Vanessa Beecroft's Analysis
Vanessa Beecroft's work is a self-reflection on her obsession and control of the human body and the way in which women are viewed in modern society and how they feel about being viewed at. Beecroft concentrates on the more confrontational aspect of her work that analyses the connection between the audience and the performers.
Food is also an important topic in her work as Beecroft suffers from a type of bulimia which compulsively makes her want to burn off calories through vigorous exercising, this also led to her keeping a sort of diary of her daily food intake which links back to her compulsive disorder to instinctively to lose as much weight as possible.
Intimacy itself is a very vague term that stretches its meaning through a number of strands, one could argue it's the emotional struggle that one shares with the person they love or the enactment of love you act with your partner. In relation to art, I feel an 'intimate moment' is felt when you start creating familiarisations and personal awareness with what it is that you are gazing at and start to link it back to yourself. I feel this is where Dave Hickey started to pick up notions of intimacy while psychoanalysing the thought process that Beecroft was trying to discuss in the number of women who are …show more content…
being looked at as sexual objects while at the control of the superior heterosexual man.
However it poses several thoughts in my head whether the work itself is about the audience or the women. What we definitely know about what Beecroft was trying to achieve was by playing this sort of game with the audience to confront them with a league of naked women and just simply discussing their reactions. For many artists, the discussion acts as part of the work and with Beecroft, her obsession to be perfect falls in line with the relationship between herself and her own body.
I feel the connection between intimacy and Vanessa Beecroft's work lies a little deeper into her upbringing. Her mother from a young age enforced a strict organic diet on Vanessa, and while living in a home without a father role had an effect on the way that Vanessa developed her eating disorder. Beecroft was raised in a very minimal and 'Buddhist' lifestyle, as her mother who was very much against modern society, religion, men and so on, only believed that this was the right way to live.
I do believe that this led up into unanswered questions that Beecroft has been experiencing her entire life, and her mother only acted as the catalyser to produce the reaction that is Beecrofts ongoing work. Her performances acts as only a small query leading up to the bigger questions which is very much reflective on what she is thinking currently throughout her work.
As I discussed earlier without being repetitive, Beecroft's obsession with food is vital to the understanding of her work, the need to be perfect, the need to satisfy the 'male gaze' or even the need to confront the voyeur. As I already mentioned before, Beecroft's mother was very militant on a strict healthy lifestyle, and later on in the artists life I feel this is the exact point where she developed the need to force provocative and violent means of work to an audience in a way of discussing her own lack intimacy that she has felt exposed through politics, media and fashion.
"For the most part she just sits there looking, beguiled by the draftsman gaze and wondering what is 'wrong' with her". [1]
Dave Hickey's text Painted Ladies, discusses a lot about Beecroft's self-obsession and her means of finding out what is wrong about herself in a constant battle she faces with her own artwork and that of her students. Classical painting, being the benchmark of Beecroft's work, is very well represented throughout the way she gets her models to act out parts of her thoughts.
"She would like to create something richer and more opaque than that, some equivalent of the model's physical immediacy, her psychological unavailability, some simulacrum of draftsman's gaze." [2]
Even so I sense there is a possible link on how her models act as symbolic victims of misjudged intimacy in downplay that there is no argument at all and that they are simply just painted women with a set of strict rules enforced by the artist to force the viewer on her opinion.
I reckon what Hickey is trying to say is that Beecroft's work contains many connotations in relevance to intimacy, this could be shown by the over-sexualised nature of the performance, the strong presence of the artist in the work and most importantly the psychological insecurities the artist has with herself. As well a sort of mission she is on to politically engage both the public's mind and view on female intimacy and the 'male gaze'.
Having successfully analysed the book VB 08-36 (Vanessa Beecroft Performances), I came up to my own conclusion that it is a very concise yet staggering documentation of images that for me portray something that is not as obvious from when I first looked through the book. I found myself confronted (yet again) with a series of images that made me ponder deeper issues I feel Beecroft isn't explaining to her audience. The models who almost look fed up or exhausted from being bossed around play an important part into what Beecroft is trying to inform the public, and this is that women are fed up of being controlled by men.
However I feel this argument could go down a slightly more different route than already discussed. For instance, you place a large or miniscule group of women into an industrial-like space (that has very little meaning to do with the artwork) and you have an overwhelming crowd made up of art critics, artists, aristocrats and general public itself glaring at you nude, that surely plays into Beecroft's aim of making the women feel scared or embarrassed. A brutal and detached way of proving a point, however I feel that type of impassiveness succeeds in looking so genuine and honest when it is put in front of you so daringly.
Even the way that the performances are all numbered in the same organised structure with just a number explains a lot into Beecroft's character, as well as the models themselves being known as just simply a number and not a name by the artist.
I concur that intimacy plays an important role in Beecroft's work, because to be intimate is to share something very personal with either someone or yourself, and in the artists case this is very coherent in relation to how every performance is very personal and all linked to her earlier life. It could be that the artist is trying to find some sort of way to avoid reality and find her harmony and release in escaping her own problems that she is very eager to not discuss with the public.
On a secondary note to my point, intimacy is demonstrated through Dave Hickey's text on Vanessa Beecroft by how he describes the models as blocking a sort of representational thought on intimacy and how the act of the audience engaging in the gallery space with the sighting of the models is more of a real encounter. The distance being another regulation set by the artist creates this sense of wanting to get closer and perhaps engage with such a soft intimate being but the rules otherwise makes it prohibited to you.
"Our anxiety, then, does not arise from the fact that naked women are near to us, but from the unbridgeable, yet ill-defined distance between ourselves and them. It is not the anxiety of desire, but the anxiety of displacement." [3]
What I believe Dave Hickey was trying to say in the above quote when discussing intimacy in relation to Beecroft's work is that our own insecurities only becomes more apparent when we are confronted with nude women straight in our view when around others, and the whole awkwardness of trying to distance ourselves from the subject can be quite disengaging and yet apparent when being told to move around the artwork. This is a very interesting point that Hickey has raised and I feel is incontrovertible when discussing Beecroft's relation with intimacy and how certain questions are posed and argued by the public.
Where there are commendable heights in Beecrofts work, it is important to discuss a couple contradictions that I saw as being very apparent in correlation with my own knowledge of the artist. I find certain parts of her work to be over-stylised and derivative from the original point of view she is trying to convey to the viewer. She makes it clear of trying to politically objectify the male gaze however I feel that by her directing her performances in a very fashion-like tableaux, she is thus contradicting herself by re-doing a similar concept as a carefully directed fashion shoot.
In relevance to the way the models are stylised, I feel again its quite hypocritical by using established fashion brands like Gucci or Maison Martin Margiela in a sense that these are the type of brands that are advertising such a sexualised view on women that she is supposed to be standing against (as a feminist), the same also applies for her collaboration with rap artist Kanye West who has frequently painted a very sexual picture of women in his music videos. Additionally, I agree that this is also relevant to how she is so heavily directive on the makeup and hair of the models, everything is approached from such a fashionable and stylised point of view.
"Despite the emergence of alternative cinemas and new developments in technology, Hollywood still dominates, mainly because of its skill in manipulating verbal pleasure -- 'mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order'. Thus erotic pleasure and the central place of the image of women needs to be analysed. Such analysis deliberately sets out to destroy naive pleasure in watching the narrative fiction film". [4]
Theorist Laura Mulvey discusses the 'male gaze' in her 1975 essay on cinematography titled 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' while outlining how she feels that modern cinema and advertisements were made to only pleasure the heterosexual male public. The essay discusses how the position of women in modern cinema are often sexually objectified due to a small range of directors available hence the 'male gaze'. The other issue she then goes onto discussing is because there are so many male directors who are regulating the film industry, the public understand the film from a heterosexual male point of view.
In relation to Vanessa Beecroft's performances, feminism comes into conversation when she consecutively attempts to question the 'male gaze' and sort of trap men in the company of other women with the sight of female nudity. This is demonstrated in performance VB35 in the Guggenheim Museum, the women who modelled were provocatively positioned and told to be silent throughout the entire performance while making little or no eye contact with the public which reinforces the purpose of her work. This is brought about how she feels that heterosexual men are being visually titillated so regularly by modern day film and advertisements as mentioned similarly in Laura Mulvey's text 'Visual Please and Narrative Cinema'.
"This 'madness' is mirrored in the delirious genre of fashion photography, where styles of psychic disturbance are endlessly circulated. There is also a contradictory undermining of gender norms at the core of this visual regime whose ostensible objective is, as Fuss has pointed out, to direct women towards the required goal of successful heterosexuality. But if, as Butler has regularly reminded us, the achieving of femininity invariably fails in some respects, then we would say it also fails within the deployment of these Particular technologies of gender, where unlike commercial Hollywood cinema, the 'male gaze' does not have a presiding presence". [5]
Angela McRobbie (quoted above from her book 'Aftermath of Feminism') was very interested in the theories explained by Laura Mulvey on the 'male gaze', and she goes on to explain the more disturbing and materially misused nature of the film and fashion industry and the effect it has on the women who are being victimised by their male superiors.
In many situations while watching Beecroft's performance VB55, you can see that the men (accompanied by a female) who view her work felt embarrassed or uncomfortable when confronted with such a violent picture that Beecroft has painted for the audience.
Nevertheless how she selectively tries to get that specific aesthetic in both the casting process and portraying the ideal woman to draw in males attention intrigues me a lot as her intention was always to impose anxiety into the male heterosexual. However this also poses questions for myself such as why are the women always naked, why can't they be fully clothed? However it is possible that she may be exploiting the women without fully understanding her
objective.
In relevance as to whether Vanessa Beecroft (as a 'feminist') has been successful in critically challenging the 'male gaze', she has definitely approached her work on a very pro-feminist stance as she is constantly targeting heterosexual men and finding ways of trapping them while working against their most uncomfortable anxieties. Nonetheless, she prefers to challenge the 'male gaze' by politically vindicating the subject by creating this almost perfect image of a woman and just presenting heterosexual men this over-desired object in their eyes which is very apparent by how she directs the models so meticulously in every form to clothing, hair, makeup, stance and so on.
Food is also an important topic in her work as Beecroft suffers from a type of bulimia which compulsively makes her want to burn off calories through vigorous exercising, this also led to her keeping a sort of diary of her daily food intake which links back to her compulsive disorder to instinctively to lose as much weight as possible.
Intimacy itself is a very vague term that stretches its meaning through a number of strands, one could argue it's the emotional struggle that one shares with the person they love or the enactment of love you act with your partner. In relation to art, I feel an 'intimate moment' is felt when you start creating familiarisations and personal awareness with what it is that you are gazing at and start to link it back to yourself. I feel this is where Dave Hickey started to pick up notions of intimacy while psychoanalysing the thought process that Beecroft was trying to discuss in the number of women who are …show more content…
being looked at as sexual objects while at the control of the superior heterosexual man.
However it poses several thoughts in my head whether the work itself is about the audience or the women. What we definitely know about what Beecroft was trying to achieve was by playing this sort of game with the audience to confront them with a league of naked women and just simply discussing their reactions. For many artists, the discussion acts as part of the work and with Beecroft, her obsession to be perfect falls in line with the relationship between herself and her own body.
I feel the connection between intimacy and Vanessa Beecroft's work lies a little deeper into her upbringing. Her mother from a young age enforced a strict organic diet on Vanessa, and while living in a home without a father role had an effect on the way that Vanessa developed her eating disorder. Beecroft was raised in a very minimal and 'Buddhist' lifestyle, as her mother who was very much against modern society, religion, men and so on, only believed that this was the right way to live.
I do believe that this led up into unanswered questions that Beecroft has been experiencing her entire life, and her mother only acted as the catalyser to produce the reaction that is Beecrofts ongoing work. Her performances acts as only a small query leading up to the bigger questions which is very much reflective on what she is thinking currently throughout her work.
As I discussed earlier without being repetitive, Beecroft's obsession with food is vital to the understanding of her work, the need to be perfect, the need to satisfy the 'male gaze' or even the need to confront the voyeur. As I already mentioned before, Beecroft's mother was very militant on a strict healthy lifestyle, and later on in the artists life I feel this is the exact point where she developed the need to force provocative and violent means of work to an audience in a way of discussing her own lack intimacy that she has felt exposed through politics, media and fashion.
"For the most part she just sits there looking, beguiled by the draftsman gaze and wondering what is 'wrong' with her". [1]
Dave Hickey's text Painted Ladies, discusses a lot about Beecroft's self-obsession and her means of finding out what is wrong about herself in a constant battle she faces with her own artwork and that of her students. Classical painting, being the benchmark of Beecroft's work, is very well represented throughout the way she gets her models to act out parts of her thoughts.
"She would like to create something richer and more opaque than that, some equivalent of the model's physical immediacy, her psychological unavailability, some simulacrum of draftsman's gaze." [2]
Even so I sense there is a possible link on how her models act as symbolic victims of misjudged intimacy in downplay that there is no argument at all and that they are simply just painted women with a set of strict rules enforced by the artist to force the viewer on her opinion.
I reckon what Hickey is trying to say is that Beecroft's work contains many connotations in relevance to intimacy, this could be shown by the over-sexualised nature of the performance, the strong presence of the artist in the work and most importantly the psychological insecurities the artist has with herself. As well a sort of mission she is on to politically engage both the public's mind and view on female intimacy and the 'male gaze'.
Having successfully analysed the book VB 08-36 (Vanessa Beecroft Performances), I came up to my own conclusion that it is a very concise yet staggering documentation of images that for me portray something that is not as obvious from when I first looked through the book. I found myself confronted (yet again) with a series of images that made me ponder deeper issues I feel Beecroft isn't explaining to her audience. The models who almost look fed up or exhausted from being bossed around play an important part into what Beecroft is trying to inform the public, and this is that women are fed up of being controlled by men.
However I feel this argument could go down a slightly more different route than already discussed. For instance, you place a large or miniscule group of women into an industrial-like space (that has very little meaning to do with the artwork) and you have an overwhelming crowd made up of art critics, artists, aristocrats and general public itself glaring at you nude, that surely plays into Beecroft's aim of making the women feel scared or embarrassed. A brutal and detached way of proving a point, however I feel that type of impassiveness succeeds in looking so genuine and honest when it is put in front of you so daringly.
Even the way that the performances are all numbered in the same organised structure with just a number explains a lot into Beecroft's character, as well as the models themselves being known as just simply a number and not a name by the artist.
I concur that intimacy plays an important role in Beecroft's work, because to be intimate is to share something very personal with either someone or yourself, and in the artists case this is very coherent in relation to how every performance is very personal and all linked to her earlier life. It could be that the artist is trying to find some sort of way to avoid reality and find her harmony and release in escaping her own problems that she is very eager to not discuss with the public.
On a secondary note to my point, intimacy is demonstrated through Dave Hickey's text on Vanessa Beecroft by how he describes the models as blocking a sort of representational thought on intimacy and how the act of the audience engaging in the gallery space with the sighting of the models is more of a real encounter. The distance being another regulation set by the artist creates this sense of wanting to get closer and perhaps engage with such a soft intimate being but the rules otherwise makes it prohibited to you.
"Our anxiety, then, does not arise from the fact that naked women are near to us, but from the unbridgeable, yet ill-defined distance between ourselves and them. It is not the anxiety of desire, but the anxiety of displacement." [3]
What I believe Dave Hickey was trying to say in the above quote when discussing intimacy in relation to Beecroft's work is that our own insecurities only becomes more apparent when we are confronted with nude women straight in our view when around others, and the whole awkwardness of trying to distance ourselves from the subject can be quite disengaging and yet apparent when being told to move around the artwork. This is a very interesting point that Hickey has raised and I feel is incontrovertible when discussing Beecroft's relation with intimacy and how certain questions are posed and argued by the public.
Where there are commendable heights in Beecrofts work, it is important to discuss a couple contradictions that I saw as being very apparent in correlation with my own knowledge of the artist. I find certain parts of her work to be over-stylised and derivative from the original point of view she is trying to convey to the viewer. She makes it clear of trying to politically objectify the male gaze however I feel that by her directing her performances in a very fashion-like tableaux, she is thus contradicting herself by re-doing a similar concept as a carefully directed fashion shoot.
In relevance to the way the models are stylised, I feel again its quite hypocritical by using established fashion brands like Gucci or Maison Martin Margiela in a sense that these are the type of brands that are advertising such a sexualised view on women that she is supposed to be standing against (as a feminist), the same also applies for her collaboration with rap artist Kanye West who has frequently painted a very sexual picture of women in his music videos. Additionally, I agree that this is also relevant to how she is so heavily directive on the makeup and hair of the models, everything is approached from such a fashionable and stylised point of view.
"Despite the emergence of alternative cinemas and new developments in technology, Hollywood still dominates, mainly because of its skill in manipulating verbal pleasure -- 'mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order'. Thus erotic pleasure and the central place of the image of women needs to be analysed. Such analysis deliberately sets out to destroy naive pleasure in watching the narrative fiction film". [4]
Theorist Laura Mulvey discusses the 'male gaze' in her 1975 essay on cinematography titled 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' while outlining how she feels that modern cinema and advertisements were made to only pleasure the heterosexual male public. The essay discusses how the position of women in modern cinema are often sexually objectified due to a small range of directors available hence the 'male gaze'. The other issue she then goes onto discussing is because there are so many male directors who are regulating the film industry, the public understand the film from a heterosexual male point of view.
In relation to Vanessa Beecroft's performances, feminism comes into conversation when she consecutively attempts to question the 'male gaze' and sort of trap men in the company of other women with the sight of female nudity. This is demonstrated in performance VB35 in the Guggenheim Museum, the women who modelled were provocatively positioned and told to be silent throughout the entire performance while making little or no eye contact with the public which reinforces the purpose of her work. This is brought about how she feels that heterosexual men are being visually titillated so regularly by modern day film and advertisements as mentioned similarly in Laura Mulvey's text 'Visual Please and Narrative Cinema'.
"This 'madness' is mirrored in the delirious genre of fashion photography, where styles of psychic disturbance are endlessly circulated. There is also a contradictory undermining of gender norms at the core of this visual regime whose ostensible objective is, as Fuss has pointed out, to direct women towards the required goal of successful heterosexuality. But if, as Butler has regularly reminded us, the achieving of femininity invariably fails in some respects, then we would say it also fails within the deployment of these Particular technologies of gender, where unlike commercial Hollywood cinema, the 'male gaze' does not have a presiding presence". [5]
Angela McRobbie (quoted above from her book 'Aftermath of Feminism') was very interested in the theories explained by Laura Mulvey on the 'male gaze', and she goes on to explain the more disturbing and materially misused nature of the film and fashion industry and the effect it has on the women who are being victimised by their male superiors.
In many situations while watching Beecroft's performance VB55, you can see that the men (accompanied by a female) who view her work felt embarrassed or uncomfortable when confronted with such a violent picture that Beecroft has painted for the audience.
Nevertheless how she selectively tries to get that specific aesthetic in both the casting process and portraying the ideal woman to draw in males attention intrigues me a lot as her intention was always to impose anxiety into the male heterosexual. However this also poses questions for myself such as why are the women always naked, why can't they be fully clothed? However it is possible that she may be exploiting the women without fully understanding her
objective.
In relevance as to whether Vanessa Beecroft (as a 'feminist') has been successful in critically challenging the 'male gaze', she has definitely approached her work on a very pro-feminist stance as she is constantly targeting heterosexual men and finding ways of trapping them while working against their most uncomfortable anxieties. Nonetheless, she prefers to challenge the 'male gaze' by politically vindicating the subject by creating this almost perfect image of a woman and just presenting heterosexual men this over-desired object in their eyes which is very apparent by how she directs the models so meticulously in every form to clothing, hair, makeup, stance and so on.