Beecroft, who began her artistic career as a painter, refers to her performances as a painterly act more than a theatrical performance. The emphasis on the composition, the postures and color, and the strict speech prohibition during the performance, indeed call to mind classical, monumental figurative painting. Held in public spaces, usually museums, the performances are coordinated months in advance, but there are no preliminary rehearsals. On the day of the performance Beecroft instructs the models, explaining how she expects them to act, thus leaving them, like the audience, in an unclear situation of doubt and alertness.
The models look like a duplication of one another. Their appearance is identical, and they stand in pedantic compositions, usually in a simple form of a grid, rows, or a spiral. In the works presented in the current exhibition, the minimalist color, the white on white and black on black monochrome, is especially conspicuous. In the performance VB 39 the artist invited a group of soldiers from the American Navy’s SEALS (Sea-Air-Land) force to stand in their white uniforms within the white cube of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and in VB 42 she matched the black uniform of the Silent Service soldiers to New York’s skyline by night. In both cases the models appear like static objects in space, ready-made sculptures, which convey, at once, a sense of familiarity and a disturbingly strange feeling. Beecroft stretches the limits of installation and performance, creating art which is a spectacular show perceived as a living sculpture or a painting in motion. The performances are underlain by an opposition between intimacy and distance, between banality on the one hand, alienation and exaggeration on the other. Tension filled, they are real and artificial at one and the same time. Beecroft creates an art form that combines painting, sculpture, photography, cinema, and fashion; a tableau vivant of the individual and the group in contemporary culture.
Vanessa Beecroft (1969) was born in Genoa, Italy. Lives and works in New York.
Courtesy The Doron Sebbag Art Collection, ORS Ltd., Tel Aviv
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