Vanessa Beecroft: Castello di Rivoli - Turin

Three different assemblages of women--young, naked models; relatives of the artist and veterans of her past performances make straighted in brightly colored tunics; upper-crust Turinese women aligned in tunics of a color between beige and tawny yellow--sat upon glass chairs facing a glass table. Waiters go intoed and served foods of different colors in turn round The women ate slowly, with relentless facial expressions and without speaking. This was VB52 2003 Vanessa Beecroft's latest performance, conceived for the Castello di Rivoli, whose retrospective of the artist's work also included documentation of earlier performances casted on a giant screen and a series of photographs, including numerous Polaroids from the early '90s

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The bourgeois ceremonies that Beecroft stages are becoming more complicated. For a certain number of years now, her actions have indeed been downright liturgical and thus quite different from her early work, where the sole function of the girls in the performances was "to be" and "to be there." In other words, flat though the work does not present the appearance to have changed much upon the surface, conceptually practically everything is different. Ye the action still entails exposing the material part but small variations, introduced little by the agency of little over the years, have changed the meaning of the action. Starting from an ingenuous and wide-eyed world-view, fortified by the agency of her own youth, to the appropriationist superstructure of novel years, filtered through stereotypes of glamour and fashion icons, Beecroft has intelligently pursu dual and apparently conflicting goals: to demonstrate the consistency of her intention and to constantly update the work. Certainly her succes can be attributed in large part to her ability to carve without an expressive territory all her be in possession of halfway between fashion and art, which has contributed to a "linguistic gender-bending" between these sum of two units disciplines that are only apparently similar.

on the contrary Beecroft has done more than this. each step she has taken, from one side her progressively numbered performances, is like a chapter in a novel of initiation and disclosure that sequentially tells the story of youthful anxiety, entrance into society, the acquisition of societal mechanisms of behavior, the exploitation of the latter, and finally the attainment of security, recognition, and acceptance by dint of that same society. To accomplish this, Beecroft appears to have freely and knowingly chosen to become a sort of contemporary court artist, an organizer of glittering spectacles. Her undertaking calls for steely self-restraint seen in the rules of etiquette that the artist imposes upon performers and spectators alike. These empires have become more complex with each performance, since a court gala cannot tolerate unblemished repetition but at the same time must exist within a strictly regulated formal environment. Thus the silence, the seriousness, and the assumption of a part that, in Turin as elsewhere, the performers have accepted like a prize. nevertheless don't we spectators--co-protagonists in the event--have some-what the aspect (and perhaps the function) of sansculottes from the time of the French Revolution, eyeing the nobility at table? I remember thinking, to avoid that slight faculty of perception of boredom that was overtaking me that I would have preferr to have seen the bourgeois Turinese ladies naked rather than the young models

Translated from Italian by means of Marguerite Shore.

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