The work of the thin, famous, Italian conceptual artist Vanessa Beecroft has graced the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim, and the Gagosian Gallery, among many others. Her art has a fairly consistent set of themes. One central preoccupation is human bodies, or rather cultural obsessions with them, especially the beautiful ones, including her own
. One installation piece commissioned for the opening of a Louis Vuitton store in Paris featured live models stacked on the shelves alongside the luggage. In 2005 in Berlin she had one hundred women wearing nothing but panty hose stand perfectly still for three hours.
This builds on her personal experience. She has long battled eating disorders and addictions from bulimia to anorexia, drugs and smoking, anything to keep her weight down, most lately “exercise bulimia” where she would swim so many laps she would faint. In fact, her first high-visibility project was a “Book of Food,” in which she had detailed every single atom of food that entered her body between 1983 and 1993, with date and time, and a record of what emotional effect it had on her. She turned this document into an installation piece in Milan in 1993, displaying parts of it along with some illustrations in a performance space. Thirty Beecroft-lookalike models, many with eating disorders of their own, walked numbly around, wearing the artist’s clothes.
I also have 10 years of precise food journals, courtesy of Weight Watchers. If I pin those upside down and dress up the dog in my now too-small Footlocker t-shirts, spattered with the kids’ Go-gurt, can I have an NEA Fellowship?
Posted by jochoapa 
