The performance artist Vanessa Beecroft is what the art world likes to call "established" (as opposed to "emerging"). She has for some years been one of the half dozen highest fliers in contemporary art and she is currently the subject of a retrospective at Italy's most important museum of contemporary art, the Castello di Rivoli outside Turin. Since its beginnings in the 1970s, a great deal of performance art has concerned itself with bodily narcissism, and Beecroft is no exception. Unusually, though, she rarely participates in the performances she orchestrates. Instead, she subjects a carefully selected group of young women to two hours standing in formation in front of an audience, under instruction neither to talk nor to meet eyes with the audience, nor to move out of position.
Beecroft says she tries to make each performance "more abstract, harder, more artificial, more photogenic, less embodied than the one before." She has used black women, Japanese women, a group of Navy Seals in all-white uniforms, and recently a group of older society women. But for the most part, the women are pale-skinned, young, tall and attractive. They wear designer pumps, but little else (Beecroft calls high heels "pedestals"). What they do wear (G-strings, wigs, or masks) is carefully chosen and uniformly applied, with deliberately placed exceptions: one or two girls in the phalanx will be naked, or bare-breasted, or exposed in some other way. Beecroft has put on more than 50 of these performances, to which she gives titles numbered from VB01 upwards. I saw VB40 in Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art four years ago. Beecroft herself, who is Italian, was breezily charming and intellectually earnest. When I asked her what responses to her work interested her most, she replied, "The truck driver reaction." At first, like so much performance art, VB40 felt more like a psychological experiment than art. I was acutely aware of spectators navigating amusement, embarrassment and voyeurism. At one stage, a member of the audience broke into the formation and sat down on the floor. Her demeanour made it clear she was staging a protest. Why look at women in lingerie? Why not me? The woman was whisked away.
But as time went by, preconditioned social responses relaxed, and the atmosphere became more intimate, more genuinely surprising. The contrived situation began to feel at once generous and cruel - not only to the girls, elevated as they were to the status of artworks and at the same time exposed to potential humiliation - but to the audience as well. One felt both privileged and insulted. Two hours is a long time to be asked to respond to any work of "visual art." But of course duration was key to the experience, which was a demonstration of entropy in the realm of glamour. I saw the art critic for one newspaper leave after 20 minutes. His review the next day was a good old-fashioned drubbing: the performance, he wrote, was exploitative and misogynistic.
I found it hard to square such ideological fury with my own experience, especially towards the end of the two hours, when the mood in the room became frayed and tender. It turns out that Beecroft suffers from bulimia. She told Judith Thurman in a New Yorker profile published earlier this year that as a girl, she used to be "so impressed" by three plump sisters she knew from a rich aristocratic family who starved themselves until they were "skin and bones." She says she feels a similar drive to perfection doubling as punishment. My first response to this revelation was an internal groan. It was suddenly clear that Beecroft's very public, very lucrative enterprise was not only the symptom of a psychological condition, but a repetitive, binge-like indulgence of it, and perhaps a form of therapy.
Still, there were interesting aspects to the revelations. When she was an adolescent, Beecroft says, she loved the girls who had something wrong or crazy about them but were still beautiful. Her project may be a slender one, but it does make you reflect on the line that divides - or fails to divide - art from obsession. There is a strong element of sado-masochism in her work, which is deliberately reminiscent of the fashion photographs of Helmut Newton. I look at what Beecroft does in much the same way that I look at Newton's humorous but often provocative photographs: as an indulgence of impulses for the most part too personal to be interesting as art; but also as a sly, sometimes genuine comment on the hollowness and the aggression in the notions of beauty feeding into those impulses. Eating disorders, like certain utopian ideologies, as Thurman pointed out, hinge on the belief that "with enough ruthlessness, it is possible to achieve perfection." But perfection is not so easily trapped, and mutilation, tragedy or farce are often the outcomes of the desire for beauty.
The perfection attained on the night I saw VB40 in Sydney was real, but it belonged to the comic realm. When the two hours were up, the 30-odd girls in red silk stockings and high heels, tired and visibly relieved that their ordeal was over, headed upstairs to the changing rooms. They filed into a storage lift - but the lift jammed, and they were trapped inside for over an hour. A handful of delighted firefighters finally came to their rescue.
