Vanessa Beecroft, Thomas Kellein, Hatje Cantz Publishers Verlag, 2004 (pp. 224, s.i.p.)
The occasional bite to eat, getting just enough sleep, dressing up, showing off and weighing yourself everyday seem to be basic rules by which every adolescent prepares themselves to face the on-looking adult world. Conserving a bit of infantile innocence that forms a fragile buttress against the outside. This universe lies at the base of Vanessa Beecroft’s aesthetic experience, the artist famous for her performances with models in the most important museums in the world, and one of the most internationally well-known Italian artists. This monograph, printed by Hatje Cantz Publishers Verlag in 2004 and edited by Thomas Kellein, takes into consideration the artist’s entire journey from 1993 to 2004.
It was published on the occasion of the second stop of the retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Bielefeld (9 May-22 August 2004), first organised at the Castello di Rivoli (with an impressive attached catalogue, Skira 2003). In an agile format with essential graphics, as is fitting for the Germany publisher, it represents a good instrument for learning and elaboration. The book is composed of a thorough opening essay by Kellein and includes two important interviews conducted by the curator in 2002 and 2004.
From these the artist’s personal past emerges through adolescent experiences, which are components that contribute to understanding Beecroft’s work from a new point of view compared to current, now in certain sense standardised stereotypes. Kellein goes back to the inquiry set under way by Germano Celant on occasion of the Turin exhibition, where it emerges, for example, that since her childhood in a town on lake Garda the artist entrusted friends with collections of stories drawn in colour pencil.
We also learn that she had a fair knowledge of cinema, from Antonioni to Buñuel, and that during her adolescence in the Eighties in Genoa her studies of female anatomy at the Liceo Artistico, as well as the analyses of Raffaello’s bodies, coincided with an awareness of her own body and its expressiveness, as with the drama of anorexia and bulimia that the girl noticed in her school friends. Furthermore, if the following stopover at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, from 1989 to 1993, represented her entrance into the art world, it also accentuated Beecroft’s sense of extraneousness towards literally “artistic” experiences.
She attended Fabro’s lessons, but her attraction was always more directed towards the concept of “pose” of real life models, her inclination for set design and the fashion world. These elements more clearly explain the origin of the first performance by Luciano Inga-Pin in 1993, where Beecroft presented her own diary in book form. Inside were Beecroft’s obsessive notes on the food that she had ingested day by day, hour by hour since 1983, while some girls modelled Vanessa’s clothes and accessories. Her work therefore appears right from the beginning to take her own past as a symbol for a general existential condition, as a boundary point between public and private.
The book brings together a selection of the first tempera paintings on paper (1994-1995), which were later at the base of many performances. In the female figures drawn as icons, with an apparent Warhol-style naivety, there is a recurrence of details such as legs, the female torso and the face with a wig. As Kellein sustains, from this we can perceive the origins of the linguistic system that would make part of the performances. Regarding this production that made her famous, the book includes a large section of Polaroids (1994-1999) and professional photographs of the events, essentially the displayed works, which come from museums and major collectors. Up to 2004 there were 52 performances around the world (catalogued by the artist with the initial VB01…).
After her move to New York, Beecroft’s activity perfected and specialised in the realisation of performance events that entailed the presence of real life models, with variations deriving from the place, the space or specific context. The book’s evocative cover image is inspired by the interiors designed by Gio Ponti for the offices of the president of Ferrania in Rome in 1936 (with an indirect reference to film and movies), with distinctive black and white stripes. It documents the poses of the artist’s sister and a Nigerian friend lying on Ponti’s striped bed, and they are in turn respectively painted with black and white stripes. It is clear in Beecroft’s works that the body is reduced to an icon, an aesthetic, algid and untouchable element, but also the polarity and ambiguity of the double, the close relationship with the space. Hence the models often merge with the surrounding space or, in contrast, seem to stand out.
There is a predominance of purely aesthetic choices in this case that the artist makes through the staff of Studio Beecroft, a series of skilled professionals at her service who take care of developing and perfecting Vanessa’s initial idea, from casting the models to the photographs and video. At the same time she closely follows the genesis of the work like a director. Lastly, the book throws light on how the connection with fashion in her work seems ever stronger, consequently the models wear elements inspired by YSL or suggested by Prada. But simultaneously it also appears clear how her activity represents the parody of the world of communication with a refined language, in emphasising the characteristics of female nudity and through a skilful maquillage.
Paolo Campiglio Art critic