In an extended series of tableaux vivants, Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft has treated the will to classicism in its diaspora of mass culture through a re-deployment of the fashion industry’s strategic organization of idealized beauty, itself inherited in large part from high art, and in her performances, returned. Models were stripped naked and arranged in art spaces with the rigid planarity of the most exacting quattrocentro painting. Templates of beauty given to the simplicity and grandeur of ancient marbles, these tableaux modernized classicism by signing flesh with flesh in a closer iconicity, posing philosophical questions about the plausibility of an art that is at once critical—even virulent—in content, yet free from formal fragmentation or will to decrepitude in its means of presentation—critical, in short, of the easy pairings of form and content that have riddled European aesthetics roughly since Manet.
Beecroft has recently taken a turn to imagery based on travels in the southern Sudan. The series includes classically-composed photographs of a Sudanese Christ and enthroned Madonnas, as well as a self-portrait as a Madonna nursing orphaned African infants. Also based on her experience in the Sudan, Beecroft has made a video-documented performance of a staged massacre, VB61: Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?, in which she poured red paint over the bodies of thirty naked recumbent African models in an event that disturbingly referenced Actionist and other such body-based 60s and 70s performance art spectacles, calling viewers to get in touch with their myopia for thinking first of those allusions, and second, of some far-off African suffering.
I was compelled by a video of VB61, which was exhibited in “Senso Unico” at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (2007), and by the Madonna and Christ photographs, which I saw at last year’s Armory Show in the booth of Galleria Lia Rumma, whose Milan space recently exhibited work from the Sudan series in a three-person show, “Africa On.” I interviewed Beecroft in March 2008 to discuss the recent shift in her work and the art historical sources for her projects.
David Shapiro: You have invoked Pasolini as an influence. Could you please elaborate on the ways in which his work has influenced yours?
Vanessa Beecroft: I read Pasolini when I was a teenage student in Italy and watched some of his early movies and documentaries. I was moved by his classical realism, the use of characters from the street who maintain their everyday appearance while being transported into a symbolic dimension. That is dialectical, and it redefines notions that we have of history, religion, myth, and the people in the street creating an image that is apparently neorealist, but charged by a destabilizing power. It demystifies history, religion, and class without sarcasm or criticism; it humanizes what is usually presented to us as inhuman. There is empathy in his work, sometimes paternalism. The Gospel According to St. Matthew is told in a believable way. The Madonna, too young and barely conscious of what is going on, is pregnant before the astonished eyes of an old Joseph. Christ is a driven young man who doesn’t stop talking and having visions. He doesn’t have blonde hair or blue eyes. The whole picture is formal and aesthetic: it looks as if it belongs to the classical Italian painting tradition. The characters don’t speak much; they are portraits. My professor of aesthetics was Francesco Leonetti, a friend of Pasolini’s, who participated in the literary movement Gruppo 63. That movement discriminated against Pasolini because he was not revolutionary in form, while they were. He used classical canons and forms. The form that Pasolini used to communicate was complex, and it was revolutionary in content.
As a student, when I looked at girls at school and in the street, I recognized in them classical images of saints and Madonnas. These women looked as if they belonged to painting. Frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t portray them with enough realism, nor could I reproduce their aura or their psychology, I decided to bring the girls themselves into the place of an artwork. These young women had some things in common: they wouldn’t eat in public, they were too tall or too thin, or they wore colors that were too bright. Some looked as if they were suffering, and I could read this in their anatomy and gaze. The qualities of these women attracted me to them visually. I observed them and brought them into the work as raw material that was not entirely revealed until the performance took place. I wouldn’t talk to them as girls; they were just exhibited and told not to speak, to maintain their visual strength. The mystery that they carried was kept and only communicated visually. I never consciously addressed fashion as a subject. What interested me was the psychology of these women, their inner struggle, the visual representation that they provided. Any specific element that characterized them (age, features, shape, size) probably had an unconscious autobiographical quality. As Cesare Pavese said, “I cannot talk of the silent red lunar rocks because they have nothing that is mine.” So there must be me in the girls, to a certain degree, to be able to represent them fairly and for repeatedly wanting to represent them under those conditions.
The discomfort, the thin balance between the women and the audience, is not reproduced in the photos or videos. A performance is a moment of a lack of communication; it is a miscommunication. While the girls are struggling to stand still, barely dressed and balancing on high heels, we look at them, judging them, with a sort of abuse or contempt, waiting for them to fall on the ground. Some fall right away, some don’t fall at all and are able to return a much harder look to the audience than the one that they receive. Most of the time, these women are naked, wearing shoes and make-up only, to appear as if they were stripped and wear a naked uniform, rather than being naturally nude and free.
We tend to vulgarize the girls, thinking that they are too beautiful, too skinny, probably a sexual object or a fashion object. All of these thoughts that come from the viewer belong to the viewer, not to the girls. The performance is a form of catharsis of these notions for the audience. Without rehearsal, the women always address the audience in a conscious way, as if they know exactly what the performance is about without my needing to explain anything. Some of the themes common to the subject are beauty, melancholia, shame, and solitude. This performance is given to an audience that has prejudices and has to deal and be confronted with these prejudices in real time. There are different degrees of fruition to the performance, depending on the audience’s mindset. Often the most educated audience is the one that rejects the subject of the performance (naked women) as a secular form of art. A performance needs an audience to exist. The audience becomes the essential element, without which the performance wouldn’t make any progress.
DS: In the last years of his life, Pasolini moved rather abruptly from the arcadian, pleasure-riddled world of his “Trilogy of Life” to a shockingly violent swan song on Sadism, Salò. Was this shift inspirational to you in your own recent change of subject from the fashion-oriented, idealized nudes of your earlier performances to the startlingly violent subject of an African massacre in VB61: Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?
VB: I have not watched his last movies yet. My work follows a personal course, and VB61 was designed to take place in the street in Venice during an international contemporary art exhibition. My performance pointed to some of the artistic references that this audience must have had: Jackson Pollock, Viennese Actionism, and 70s street performances. The intention was to make the audience feel guilty for even indulging in those references while the mimicking of a massacre was taking place. At the end of the performance, what was left was a painting on the floor.
DS: Could you please describe what else may have precipitated this shift in your work? What led you to southern Sudan in particular? What made the atrocities of Darfur different from other such occurrences?
VB: My work is very close to my life; what I experience closely becomes my subject. For many years, the subject had been exclusively girls and women and their relationship with others and an environment in different settings and compositions. I felt as if I were painting a still life, in which the natura morta was the girls and the psychological weight that they carried their additional concept. For that work, the formal composition was controlled until the women broke it by falling on the floor after a length of time. That stage was already informal and out of my control.
In 2005, I followed a strong impulse to go to the Sudan. I read in the New York Times that there was a genocide, and I connected deeply with it. I decided to go there. I took a cameraman and a photographer with me on a trip to a Catholic mission in southern Sudan. I began documenting southern Sudan (not Darfur) and continued until 2007. Upon my arrival in the country, the first day, I was brought to three newborns who had no mother, and since I carried mother’s milk for my own child, I nursed them for several days. That act established a profound bond with that country, and in my mind, it justified my going there. My philosophy-student friend Paul Majur Makur kept insisting that I do something to raise awareness, which motivated me to realize VB61. I made a sketch on a plane and sent it over to be realized in June during the Venice Biennale at the Pescheria di Rialto.
DS: The work that came out of this trip included photographs of Sudanese enthroned Madonnas and a Christ-like boy. What were your references for the massacre of VB61?
VB: My cultural and personal backgrounds are not distinct: they meld together and are not directly recognizable at all times. VB61 came first as an image and then was refined, thinking mostly of late-60s and 70s art. The Madonnas and Christ in the Sudan were the only things that I could do in that environment. I was staying at a Catholic mission, and the imagery inspired me to take pictures in the local cathedral of local people in the guise of Christian icons; my friend Paul, who was in a lot of trouble at the time, is the Christ. While we were doing this, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army was chasing us because we had the wrong visa and couldn’t photograph in the country, and the Church didn’t know what we were doing. The NGOs, the Church, and the West in general perpetrate a form of colonialism on Africans and are often insensitive to their cultural traditions and resources. In the Madonna with Twins, I used myself as a subject that represented this form of Western paternalism in trying to aid Africa. When I realized that I couldn’t take the infants who I was nursing back with me to the U.S., I made art out of it. The picture represents a real story—or else I wouldn’t have done it.
DS: Was your interest in the Sudan prompted, in any way, by the example of Leni Riefenstahl’s work with the Nuba tribes in that country? Before going to the Sudan, Riefenstahl also worked in a classicizing idiom informed by the aesthetics of fascism, though in her case, of course, much more ominously so. Do you think that shifting from classicism to a romantic fascination with liminal cultures is a natural or simply logical progression?
VB: My work is not planned. It is spontaneous. In this sense, I am not a good art student. I didn’t think of Leni’s work. It was a coincidence that the locations were close. The Dinka, the tribes that I visited, are extremely contemporary-looking, striking people. They have been subject to enslavement and violence for centuries. They are aware of this injustice, which goes beyond the simple fact of their resources being stolen. They raised my interest in going deeper into the analysis of race and racism.
DS: Many modern European artists have sought artistic re-orientation in Africa and other technologically underdeveloped places. To what degree do you identify with Orientalist or primitivist artists as foundational for your Sudanese work? If not, how and why do you see your project as being fundamentally different from the African projects of past artists?
VB: I don’t consider Africa primitive. The spirit of the people is very current, contemporary. The primitive, minimalist look may be a choice. We are still anchored to the concept of mimesis, but they are not interested in realism. I never really liked art that relies on primitivism or ethnic tendencies and finds in those “heavens” a romantic escape or a reason for naiveté. The only work of that type that I value is Picasso’s because it led to Cubism.
DS: Do you identify with the theme of redemption in your Sudanese work? Do you renounce your old work, or do you see the two bodies of art working together to produce new inter-textual meanings? If so, what are those meanings?
VB: The two works belong closely to me—they represent my experience. I only make work that I feel very responsible for and close to. When I didn’t have any means, I did watercolors that were psychological pictures, then I used the girls because I had a problem with technique. At the moment, I am interested in documentaries rather than performances because they allow me to investigate subjects that are more foreign to me.
DS: You have acknowledged the influence of Piero della Francesca, the rigid geometry of whose arrangements of bodies stands behind that of much of your earlier work. Perhaps even more fitting, you have also cited Raphael as an influence for his “perfect equilibrium,” a phrase that I take to refer to composition, though of course it must be acknowledged that you temper his dolcezza with a certain toughness. Could you please elaborate on what both Piero and Raphael have given to you as an artist? More generally, what does the word “classicism” mean to you?
VB: I plan performances in terms of numbers and geometrical compositions. The girls are installed based on a planimeter and then break the composition the instant that the performance begins; I admire Piero’s geometry. I cite Raphael in the sense that his perfection and balance are the elements that create discomfort. That balance is more disturbing than Michelangelo’s struggle, because it doesn’t allow you to identify the source of doubt that you immediately feel in that perfection.
Classicism in Italy is like pop culture for Americans.
DS: Though your sources of influence in pre-modern painting are largely Italian, the women that you use in your tableaux vivants seldom seem to be of typically Italian ethnicity. In many of your works, you have tended to favor pale Northern types before shifting to very dark-skinned models in your recent work. Why are you drawn to these racial extremes? Could we theorize this as a chiaroscuro of the flesh?
VB: I was raised in Italy but had lived with my English father in London, which I left when I was about two years old. For many years, I didn’t identify with the people in Italy, and I longed for foreign-looking features. I was raised on the border of Austria, and at age eight, I decided to only draw characters with orange, yellow, and red hair who had German names. Recently, I found nursery-school drawings of mine with only black people on boats. I am not able to rationalize my interest in extremes, but my favorite colors are black and white. When I met my half-sister in 2000 for the first time, I realized that her features were very similar to the ideal that I had been seeking for so many years. She looked like my father and like the Portrait of a Young Woman by Piero del Pollaiolo. And Vanessa Redgrave.
DS: You’ve mentioned that as a student you rejected the Arte Povera that constituted your teachers’ attempts at education and instead exposed yourself to film and Renaissance painting. Why do you think that Arte Povera took such hold over Italy? To what do you attribute the persecution of classicism? What kind of morality do you think is contained in peoples’ commitment to the likes of Arte Povera?
VB: In Italy, Arte Povera corresponded with Marxist ideals and conceptual art. To me, the premises were good, like those of most of the late 60s and 70s movements, but later it became mannerist. In Europe, there is a fear of painting as a bourgeois form and representation as a lesser form of art. I think that Europe cannot get over its past and cannot really accept new forms of representation that are not radically different from those of the past.
DS: Finally, could you please say what you are working on now and where you are going in your art. In your most recent body of work, you have greatly expanded your range, leaving open many possible directions.
VB: At the moment, I am completing two documentaries, one shot in the Sudan between 2005 and 2007 that represents the locals after the war and the church trying to evangelize them, and one shot last summer in Sicily about the birth of tragedy during the Greek colonization and the new migrations from Africa. Both touch on subjects related to Africa, myth, and migration. I also produced a group of thirteen white gesso sculptures inspired by the funerary tradition of mortuary tombs for a performance that will take place in the U.S., Italy, and Russia this year.
