partially obscured by a huge vase. Immediately, I want to stand between them, I want to block her from his gaze. She stops me, and tells me to look at the guard's face. His smile is a panicked grimace of awkward politeness. I start to laugh. Everyone is smiling. It seems hilarious. Kate and I take our clothes off and start talking to a young guy with a friendly face and a faded Celtic tattoo on his chest. We tell him we're from Byron, and he tells us his uncle runs a pub in Bangalow. None of this seems normal, but it doesn't seem strange either.
It's quiet and still in the gallery. We follow Ringholt through silent hallways and into the James Turrell exhibition, a winding river of hips and breasts and butts. He talks about his history as a performance artist, and about how confronting bodily shame helped him overcome his anxiety over talking to girls. He talks about Turrell, too, and explains the artist's 50-year obsession with illusionistic geometric shapes. Ringholt is affable and friendly, comfortable in his lean body. There's warmth radiating from the figures around us. People are starting to uncross their arms from their chests, shift lightly on their feet. There's a growing feeling of looseness.
We move from room to room, looking at clever projections that bend light into cubes, and wall excavations that, once filled with thick coloured light, seemed to protrude outwards in right-angled shapes. We move into the room housing Raemar Pink White (1969), with its radical pulsating pink light. Kate says she feels like she's inside Paris Hilton's brain. I feel like covering myself in glitter and drinking mimosas on a deck chair. It's glorious. Ringholt tells us to look at each other, and for the first time, I let my gaze wander freely. Everyone's skin is orange – our bodies look like photographs dunked in neon dye and stuck in an uncanny fluorescent darkroom to develop. Our flesh is absorbent and darkly glowing.
Our bodies look even stranger when we move into the next huge room, softly lit by three projections – two egg-shaped lights on the right and left, and a large rectangle in the centre. The oval lights make me think of street lights in noir films, and I half expect to see a gumshoe detective emerge from the shadows, or a beat-up cop car. Instead, strangers' bodies – barefoot, quiet and barely perceptible – surround me in the darkness. They seem almost alien. I feel like I'm fading into a silhouette against faint light.
That ghostly feeling immediately dissipates upon entering the Ganzfield installation. In the Ganzfeld, the light is overwhelming – the room's rounded corners and shifting colour obliterates all sense of space, all sense of depth. Some people are fascinated by how the colour of the entrance changes as the colour inside the space alters. They dance in front of the entrance, admiring the thin thread of blue iridescence that outlines their bodies. I turn away, and look to the back wall. It seems to stretch into infinity. I'd like to walk straight ahead into that light, receding, naked and glowing, into the distance.
I've been naked in public only a handful of times in my life. The first time, I was 21 years old. My friend and I bought tickets to Burning Man, expecting to find Nirvana and instant enlightenment. What we found was a party. Elevated, spinning, we'd ride out into the night, past dancing statues and mutant vehicles, through fields of fire, bare-breasted and brave on kids' dirt bikes.
Walking naked through the NGA is easier and somehow more organic than riding naked through Burning Man. There is no adolescent pride at stake. There is just the challenge of quietly and calmly overcoming physical inhibition. As a loosely bound group of bodies, we have become implicit spectacles, and active spectators. The light seems to both pass over our skin, bright and smooth and cold, and soak our flesh with wild colour. The people in the tour react to their circumstances with either insular dignity, or a sense of hilarity. Some are quiet, almost removed. Some joke and laugh, make new friends, stretch their hands towards the light, twisting their bodies to find its source. Kate and I escape the pack and run back to Raemar Pink White. Dizzy with nerves, drunk with colour, we spin in tiny circles, laughing with arms outstretched, bathing in the neon light, welcoming it into our skin.
Dancing naked in Paris Hilton's brain. What a way to start a weekday.
James Turrell: A Retrospective is on at the National Gallery of Australia until June 8.
