Vanessa Beecroft - When Art is Disturbing

Beecroft most often uses female models -- thin, tall women usually dressed alike or with similar hair color -- then posed in the art gallery with just red stockings or with black tee shirts but no skirt or pants.  The viewer is surprised...becomes a voyeur -- and the artist questions the interpretations we place on the female body and the very notion of looking.

The Darfur piece exposes similar discomfort with looking. Black women's bodies lie face down in pools of blood, a reference to the mass killings at Darfur in the Sudan. Perhaps we as modern voyeurs become too accustomed to seeing atrocities in the media -- we make only superficial

 

connections to the shocking events of our world; there is something about confronting live nude bodes in an art gallery setting that truly jars us provoking a more profound sense of the horrors on war.