Pirelli More than just..um cough

I watched an SBS show about the  Pirelli Calendar the other night and apart from the
obvious oggling and “lets make one of these for Radio Sydney” it was fascinating how
something originally put out cheaply for car mechanics’ grease-pit walls became this
amazing arty farty thing with women represented photographically as works of art. You
would think with the target market in mind that it would never have progressed beyond
the standard ‘T and ‘A  (as they say..if you don’t know what that means your too young
to know..) and there’s still plenty of that – but very tastefully done.

In fact most of it will pass the Google safe search Moderate bar and is really very good.
Being a bit of a purist where art is concerned (lets face it if you read too heavily into
things you could make a fairly convincing argument that the collected works of Hugh
Hefner are art too) it surprised me that I found a lot of it very good. Well composed and
very thought provoking. Once you get past the immediate hormonal reaction of seeing
the world’s most beautiful women strutting about ex-clothes and get to the “oh another
naked woman” stage you begin to see  a lot more.

I would guess a lot of feminists would tend to disagree with me as the calendar revolves
very much around Woman as object, not even really just the Woman herself as an
object, but often less than a human; composed into a landscape or structure like  a
building beam or sea shell. Of course Pirelli’s marketing department argue that the
calendar is all about the various ways Women can be beautiful and that Beauty is
somewhat dependant on other relationships.

Like all bodies of art of course you had the “shock artists” who really said nothing
from their work other than “look at me I am so different to everyone”; I suppose really
saying “I am an emotional vacuum with no life experience” without exactly meaning
too. I think in incestuous art cliques they call that “testing the boundaries” or
something…

I noted with amusement that Pirelli did actually appear to put its foot down one year
and demand that tires actually be shown with the models as they bankroll the calendar
to the tune of millions. Apparently tires have always been in there, just usually so
obscurely that it takes a forensic scientist with a magnifying glass to find them in the
wild and amazing pictorials. As I am not much of a car nut, unless they had told me I
would not have known Berelli or Pirelli even made tires! Not based on the calendar
stills I saw anyway. Maybe they make rubbish tires, who knows (maybe they make you
go just that bit faster), but I do know they make amazing calendars.