Vanessa Beecroft behind the scenes - embarrassing details
You probably heard about the "artist" Vanessa Beecroft. She is specialised in placing nude women in public galleries and museums, that has been posted here and elsewhere several times.
I always wondered, how a nude female must feel in that situation, isn't it total embarrassing?
So I did some research, and finally, I found a very good document by 3 women (Julia Steinmetz, Clover Leary and Heather Cassils) of which 2 participated in the "VB 46" performance (Clover Leary and Heather Cassils). "Behind Enemy Lines: Toxic Titties Infiltrate Vanessa Beecroft"
(as I don't know whether links work now, I post the link separately in the second post, but you'll find it on google...)
Before I post some fine quotes focused on embarrassing of the 37 page document, I ask for your help:
Have you found another report of a woman participating in a Vanessa Beecroft performance? And did she regret it later? ;-)
Please help me search!
OK, so here are now the quotes.
It may look long, but compared to the whole text it's short and IMHO really worth for every fan of embarrassment. :-)
Quote:
In the first year of our Master of Fine Arts (MFA) studies in art and photography at the California Institute of the Arts, we spotted an unusual item on the walls: a call for models to audition for Beecroft’s upcoming Gagosian performance. The call stated,
“Needed: 20–30 nude models, eighteen plus, skinny, tall androgynous body, very small breasts, available to pose nude. Preferably with short hair, boyish cut, blond, and fair. Will be covered in body makeup. Will wear Manolo Blahnik shoes.”
Clover Leary:
I went to the Gagosian Gallery with Heather that day for moral support and out of a certain undeniable curiosity. Heather was led into an upstairs room, and when she came back down about five minutes later she whispered in my ear “The pay is $1,500.” At the time it seemed like a lot of money, especially since we were both covertly living in our graduate studios on campus to save money on rent. After a moment’s hesitation, I filled out the questionnaire and followed the woman up the stairs. She asked me to strip naked; she took one Polaroid of my face and one frontal nude. She told me that the Polaroids would be sent to Beecroft in New York. About two weeks later Heather and I each received a call; we had been selected as the number one and two model picks for VB46. We both accepted. I was a little apprehensive to be putting myself in that position, but I thought maybe I could just be more in the back or something. . . . I had no idea what this experience would entail.
(...)
The second and third day we met at 8:30 a.m. at Sound Stage 9 on the Sony Pictures Studio lot. A crew of about ten makeup artists was responsible for spray painting each of the thirty models with semitransparent body makeup. This process took about two hours per model. After painting, each model was given directions on how not to damage the body paint. We were told to eat, drink, sit, and move with extreme caution. We were told to squat over the toilet when urinating, holding our labia out of the way and blotting carefully so as not to damage the water-based makeup covering our genitals. After the painting process we were each given a thigh-length, semiopaque white silk robe to wear between shoots. The robe ties were removed so the body paint would not be damaged. We were all constantly trying to force the too short, open-fronted, transparent robes to cover our bodies adequately. The two makeup artists in charge wanted to experiment with paint thickness on one of the front models, so I was the first model taken into the room for painting. I remember thinking: this is what a sheep must feel like when it is separated from the herd and shorn, a fitting analogy in many ways. They had me stand naked on a platform with my legs spread while they airbrushed swatches on different areas of my body, and the remainder of the makeup crew stood around to watch. My legs were shaking as they directed me to walk naked past the other twenty-nine curious models and twenty gaffers, grips, lighting technicians, photographers, and assistants into the room that had been constructed for the VB46 documentation. I just stood there, occupying myself by trying to figure out what the hell I was doing in that situation while the crew went through the lighting checks and metering.
Vanessa Beecroft:
“I was able to remain constantly at the exact distance ‘x’ from my canvas and thus I could dominate my creation continuously throughout the entire execution. In this way I stayed clean, I no longer dirtied myself with color, not even the tips of my fingers. The work finished itself there in front of
me, under my direction, in absolute collaboration with the model. And I could salute its birth into the tangible world in a dignified manner, dressed in a tuxedo” (quoted in Sitch 1994, 177).
Beecroft also uses this technique of distance in order to “stay clean.” By delegating the more
ethically troubling aspects of “dominating [her] creation” to a team of stylists (charged with the unseemly task of waxing the models’ pubic hair), makeup artists, photographers, and production managers (who would relay “bad news” to the models, including extension of the shooting day or restriction of access to the bathroom during shooting), Beecroft can arrive at her opening dressed in couture, unruffled by guilt.
Vanessa: I have never come in contact with the models before.
Heather: Why not?
Vanessa: It makes me feel guilty.
Heather Cassils:
We have been shooting for hours. Teetering in my heels. The distant tick of an assistant’s wristw*tch. I am zoning out. Focused on nothing, the edges of the room erased and rounded to give the impression of an endless vacuum of whiteness. On this sound stage present is the pulse of my heartbeat in the coils of my expanded blue veins, heavy from standing. Other than the slight breath of the girl behind me that makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up, all is still. How long have I been here?
Clover Leary:
We were initially told the pay was $1,500 for the one day of hair bleaching, three days of shooting, and the four-hour performance. The first day all the models met at the Fredric Fekkai salon near the Gagosian
Gallery in Beverly Hills. Our hair and eyebrows were bleached to white through three to five bleaching processes. After bleaching, the models were led one by one into the waxing room. A model was walking out as I was walking in; she looked appalled; the rest of her face was now as bright red as the skin beneath her bleached scalp and eyebrows. Short white fluffy hair was sticking up from her head in disarray. She touched my arm as I walked by and hissed, “They are going to wax everything, I mean everything!” I didn’t quite know how to respond. The woman doing the waxing was angry and troubled. She kept repeating, “They should have told you, I am so sorry, this isn’t right!” She started with my arms then waxed my legs. She just kept apologizing as she started to rip off my pubic hair. “They told me to remove it all, every bit, I am so sorry. . . . They should have told you!” The sides weren’t that bad, so by the time I realized how painful the full pubic waxing would be it was much too late to stop as my pubic hair was already covered in the sticky wax, so I just clenched my jaw and nodded to her to finish. I concentrated on steadying myself, keeping my expression neutral each time she would tear off a new strip of hair with an audible rip that brought tiny drops of blood to the surface of the raw skin. None of the models was informed that this would be required until we were in the waxing room. We already had white fried hair and eyebrows, and we also knew that we would likely not receive any of the money if we didn’t go through with it. At this point no one walked away.
(...)
We had all been assigned spaces in a circular formation, which were designated by our Polaroids on the floor. All of the models were given a pair of white, strappy, Alesandro Dell’Acqua four-inch-heeled shoes. Although they had asked for our shoe sizes in the initial application, all of the shoes were size 10. During the following grueling days our ankles and feet became swollen, blistered, and bruised as a result of continuous standing in the dramatically ill-fitting shoes. Due to the extreme swelling of our ankles, almost all of the elastic straps eventually had to be cut when they dug into our swollen skin and cut off circulation. The straps were later altered in Photoshop to look unbroken.
Heather Cassils:
As 7:00 p.m. (the time when we had been told the shooting day would be over) approached, Zach, Beecroft’s primary assistant, entered the room: “Okay ladies, it seems we have some more work to do.” We were informed that if any of us left production would cease and no one would be paid.
Clover Leary:
We stayed a total of fifteen hours, until 1:30 in the morning, on the first day. We were only able to sleep for a few hours before we found ourselves driving back to stage 9 the next morning. That day we worked sixteen hours. By the end of the second night we were swaying as we collected our clothes. When I put on my sneakers my feet felt crippled; I stumbled disoriented while my body relearned how to walk in something flat.
(...)
On the fourth day of VB46 we did the actual performance in the Gagosian Gallery. Although less physically arduous than the previous days of shooting, the actual performance had its own set of challenges, which were compounded by our collective exhaustion.
Due to the fact that we were all locked into the same surreal, homogenizing, and objectifying set of circumstances, we found ourselves bonded to each other during the four days of VB46. We all underwent the same difficult, exhausting, often degrading set of procedures; we were treated as a unit, homogenized aesthetically; and we were all of course completely naked and hairless while the crew and audience were clothed. Several of the models told me that they had never been pushed anywhere near this hard in a modeling job before. One woman told me that since this was for art, which she believed to be more socially worthy and noble than fashion or advertising, she was willing to put up with a lot; by the end of the performance she told me that she did not feel that way anymore.
(...)
Seeing the who’s who of the L.A. art world: dealers, collectors, critics, artists, etc., gathered for the dubious entertainment of watching thirty nude, airbrushed, well-paid models with exposed hairless genitalia stand in four-inch heels until they were forced by exhaustion to sit was a bit disheartening to say the least. (...) In the end it was damaging to be so directly viewed as more object than individual.
Julia Steinmetz:
We are led to believe that the performance is self-contained, that it begins when the doors of the gallery are opened and ends when the models walk out of the room three hours later. Without insider information, I would not have known that the models had been working under extremely exhausting and traumatic physical and emotional conditions for the three days prior to the performance. The Gagosian’s press materials suggest a narrative of endurance: “The women begin en masse, aggressive and strong, slowly melting into boredom and exhaustion from the physical trial of the performance.”17 They fail to mention that the gallery performance is just the tip of the iceberg. The exhaustion evidenced by the models’ gradual move from standing to seated or reclining positions during the course of the performance has been carefully manufactured through the conditions of their labor over the preceding days. The models are pushed to the point of total physical and emotional collapse before the stated period of the performance even begins; when given the directive to “sit when you are tired,” they are at that point all too ready to comply.
From the perspective of the models, the experience of the performance at the Gagosian was intimately tied to the trauma of the past several days of physical and emotional stress.
Heather Cassils:
The air was icy, too cold to be that nude. Although it was only the very beginning of a three-hour performance, my feet were already pinched, my ankles swollen, and my feet blistered from the last three days of standing. It was only afterward that we figured out we had all been given the same size shoe to wear. (..) I had decided ahead of time that I would stand for the full three hours. Standing would be a protest. It would symbolize my strength and resistance, and although the instructions were explicit—sit when you are tired—relaxing into any kind of seated position allowed an already too available glimpse of my bald raw pussy.
I was in the front of a V-like formation when the first two people entered the room. Goosebumps left my ghostly flesh, and despite the bite in the air streams of sweat ran little rivers in the airbrushed makeup. It was this first physically stressed symptom of my body that made me realize that, although I had decided to go through with this, my body correctly protested. As the first viewers entered the white cube my quadriceps started to shake so hard I thought I was going to fall out of the designer heels that cost more than my rent. My fists were clenched and stomach taut. I felt like my skin was a force field against the eyes that were drinking me in. I wanted to make myself menacing and indigestible. In my mind contracted muscles bounced their viewership off of my body like fists in the boxing ring. My jaw was clenched and I was dripping from quiet exertion. The more I stood the more energy built up in me until I
started to feel like I was going to explode in my stillness. “Wow, she’s so angry. Wherever did she find her? Really great.” And it was in this moment that I realized that I was powerless in this situation.
My silent anger was easily subsumed by the artwork. No one could tell that my anger was my own and not a possible instruction of the artist. Despite my intentions, I had sold my body and my voice.
Julia Steinmetz:
(...) Both attempts at individual agency failed: the photographs sold in Beecroft’s second Gagosian Los Angeles exhibition were shot during the photography and video shoots conducted at Sony Studios in the days prior to the performances, and they all feature Cassils lying down or seated, disturbingly displaying her genitalia.
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Additionally, some pictures from VB46:
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11-25-2011, 10:18 AM
