77 stage name Every great artist is, first and foremost, an egoist: Vanessa Beecroft enacts her splendid gesture firstly to appease her own demons. “I look at the prospect of an aseptic language” she revealed in an interview8 with her mentor Giacinto di Pietrantonio, “but more often than not, I recognize myself fond of perceptions.” From a naturalist habit and a propensity toward eating vegan, at a young age, resulted in an obsession with food disorder due to the same self-imposed rigidity, to an inclination to a mathematical order converged in control freakness, Beecroft seeks self-healing as a woman and the redemption of woman as a condition. Men are rarely present, always in uniform, in relation to an idea of uniformity as seriality and to a power not so much represented, as perpetrated. Performances serially coded and composed of an urban amazons armada, arranged with an artistic rigor only comparable with the clinical one. A sinuous and harmonious ensemble of lines and curves, a formal vocabulary of skin tones listed like Pantone colour charts, starting from an iconographic reference which the artist always honours, in declaring it and re-semantising it. With the same bulimic compulsion, the artist builds up different expressive media in each of her tableaux vivants: drawing moves into sculpture, sculpture into dance, dance into vernacular movement, drawing inspiration from cinema and painting, relational art and body art, Renaissance, Nouvelle Vague and Vogue. And on the way to a recovery that, more than pursued, is rather self-inflicted, Vanessa Beecroft enables, despite herself, the fact that “a performance begins like a Donald Judd and ends like a Jackson Pollock. I let the random component of a performance create unexpected moments, not because I love chaos, but because I can’t avoid it9 ”. So, for each of her works and for her corpus as a whole, lies an intimate key of interpretation that excludes and transcends any medium and each artistic-feature: the one of self-portraits in a large scale. Vanessa is one, none and one hundred thousand. [Or better: VB01_00_100.000]. 7 “ 1. Please, don’t speak. 2. Stay still. 3. Don’t smile and don’t laugh. 4. Don’t make any direct eye contact. 5. Don’t interact with anyone. 6. Don’t move theatrically. 7. Don’t move too fast. 8. Don’t move too slowly. 9. Maintain your posture and position for as long as you can. 10. When you are tired, take a seat. 11. If you need to get away, do it quietly; you will be automatically reached by assistance. 12. Stay focused on yourself. 13. Feel tall. 14. Try to resist until the end of the performance. 15. Assume the mood you prefer [calm, strong, neutral, indifferent, proud, gracious, haughty]. 16. Behave as if you were dressed. 17. Behave as if no one else was in the room. 18. Be far apart. 19. Be alone. 20. Be independent. 21. Be unapproachable. 22. Be classic. 23. Be like a beautiful picture. 24. Be quiet. 25. Interpret the rules in a natural manner. 26. Don’t break the rules. 27. You are a fundamental element of the composition. 28. Your actions have consequences on the group. 29. Towards the end, you are allowed to lie down. 30. Just before the end, stand up.” [from VB Performances 1993-2003] 8 [From Fond of Perceptions. Interview with Vanessa Beecroft, Flash Art Italy, 2008] 9 [from VB Performances 1993-2003] Vanessa Beecroft, VB66, Mercato Ittico - Napoli, 2010
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