Vanessa Beecroft

born 1969 in Genoa, Italy
lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA

Vanessa Beecroft studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, Italy. The first work in her ongoing VB series, VB01, was part of a show at the academy, which also included a selection of watercolour drawings of women derived from a diary she had been working on since adolescence called The book of food (also known as Despair), which was also on display. Begun in 1983, the book consisted of a log of every bit of food that she consumed, and a journal in words and pictures of the feelings – mainly self-hatred – that her struggle with her wayward appetite aroused. She intended to show it to a doctor one day, but it ended up as an art project with 360 watercolours and drawings to be published in the form of a cube-shaped book divided into coloured sections.

Beecroft suffers from exercise bulimia – a compulsion to burn off kilojoules that she considers excessive. With its cycle of binging and then vomiting (or exercising, as in Beecroft’s case), bulimia is an eating disorder that is psychologically addictive and socially contagious among young women, especially actors, dancers and models. It comes as no surprise then that Beecroft’s performances with their ritualised deportment over several hours play out an unresolved tension between control and entropy, uniformity and individuality, intimacy and impersonality, desire and resistance to desire. Though mainly using glamorous, thin, young women, Beecroft has also deployed white uniformed sailors from the US Navy (VB39) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1999 as well as on the deck of the Intrepid (VB42).

The performances over the years tend to be made for a specific location and thus provide sample readings of local notions of class, beauty, politics and taste. More recently the bodies have been less like mannequins, and the models more mature with less-than-perfect bodies. In Miami for VB58, within an open-walled model home called the Push Button House designed to fit in a shipping crate, 15 uncomfortable Haitian girls were dressed in formal maid’s costumes, making a stinging comment on race and class in America. The 2007 Venice Biennale reflected Beecroft’s visit to the genocide area of Darfur with 30 naked Sudanese women lying covered in blood on a white floor in VB61. On Long Island for VB64, Beecroft painted the women in white gesso, placing them among white sculptures, making them look the same, while VB65, conceived for Milan, took the form of a ‘Last Supper’ of African immigrant men, legal and illegal, dressed in suits, eating chicken with their hands.

Read more about Vanessa Beecroft’s 1999 Kaldor project.

See also Vanessa Beecroft website