Vulnerability, Confrontation, and Moncler Genius: Understanding Vanessa Beecroft’s Latest Work in Milan
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Vanessa Beecroft is back in Milan—the city in which she was once an art student and where she presented her very first piece, VB1—to present a new piece later this evening in partnership with Moncler. Remo Ruffini’s outerwear label is everywhere right now thanks to its ongoing Genius collaboration projects, and tonight’s Beecroft performance will mark the opening of a new temporary Genius store in the soaring Belle Epoque retail cathedral that is Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. A few hours before the show, Beecroft is to be found in the concrete exhibition space in the northeast of town. Flanked by assistants, she is softly skipping from one side of a trestle table to another, chewing nuts as she arranges her freshly shot Polaroids of the models and dancers cast in the performance ahead. Her dress is black and lightly crumpled from movement, her red hair a halo wildly ruffled from work.
“Usually this process doesn’t exist,” she says of the photo editing. “I usually do photography just before the performance, live.” Tonight’s performance, however, will be presented in a public space, affording no opportunity for her to shoot it in situ before it is exposed to the audience.
Beecroft’s métier is humanscapes, installations of individual humans who, en masse, contemplate the audience contemplating them. The casting of those individuals and the clothing they wear serve to inform the subject that Beecroft is exploring. Broadly this subject is human difference—difference in shape, difference in color, difference in gender—and our perception of it. First in the conventional contemporary-art world, then working hand in hand with Kanye West on Yeezy and other projects, and latterly through corporate collaborations such as this one, Beecroft has devoted her practice to interrogating prejudices and exposing vulnerabilities. Tonight’s performers will be wearing Moncler, naturally, but interestingly the jackets on the rails here are all vintage, a mishmash of pieces and styles. What is that about?
Before she can explain Beecroft suggests we find a room away from the hullabaloo of preparation. It takes a few minutes, during which I glean that this is not an artist who confines herself to gnomic silence. Even before we sit down, she tells me that her English father, Andrew Beecroft, lived in London’s Holland Park, looked like Michael Caine, and “spoke to death every day.” Beecroft’s conversation is deeply unfiltered and sometimes as confrontational as the human vistas she invites us to gaze upon. Below, edited, is a written run-through of some of what she had to say.
Your artistic medium is the people you cast, but is it fair to say that clothes have always played an important part in the tableaux you create?
As I’ve repeated many times, I was raised with a little bit of discrimination towards fashion, from my mother and my family. However they were wearing black, they were wearing colors and choosing particular items, so they weren’t unaware of wardrobe.
What was their discrimination toward fashion based upon?
That was never explained to me. It was never clarified. But my intuition was that perhaps they think it’s vain. They were more monastic, but I was ashamed. I remember my first issue of Vogue, which I love, I bought and hid under a mattress. I remembered this recently while I watched the documentary about Franca Sozzani because the first issue I bought was the first issue that she did! So that was when I started discovering Helmut Newton, Steven Meisel, all those photographers, and the models, Linda Evangelista, Kirsten Owen. I started to rip out the pages and keep them.
So wardrobe in my work is important. It almost creates a hierarchical system, so I use clothes to define. For instance in Brazil [VB50, 2002], the short girls were wearing flat Alaïa ballet shoes, the middle-sized girls were wearing midsize heels, and the tall girls wore tall heels to reiterate the injustice. From the beginning I cared for certain designers because their shapes were more beautiful. The look of a Manolo Blahnik shoe is very clean. In my work a shoe by Manolo became something else, a dress by Margiela became something else. Margiela burned a dress for me! So sometimes I’ve had the chance to do these collaborations.
For this collaboration, then, why are you using vintage Moncler pieces?
First of all I am against contemporary society. I don’t like new things. I like old—not necessarily vintage because I am a germaphobe, so I have a problem! But I like to adopt or inherit from other people. I also like old-looking sportswear. I love that faded look of vintage sportswear, so my first step was I went online to look for all the brown-beige shades, skin tones, in Moncler vintage. It was impossible to buy them because there wasn’t enough time. So Moncler went into their archive [to find these]. I wanted them to be distressed and used. Also because in today’s world I would rather recycle, use what we already have and repurpose it. At Kanye West’s Madison Square Garden show [for Yeezy], I repurposed I don’t know how many garments from Adidas and then dyed them in new colors. They came out purple and magenta, cyan, and crazy colors. So my immediate thought [for Moncler] was to use what was out there already.