Vanessa Beecroft
VB 31 Performance
VB 31 Performance, 1998
Vibracolor print, 102 x 151 cm
Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur
1999-002-002
b. 1969 (Genova, IT), lives and works in New York, US
As part of a practice she began in 1993 Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft stages large-scale tableaux vivants – which she calls VB Performances – that deal with images of the female body. In them, Beecroft takes on the role of a director, blocking the space for her performers. Naked or scantily clad, the women, most of them young, act out slow movements during performances that last several hours or remain frozen in static poses like living sculptures. Beecroft’s work interrogates the social conditions and effects of gender-specific role models and ideals of beauty. The artist’s 1998 performance VB 35, for example, involved women posing in their underwear and high heels beneath the dome of the Guggenheim Museum, which could be read as a reference to the way representations of the female body are pulled between art appreciation and voyeurism. The documentation of some of her site-specific stagings, either in photographs or on film, has in turn given rise to standalone works of art that are a permanent record of these unique performances, capturing their ephemeral character.