Vanessa Beecroft

Vanessa Beecroft (born April 25, 1969) is an Italian-born American

Vanessa Beecroft was born April 25, 1969, in Genoa, Italy^[3] and raised in Santa Margherita Ligure and Malcesine near Lake Garda.^[4][5] Both of her parents were teachers; she was born to an Italian mother, Maria Luisa and a British father, Andrew Beecroft.^[4][6][5] After she was born, her family briefly moved to Holland Park, west London.^[5]

Her parents divorced when she was three years old and she did not see her father or her younger brother again until she was 15 years old.^[5] Her mother raised Beecroft alone in a village in Italy in a strict vegan household with no cars, no television, and no phone.^[5] In childhood, she was hospitalized for overeating specific foods she thought would cleanse her system, and she struggled with an eating disorder.^[4][7][8]

From 1988 to 1993 she attended

She moved to the United States in 1996, at the invitation of art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, settling in New York City.^[4][9]

Art

Some common themes in the work include self discipline (of the models), voyeurism, and power relationships.^[10] Beecroft's artwork is often performance or installation-based with live human figures, but she also documents the performances with photography and video; this work is in many public museum and art collections including the Art Institute of Chicago,^[13] Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),^[14] Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía,^[15] Österreichische Galerie Belvedere,^[16] Van Abbemuseum,^[17] amongst others.

VB performances (1993–present)

Many of the VB performances were documented in the Dave Hickey book VB 08-36: Vanessa Beecroft Performances (2000), and in Emily L. Newman's book Female Body Image in Contemporary Art: Dieting, Eating Disorders, Self-Harm, and Fatness (2018).^[18][12]

The performances were titled sequentially.^[19] Strict rules were imposed on the models' behavior during the performances; they were instructed not to engage with the audience.^[12] Models were uniformed, nude, or barely clothed and were required to stand for hours, often in tall high heels without movement or eye contact.^[5] Beecroft always used tall, thin, young models who she referred to as "girls", regardless of their age.^[12][10] In later work, Beecroft would use designer accessories or shoes as props for the models.^[10]

• VB02, VB03, VB04, and VB08 took place in 1994 and featured live girl models all dressed in bright red wigs (an exaggerated representation of Beecroft's own hair color) and white underwear.^[12] VB08 (1994) performance took place at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York, using live female models, pantyhose, and bright red wigs.^[18]
• VB25 (1996) performance took place at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, with seven identical-looking young women wearing fake eyelashes and red nail polish, each dressed in a polo-neck pullover, white underwear, tights, and high heels.^[17]
• VB35: Show (1998) took place at the Guggenheim Museum in New York; twenty women stood in the museum for two hours in a circular arrangement in order to mirror the architecture.^[12] Fifteen of the women wore rhinestone-decorated bikinis designed by Tom Ford, and five of the women were nude. This was a larger event than some of her prior work and made international news.^[12] Casting was done by Jennifer Starr,^[20] and the production was done by Yvonne Force Villareal, and Doreen Remen.^[21]
• VB45 (2004) took place at Terminal 5 of the John F. Kennedy Airport with 36 young women standing in formation in the sunken waiting area, wearing only Afro wigs, black body paint, and silver shackles on their ankles.^[22][23][24]
• VB51 (2002) was her first filmed performance, it took place in Schloss Vinsebeck, Stenheim, Germany.^[10] It featured older models in their 60s, including Beecroft's mother, mother-in-law, stepsister, and the actresses Irm Hermann and Hanna Schygulla (both actresses from films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Beecroft's favorite director).^[5][10]
• VB53 (2004) at the Tepidarium in Giardino dell’Orticultura, Florence, Italy, women were staged in a mound of dirt, as if they were plants.^[19]
• VB55 (2005) featured one hundred women standing still in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie for three hours, each woman oiled from the waist up and wearing nothing but a pair of pantyhose.^[6]
• VB61, Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf? (2007), one of Beecroft's most politically-engaged performances, was presented the
  Sudanese women with their skin painted, lying face-down on a white canvas on the ground, simulating dead bodies piled on top of one another", representing the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.^[26]
• VB65 (March 2009) performance at Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea (PAC) in Milan, Italy, featured a "Last Supper" of twenty African immigrant men, dressed formally in suits (some without shoes), drinking water, eating chicken and brown bread without cutlery.^[7]
• VB66 (2010) took place at Mercato Ittico di Napoli [it] (the fish market), Naples, Italy with fifty living models, staged on a platform amongst a group of cast body sculptures and body parts, all painted black.^[27] It highlighted the relationships among body, sculpture, and an iconographical reference to the nearby ruins of Pompeii.^[27]
• VB67 (2010) performance took place at Studio Nicoli in Carrara, Italy, and again a similar reenactment in a year later, VB70: Marmi (2011) at Lia Rumma gallery in Milan.^[28] The models were staged near marble sculpture statues and the stone was in various states including polished, rough, and in blocks and slabs.^[28]

Other work

In October 2005, Beecroft staged a three-hour performance on the occasion of the opening of the Louis Vuitton store, "Espace Louis Vuitton" on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.^[29] For the same event, Beecroft placed models both black and white on the shelves next to Louis Vuitton bags in a "human alphabet".^[30][31] In 2007 the Louis Vuitton company apologized to Dutch graphic designer Anthon Beeke for mimicking his "Naked Ladies Alphabet" design without his consent.^[32][33]

In 2018, Beecroft and Kim Kardashian collaborated on a series of nude photos of Kardashian that were displayed on social media for the release of Kardashian's perfume, which had a "Kardashian body-shaped bottle".^[34]

Collaborations with Kanye West

Since 2008, Beecroft has been collaborating on work with artist Kanye West.^[34][35] They began working together with a listening party at Ace Gallery, Los Angeles for West's music albums 808s and Heartbreaks. In 2010, Beecroft was named creative lead for the Runaway music video.^[35] On the Kanye West music tour, the Yeezus Tour (October 2013 – September 2014), Beecroft designed the sets and choreography.^[35] Beecroft worked on West's Spike Jonze directed music video for the 2014 song “Only One”.^[34][35] In 2014, Beecroft assembled and built the wedding ceremony of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West .^[34]

In February 2015, West embarked on a fashion design career with Yeezy Season 1, under the Adidas label and Beecroft directed the performance presentation.^[35] Beecroft went on to work on Yeezy Season 2 (September 2015), Yeezy Season 3 (February 2016), and Yeezy Season 4 (September 2016).^[35]

Beecroft alleged she was a full-time employee for West until 2016, when her role changed and she became a part-time contractor.^[34]

In 2019, she collaborated with West on two opera-based performances, Nebuchadnezzar and Mary.^[36][37]

Controversies

Her performance work about gender was often critiqued for being a "post-feminist statement about fashion or pandering to a corrupted way of seeing".

Beecroft has been quoted in an interview in 2016, “I have divided my personality. There is Vanessa Beecroft as a European white female, and then there is Vanessa Beecroft as Kanye, an African-American male.”[38]^[4][39] Her later work deals with race, and she has made a series of racially insensitive remarks in interviews.^[39][40]

Beecroft’s failed attempt to adopt

Vanessa Beecroft was previously married to marketer Greg Durkin. They lived in Cold Spring Harbor, New York together for many years. The marriage ended in divorce.^{[when?][4][11]} Durkin and Beecroft had two sons together (born in 2001 and 2004).^[11] Later, she married to photographer Federico Spadoni.^[4][38] Beecroft and Spadoni have one daughter and one son together (born 2009 and 2012).^[4]

Bibliography

Biography

• Kampwerth, Karin; Thomas, Kellein; Beecroft, Vanessa (2004). Vanessa Beecroft.
  ISBN 9783775715072
  .

• Hickey, David; Beecroft, Vanessa (2000). VB 08-36: Vanessa Beecroft Performances. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers.
  ISBN 9783893229642
  .
• Beccaria, Marcella; Beecroft, Vanessa (2003). Vanessa Beecroft Performances 1993–2003 (art exhibition catalog from Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea (October 2003 – January 2004)). Milan, Italy: Skira.
  ISBN 88-8491-572-4
  . (English, French, Italian).
• ISBN 9783775715089
  .
• Cianchi, Lapo; Beecroft, Vanessa (2005). VB53: Vanessa Beecroft (exhibition catalogue). Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery (in Italy). Venice, Italy: Charta.
  ISBN 9788881584994
  .
• Polier, Alexandra; Deitch, Jeffrey; Lisi, Riccardo; Beecroft, Vanessa (2007). Vanessa Beecroft: VB LV. New York City, New York: Charta.
  ISBN 978-8881586158
  .
• Beecroft, Vanessa; Di Pietrantonio, Giacinto (2007). Vanessa Beecroft: Drawings and Paintings 1993–2007 (exhibition catalogue). Cataloghi di mostre. Galleria d'arte Moderna e Contemporanea (in Bergamo, Italy). Milan, Italy: Electa Mondadori.
  ISBN 9788837053574
  .
• Di Pietrantonio, Giacinto; Beecroft, Vanessa (2010). VB65 PAC Milano: Vanessa Beecroft. Milan, Italy: Mondadori Electa.
  ISBN 978-8837071059
  .

• Blackface in contemporary art

References