Performance Detail

As everything becomes intangible and can be expanded endlessly within our minds, the presence of the individual in space appears more irrelevant than ever. Computers' intangibilities become the preferred mode of encounters. Yet Beecroft's tableau vivant, which swings into a performance atmosphere as the public reacts to it, questions the very irrelevance of this subject in space. If painting induces remembrance, the women used by this artist as pure figurative elements induce a new kind of veneration because they appear visibly before the viewers' eyes and are present before their own bod- ies. While the experience of painting offers a challenge only at an intellectual level, these half-naked people wearing strange wigs challenge the audience on a physical level, performing one of the most powerful acts of passive-aggression known in recent contemporary art.
Text written by Curator Francesco Bonami for the exhibition catalog.