



Here comes Johnny Yen again

With the liquor and drugs

And the flesh machine

He’s gonna do another striptease

So sang Iggy Pop in “Lust for Life” (1977), a song he wrote with David Bowie that became an underground anthem for the post-Nixon, post-Vietnam era. Now 69 years old, Iggy Pop has been conscripted into a different form of striptease as the subject of a life drawing class organized by the British artist Jeremy Deller and presented at the Brooklyn Museum as an exhibition, “Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller.”

When Mr. Deller approached Iggy Pop with the idea 10 years ago, he refused. He was worried a museum would reject the resulting drawings. But you can see why he’d be concerned, since, on one level, the project feels like a perverse joke. Life drawing is a conservative practice, dating to the Renaissance, when artists wanted to draw from nature, and Iggy Pop (born James Newell Osterberg Jr.) is the antithesis of conservative. Even Mr. Deller, a product of post-conceptual art education, acknowledges in the catalog that this was only his second time in a life drawing class.

Moreover, traditional artist’s-model bodies were supposed to look like Greco-Roman statues: smooth, muscular and young. Iggy Pop is known for his sinewy, androgynous body banged up by decades of rough performance (and early, compulsory rock ’n’ roll drug use). The project also overturns the usual equation in which artists are the masters and their models are known only through the art. (Think of Andrew Wyeth’s Helga or any of Picasso’s women.) Wouldn’t it be belittling to have an aging rock star pose for a bunch of unknown art students? Or kind of great?