When conflict with your own body and obsession with food becomes art through living paintings:
- Il Mio Salotto
- 4 feb 2022
- Tempo di lettura: 3 min
Aggiornamento: 5 feb 2022
Vanessa Beecroft
Using yourself when you have something to say makes the topic move from a purely artistic level to a real and universal one, and this is how for many artists, autobiographical expressions become the simplest, most spontaneous, and above all direct way of expressing a concept and creating their work of art.
This is how feelings and emotions such as anguish, chaos, fear, and confusion created by an obsession such as that with food, are part of the artist Vanessa Beecroft's work, which although she is aware, she cannot overcome, but which she wants to show to everyone in her works.
Vanessa Beecroft, born in Genoa in 1969, but American by adoption, photographer, and contemporary artist, has succeeded in turning an obsession that unites more and more people into art, especially in recent years, considered to be the "years of the modern era"; Vanessa succeeds in stripping bare and recreating in her works the obsession that has accompanied her for years, the obsession for food, for the body, for an aesthetic ideal of beauty to which to aspire, increasingly distant from reality, and consequently the difficulty of accepting oneself and having self-esteem and body esteem. Nowadays, when we are talking about body positivity and self-acceptance, eating disorders such as bulimia, anorexia, binge eating, and obesity are real problems that are still present in our society and have finally been recognized and studied.
For eight years, from 1985 to 1993, Vanessa wrote down her daily meal plan in a very detailed and precise way, specifying the food ingested and the characteristics such as colour and emotions, her fears and obsessions related to it, because of her illness, bulimia. This is how she plans to create performances and "living pictures" to represent these delicate issues. The first staging linked to that diary, and to his inner chaos, is called "The Book of Food", and it uses clumsy and untidy women, flesh and blood, of different ages and ethnicities, more or less naked, to focus his reflections on themes such as the gaze, desire, fashion, embarrassment and the discomfort of feeling exposed, "naked".
The artist also wanted to represent the struggle and conflict with her own body by having girls in whom she mirrors herself, involved in the performance, wear her own underclothes.
Vanessa's most famous performance related to these themes dates back to almost 20 years ago, in 2003, called VB52. It consists of a banquet (a long table), consumed by 32 diners, who in this case are models, some half-naked, others increasingly dressed as one moves towards the end of the table. Because the table is the place where those secret meals are consumed, those orgies of food called binges, intimate moments with oneself that no one must know about. They are moments in which one manages, in an illusory and temporary way, to calm thoughts, anxieties, fears and to fill those voids, which at that moment, apparently only food can do. At the same time, however, the table is also the place where one is most afraid when suffering from an eating disorder. Especially when at that table there are other people with whom you have to share the meal, people to whom you want to seem normal, people who are serene and happy (perhaps in appearance) and who eat with taste having a healthy relationship with food, and that therefore create in you even more discomfort and at the same time envy, because you would like to enjoy the meal peacefully too, anxiety because you have to force yourself to eat and think about how many calories you are going to ingest, and finally the fear and hope of being discovered.
The women sitting at the table include Vanessa's mother and sister, probably to show how eating disorders sometimes inevitably involve the whole family.
When I suffered from eating disorders as a teenager, the members of my family were the ones who caused me the most fear and anxiety at the same time, because they were aware of the problem and I felt all the weight of their love, at that moment broken by a daughter who was letting herself die, of their displeasure, their disappointment, their fear and their anger.
Vanessa's works, and her performances, are unique and touching encounters between models and spectators, staging important and delicate issues such as shame, social taboos, voyeurism, and eating disorders, trying to raise awareness and prevent them in order to pay more and more attention to young people. Although they date back almost 20 years, Vanessa's performances are extremely contemporary because they touch on issues that are unfortunately still too present and widespread today and that I sometimes fear are increasing with the incorrect and disproportionate use of social media with images and videos that distort reality.
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