76 vb01_00_100.000 The body is already naked, drenched in almond oil, to conceal the difficulty that will be; the position stable; the posture assigned. A platoon of performers, sacred and carnal like wrong Madonnas, has been lined up. Performers like reflections of a sick emotional landscape, performers as bodies of evidence. What Vanessa Beecroft brings to the field starting in 1993 is an armed phalanx of their own skin, and of her artistic and intellectual leadership, fighting on a single battleground: the one of the body. An individual body, struggling with its own obsessions to gain acceptance; and a social body, amplified in a hundred naked bodies to demand attention. Bodies representing urgencies, bodies that compel reflecting, bodies that do not find - as already expected – a response. For this reason, tragic bodies. A corpus, the one of the artist, that affirms, disturbs, celebrates, distresses and that condemns through a high and refined aesthetic construction, where the naked will act in the same manner as a paramagnetic device during an MRI: as contrast. It is a nude that does not indulge, does not excite, does not wink; it is an abrasive nude, an extreme and nonrequired sharing with an audience that finally realizes how much guilt there is in the act of idle bystanding. The background sound - a metallic, automatic voice, with the same cold persuasiveness of hypnosis - sets out the rules. “Please don’t talk. Don’t smile. Don’t laugh. Don’t make any direct eye contact. Don’t interact with anyone”. Thirty directives7 repeated in loop from a loudspeaker like for an autogenic training, a mystical liturgy, a brainwashing, a nazi propaganda. “Maintain your assigned position for as long as you can. If you need to get away, do it quietly; you will be automatically reached by assistance”. The artist masterfully reaches an upward tension towards beauty, by building a step also through the construction of a complete psychological tension, a cross between the techniques of persuasion [“Be like a beautiful picture. You are a fundamental member of the group”], the construction of a parallel virtual reality [“Behave like you are dressed. Behave as if no one else were in the room”] and the strategies of terror [“Don’t break the rules. Your actions have consequences on the group”]. The very selected audience, where black tie is required at the opening, makes its entrance - now into a world temple of contemporary art, now into a highly symbolic place from a historical or a social standpoint, to show how powerfully her monogram has already been stamped not only in art history, but also in contemporary culture. Although the artistic act had its beginning months before, through an idea of sitespecificity that moves from an anthropological logic [the artist starts her formal research in close correlation with the venue that will host the performance; so for VB53, 2004, at Terminal 5 at JFK Airport, Vanessa Beecroft has lined up nude, chained statuesque black women, and equally burnt in black were the women scattered on platforms of the Fish Market in Naples for VB66, 2010, with sculptural fragments of bodies molded by herself in reference to the historical events that afflicted Pompeii and Herculaneum], it is the entry of the public that will trigger, in 180 endless minutes, within which movements are hardly noticeable, the social experiment serially conducted between an army of elegant nude doppelgänger performers and a sophisticated crowd of observers in tuxedos. All calculated – even the high probability that the woman may waver but she will attempt to resist at all cost, from the height of a designer stiletto that is both a pedestal and an instrument of torture. A social experiment for which Beecroft is the director and spectator, artist and sociologist, mistress and serial killer. It is the sublimation, through a gesture reminiscent of the portraits of the Luis Buñuel’s bourgeoisie, of the atavistic mechanism of class struggle. It is the claim of devious mechanisms inherent in the Society of the Spectacle through the exasperated and refined use of their own sidearms. Expanded over a length of time bordering on sadism – glamorous son of that same sublime sadism staged by Pasolini in Salò [1975] or by Fassbinder in The bitter tears of Petra von Kant [1972] – the icon dissolves, decays and becomes flesh, and the voyeurs watching it remain disarmed, destabilized in finding themselves powerless to address the absence of their expectations of perversion. Once again, ready to be catalogued in a new code, VB has staged humanity and, in front of it, its own loss. nome d’arte
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