Vanessa Beecroft

Ever heard of Vanessa Beecroft? I hadn't. I had seen fleeting images of her performance art installations where she has a group of people, typically women, usually partially or entirely nude, stand, sit, or mill around in an art gallery - but I didn't know who the artist was. Turns out to be an Italian/American artist called Vanessa Beecroft.

I'm not going to debate the supposed artistic skill it takes to tell someone to strip and stand over there for an hour whilst art gallery patrons try to appear blase upon encountering several naked people in public as this is not about skill; it's about concept. For once, I think the concept has merit.

Now, I've seen a lot of performance art and most of it registers on my personal appreciation rating level just below most abstract paintings, which themselves register below someone hurfing up hors d'oeuvres and box wine in the corner of the gallery. This particular, uh, display, however, intrigues me - and not just because there's nekkid girls involved. Heck, in this age of the internet where you have to explicitly tell your search engine to not return porn, strip clubs that festoon every berg, Mardi Gras, "Girls Gone Wild" and so on, the connoisseur of flesh does not face a dearth of product.

What intrigues me is the visceral reaction most patrons must have when encountering one of Vanessa's performances, especially if they didn't expect to. We are all hard-wired to react to the nude body of another; we are helpless in the face of this ingrained response as we are to other notable human events, such as the cry of a child, seeing someone getting hurt, laughter, a passionate kiss, etc. What must it be like to happen upon this kind of thing?

So, there ya are, bebopping along, inwardly shaking your head at the smearings of pigment on canvas that mean something only to the artist, his/her mom, or his/her shrink - or perhaps you have had that rare exhilaration of encountering something truly beautiful, moving, and artistic - and HOLY COW THERE ARE A BUNCH OF NAKED PEOPLE HERE! (Whoa ... Don't look like an idiot, put on your art observation face...)

Imagine bumping into this, for instance:
(Warning to those at work, nudity ahead. Click to view full size.)


Or this:


This too:


Or, Dear Lord, this:


Look at the faces of the people in the crowd in this pic. Barely suppressed shock or lust or embarrassment or who knows what - all barely suppressed, though.

I imagine I would react much like I did when I encountered it on the web by accident, with no explanation for context. (The trail of blame: I found it via CrazyAss13 [DON'T open this at work, either!], who I found via Dooce.) Since the verbiage of the link was "I Have No Idea" and went to a page of unexplained thumbnails, the only difference from my experiencing it live (though a very significant difference, for sure) is the actual live presence of the nude women themselves. (The men in her performances are always fully clothed, evidently. Odd, that.) I was curious, enchanted, confused ("What the hell?" crossed my mind in capital neon letters a few times), and intrigued by what the point, if any, could be. It had me thinking about it for a couple days. Thus, the artist succeeded.

The artist herself describes her performances like this (btw, I'm assuming she herself does not participate in the performances, I was unable to find that out):

"Beauty creates shame," Beecroft claimed "...I want women on heels because that’s powerful, that’s not natural nudity or pureness," she explains. "When men see this woman standing on heels as if she were dressed, and facing the audience, well, if that’s what they like to see, then here it is, so what. I don’t know if that will create more respect or go somewhere beyond that. Maybe after they see it twenty times they’ll start not to think of it the same way, I’m not sure. It’s an experiment."

For the first and only time, a performance piece has made me think about it - the topic itself and not all the ways that I could laugh about it and mock it.

I wondered how the women in the piece felt about the experience. I wondered how each and every person who saw the performance felt about it, and what they thought, maybe how they interpreted it.

I still haven't worked through all the reactions and questions this has provoked for me. I wonder... What do you think about it? Have you seen a performance live yourself? What were your reactions? Were you one of the women who participated in one of the performances? How did you feel and what did you think about it? How does it make you feel?

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Update:

So, having thought about it, I think this is what hadn't formed in my thoughts when I posted this:

The intriguing thing about this is that art has always celebrated the nude, as it should, because nude bodies can be beautiful. And as I said before, we are simply built to respond to them.

However, at least for me, when they are offered in a purposely prurient way, say as a stripper or as porn, the effect is corrupted because there is an overt attempt to manipulate the spectator sexually - not really allowing a choice on how he/she might choose to perceive it - and the subject or object of the porn is lying, essentially, as they are not there for their own reasons or artistic reasons, and are certainly not there for any reason other than selling sex. (Obviously I consider the selling of sex a less than honorable thing.)

At these performances, the spectator gets to choose how he/she feels about the encounter, and I don't imagine the women are offering themselves for sexual or pornographic purposes anymore than models for nude paintings/sculptures/pictures/etc. are (not that I can totally assume that or rule out dubious purposes since I can't read their minds). Rather than viewing a painting or a sculpture, we get the model his or herself and not a representation or a reworking of the same. In other words, one can (perhaps naively) choose to approach or regard this as a pure admiration of beauty; art in its purest form, say.

(Which reminds me. I also find it odd that is there never anyone who is obviously a little fat, or old, or otherwise towards opposite end of what's typically offered as aesthetically pleasing. Not that I would want to round a corner and encounter 27 octogenarians milling around in the nude - heavens no. But it might go towards a broader definition of beauty if some not-quite-so-perfect people were included in these performances. Just a thought.)