One of Vanessa Beecroft's live performances was held in March 1998 in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. There, as in her other performances, she worked with young women whom she de- individualised with wigs, make-up, uniform underwear and shoes. Their appearance on stage was tightly pre-choreographed. "I give them instructions: not to speak, not to react in real time, not to move too quickly or too slowly, to be classical (...) I see them as subjects for a painting," Vanessa Beecroft explained in 1997. This is reminiscent of the 'tableaux vivants' in court circles of the 18th and 19th centuries, which imitated paintings and sculptural works by visual
arrangements of motionless, persistently silent people.
This book presents the performances of the American artist for the first time. She always documents her work on video, with the help of enlarged Polaroids and digital photography. "She stages the male view of women in a hyper-real way. The possible stereotype of desire is turned into horror."
The artist: Vanessa Beecroft, born 1969 in Genoa. Numerous exhibitions, including the
1997 Venice Biennale. Lives and works in New York.
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