i need a loft bed

PC

The other night I hiked up the hill to SFAI so that I could see what I knew would be a crude documentary on the life of Vanessa Beecroft and her desire to adopt Sudanese twins. I'm referring to Pietra Brettkelly's The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins. I was surprised to find that Beecroft's eating disorder was not the main topic of this highly contrasted (the colors were totally off, and I don't think it could be entirely attributed to the bright colors found in Sudan) film. Glen Helfand introduced the film with a painful expression on his face, then sat down and it started to play. Painful it was, to watch a prim Vanessa Beecroft with her limp-wristed photographer Mathu (matthew?....the way he said it made it sound as though you could spell his name more exotically). Mathu (let's just call him that for now), came equipped with fans and lights and cameras and water bottles and martin margiela boots...and all Vanessa could talk about while breast-feeding two "starving" Sudanese twins, was her silk martin margiela boobless dress. Yes, she refers to all of the typical "other" conversations such as the white Madonna coming in with her pendulous breasts, bearing food for...etc. etc. The entire documentary seemed to catalog each and every topic that Edward Said, Marcus Garvey, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have ever written about. Yet, Beecroft continued to prance about in front of the camera, carefree. Is this a performance? I kept asking myself. Is it an extension of her already narcissistic bodies (literally) of work? I guess it was not ironic that SFAI chose to screen the film on Columbus Day.


Other works that I've seen recently (at the Whitney Biennial) that seem to relate:

Olaf Breuning's video work Home


Sherrie Levine's Makonde Body Masks

eastern european kitsch