Vanessa Beecroft
«VB 50»

Since the middle of the 1990s,Vanessa Beecroft stages 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