Some of My Favourite Web Sites Are Art
http://www.alberta.com/unfamiliarart/

Project #7:

Vanessa Beecroft
http://www.thing.net/~vanessa/

Vanessa Beecroft has achieved notoriety as an offline artist. Her
performances in galleries or museums feature young women dressed
uniformly in odd and scant clothing. They stand around, staring,
milling, and stretching in the presence of an audience for around two
hours. The girls are instructed not to interact with each other or the
audience. Beecroft's role as artist is to produce these events, which
are documented using video and photography.

For her web project, these photos and videos have been made available
online, making use of the Internet for distribution, and giving
Beecroft's girls a much wider audience than the rarefied art world. The
girls are also re-contextualized. At first glance the Web site recalls
the simplicity and order of a gallery. But this feeling fades as the
viewer explores each individual photo.

The photos, which show the girls' patently theatrical outfits, snooty
affects, and listless self-containment, aptly communicate the theatrical
nature of Beecroft's performances. In real life the women's almost naked
bodies are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Online though,
lacking the physical presence of Beecroft's lovely clique, these photos
resemble pictures of models backstage at a fashion show, or even
cyberporn. The intense psychological content of her offline performances
is muffled by the translation of the art into an online space. Yet the
photos and videos remain viscerally compelling.

The possibilities of art making by women have changed profoundly in the
last thirty years. As a young, female artist working in the nineties,
Beecroft is in a complicated but potentially liberating position. The
advent of a pro-sex feminism, the reappropriation of women's fashion,
changing feelings toward the female body, sexism's residues–all these
things converge in Beecroft's work.