Publisher: Hatje Cantz Year: 2000 Format: Hardcover Edition: 1st Edition Condition: Very Good Pages: 176 Size: 28 x 22cm
This is the first book to focus on the controversial performances staged by Vanessa Beecroft, whose work inhabits a realm where the lines between fashion, performance art, voyeurism and feminist commentary blur.
One of Vanessa Beecroft's live performances was held in March 1998 in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. There, as in her other performances, she worked with young women whom she de- individualised with wigs, make-up, uniform underwear and shoes. Their appearance on stage was tightly pre-choreographed. "I give them instructions: not to speak, not to react in real time, not to move too quickly or too slowly, to be classical (...) I see them as subjects for a painting," Vanessa Beecroft explained in 1997.
This is reminiscent of the 'tableaux vivants' in court circles of the 18th and 19th centuries, which imitated paintings and sculptural works by visual arrangements of motionless, persistently silent people.
