Vanessa Beecroft Performances

The Meeting of Performance
Art, Fashion, and Voyeurism

Vb-0836: Vanessa Beecroft: Performances
performance art photos
& text by Vanessa Beecroft
limited availability

Regarding Vb-50: Since the middle of the 1990s, Vanessa Beecroft has staged  performances that use naked and stylized female bodies as tableaus. In the case of this work from the year 2002, created in Sao Paulo, the determining stylistic elements chosen for the staging amount to a uniformed coloring of the flesh and the wearing of wigs. These refer to the social content of advertising images—the different skin tones being reminiscent of Brazil’s multicolored society. That also echoed here are utopian visions on the cloning of bodies is no less than deliberate. But the performances never abandoned the idea of this being a space meant for art. Through the absence of anything really happening over the course of the performance, the act of exhibiting and the voyeuristic watching become increasingly secondary. Even though Vanessa Beecroft works with real bodies, in the end she produces only body images. Works of photography—stills—are the evaluating medium of her performances. --Rudolf Frieling (Media Art Net)
 

Also See:

The Explicit Body in Performance
by Rebecca Schneider

A great survey of the 1980s performance art scene, the era of Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, Carolee Schneeman, even Sandra Bernhard and RuPaul. Scheider's book is both personally compelling and theoretically rich. She was obviously in New York City for the 80s, catching the downtown performances that launched a thousand Jesse Helms speeches. Wonderful observations from the front line and the front row, a perspective too often missing from academic works about performance. Schneider is also an expert guide through the theoretical precedents for the body as stage; the book offers original and relevant readings of Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and Jaques Lacan. Explicit Body is illustrated with a terrific photographs, invaluable documentation of a vital and dynamic period.
 

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