The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins opens in Toronto on March 20 and Vancouver on March 27, with more Canadian dates to follow.
A portrait in pushing boundaries and people
Vanessa Beecroft's art shocks many viewers. And a new film suggests her methods can be just as controversial.
GUY DIXON
March 18, 2009
Performance artist Vanessa Beecroft, a white woman with reddish hair, is breastfeeding two black children, her breasts protruding through slits cut down the front of her dress.
She has a nurturing, if sombre, expression on her face. But the charred hem of her dress and the stark background of the image - one of the most controversial photos the Italian-born artist has made in recent years - places it far from the benign world view of, say, a Benetton ad.
Or does it? Why should the image of a woman breastfeeding two black children, in this case orphaned twins the artist tried to adopt in southern Sudan, be controversial at all? Why is it that some viewers detect an attitude of superiority toward these children?
These are some of the uncomfortable questions that come up in Pietra Brettkelly's documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, opening this Friday. But instead of merely showing the public reaction to Beecroft's work, the New Zealand-based director goes further - exploring how the image was created and the difficulties, many self-created, that Beecroft encountered along the way.
The filmmaker met the New York-based artist in the Sudan by chance while Beecroft was working on her photo project and Brettkelly was making a different documentary.
"She had gone out there to try to understand the whole Darfur situation with an Italian delegation," said Bretkelly. "She says that she was on a plane from New York to Italy at one stage and picked up a newspaper, and Darfur was on the front page. And she said, 'What is this? I think I need to understand it more.' "
In the film, Beecroft describes this sudden interest in the Sudan in breathless, accented English. But her voice also conveys a certain amazement and insistence that can come across as either naive or manipulative - except, perhaps, to Brettkelly.
The filmmaker talks about Beecroft as if she's still trying to understand her. And the film takes an objective stance on her work. The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins simply shows the intense factors surrounding Beecroft as she makes her art - from her obsessive failed attempt to adopt the twins (which nearly breaks up her marriage back in the United States) to her insistence on photographing the children (which upsets Sudanese locals).
In one of the most poignant scenes in the film, women from the orphanage try to stop Beecroft and her photographer (also white) from shooting the twins unclothed in the village church.
Beecroft is trying to capture them with the cherubic look they have throughout the photo series. But instead of heeding the locals, she races through the photo shoot in a panic - and at a certain point even barricades herself inside the church.
"What comes first, the genius or the personality? I've often asked people this," Brettkelly said. "She really pushes boundaries and pushes people. But is that her, or has the art community encouraged her to be like that, because the personality sells the art?
"That really interests me. I haven't quite decided which comes first. But I do think she is a genius. Just from talking to her, her command of language is extraordinary. How she thinks and writes, and what she references, and historically what she draws on, is amazing."
Beecroft's fame - and notoriety - first came from her installation pieces of naked women standing in galleries, posing often to the point of exhaustion. Questions about self-image and the act of observing are at the core of her work, which some art-world observers link to Renaissance painting in terms of its attentiveness to the human form and its sense of stillness. The photos in the Sudanese series also have clear religious references.
But Beecroft's work also straddles the line between art and fashion. This can make her more accessible, says Brettkelly - but can also be offensive to some viewers. For example, the film shows how digitally manipulated the Sudanese photos are: Beecroft's hair is changed and some of the unique characteristics of the location are removed from the image.
Even before she went to Africa, Beecroft included African women in her art. But as Brettkelly explained, the situation on the continent began to interest her, "so she thought, 'Well, I'm going to try to get to the actual scene.' " She ended up in southern Sudan, hundreds of miles from the western Darfur region.
As for filming Beecroft at work there, "I've never come across a subject that allowed me access all the time, every time," Brettkelly said. But the filmmaker also admitted that ultimately she found this exhausting, mainly, she hinted, because of the input Beecroft tried to have in the editing process.
But then the director stopped herself from saying more - she clearly wants the film to speak for itself, and for viewers to draw their own conclusions about Beecroft.
"I just think she's got this incredible drive to do her art. She can't live without doing art. Everybody in her life becomes part of her art. For her, there's no barrier. If she's experiencing something, she's photographing it or painting it," Brettkelly said.
"People either really love her or are disgusted or appalled by her behaviour ... One person [at a screening] said that Van Gogh was apparently a really hideous person [to be around], yet we find his work extraordinary. And therefore we should allow artists to do what they do."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090318.ASTAR18//TPStory/Entertainment
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Film portrait of an art star is not so black and white
Is controversial artist Vanessa Beecroft a genius or a narcissist who's gone too far?
March 19, 2009
PETER GODDARD SPECIAL TO THE STAR
The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins may be the film world's most fearsome title since Snakes on a Plane.
Seeing an airborne Burmese python surely can't compare with horrifying visions of unspeakable indulgences conveyed by the very idea of the "art star." In this regard, Art Star delivers big time in its daunting portrait of Vanessa Beecroft. It opens in Toronto tomorrow at the Cumberland Theatre.
Over the years, the Italian-American performance artist's pathological fear of becoming fat has led her to pose silent battalions of nude or near-nude women before blasé wine-sipping art mavens at high-end museums and galleries. Museums everywhere still vie for her Playboy-esque, nubile installations.
Beecroft tops herself in Art Star, though. Her plan to adopt twin Sudanese orphans Madit and Mangor Akot as an art event – the artist sees herself as a retro-Renaissance Virgin Mary suckling the infants – makes similar cross-cultural adoption efforts by Madonna and Angelina Jolie seem wholly selfless by comparison.
One quickly comes to believe that Beecroft masochistically enjoys the universal condemnation hurled her way because of this plan. When a number of Sudanese churchwomen burst into a church where Beecroft is photographing the twins naked, the artist seems utterly bewildered. It's not right, the women insist. Beecroft doesn't understand. If she's doing it, it must be right.
So credit is due Pietra Brettkelly, Art Star's New Zealand director/producer, in humanizing an artist who's other observable talent is attracting invective worthy of a serial killer. (Following the film's appearance at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, one reviewer concluded that Beecroft is a "hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist.")
"I didn't want to just show all her attitude and how she treats people," says Brettkelly, who hadn't heard of Beecroft before they met in 2006 when the documentarian arrived in south Sudan shooting a doc based on New Zealanders living abroad. Brettkelly describes herself as "a general punter on the streets" when it comes to high-end art.
"I wanted the audience to feel (something for her) and not completely dislike her," Brettkelly elaborated during a recent interview. "I personally wouldn't want to go to a movie to just see somebody ranting.
"Besides, it wasn't hell all the time with her. There were some really great fun moments. She's great to have a glass of wine at the end of the day with. She's incredibly warm and friendly and encouraging and generous. Some days I was just so fond of her. Other days she was so frustrating, rude and abusive, and not just to me but to the people around her."
Beecroft's overwhelming self-centredness undermines Brettkelly's best intentions at every turn, though. The adoption plans, by no means welcome by Sudanese officials, catch social anthropologist Greg Durkin, the artist's husband, by surprise. He's aghast. "It's almost too selfish," he says.
Almost? Beecroft and Durkin have separated since Art Star's release, although Brettkelly told me she felt Durkin was "the rock" in Beecroft's life. The artist, although taken away at an early age from her English father by her Italian mother, seems to enjoy her jet-setting life. It's a way around not facing certain basic truths.
Aside from Brettkelly herself, Beecroft's apologists are found almost entirely in the art world, whose welfare depends in part on Beecroft's latest outrage.
"There's never been anything like the double breastfeeding photo," says the artist's New York dealer, Jeffrey Deitch. "It is a disturbing beauty."
He's right. But that's not what Art Star is about. In the film, the disturbing beauty is the artist herself, who believes her excesses are not merely justified in the name of art; they are her art.
http://www.thestar.com/article/603827
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Artful dodger
A new doc explores artist Vanessa Beecroft's controversial adoption efforts
Filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly, left, together with her subject, artist Vanessa Beecroft.
(Frank Micelotta/Getty Images)
Performance artist Vanessa Beecroft's intention to adopt orphaned babies Madit and Mongor Akot comes under scrutiny in the film documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins. (Vanessa Beecroft/Pietra Brettkelly)
The photograph is clearly meant to be a shove and a slap, and it is: A white woman in an angelic white dress, burnt along the bottom like a baked doily, nurses two black babies, one on each breast. In this portrait, the deified figures are not the babies, but the Madonna front and centre: Vanessa Beecroft, a 39-year-old Italian-British artist.
'There aren’t many people who feel lightly about Vanessa [Beecroft]. It’s either love or hate.'
— Filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly
For her, the image is a piece of reverse colonialism, an attempt to rewrite the history of wet nurses of colour enlisted in the service of white Western women. But as with all of Beecroft’s work, the photograph is also painfully personal. In 2006, she travelled to Sudan and on her first day there met Madit and Mongor Akot at an orphanage. The baby boys needed to be nursed, and Beecroft stepped in, able to do so because she was still breastfeeding her youngest son in New York. Whether she bonded intensely with the children, or had a selfish urge to live out the Angelina Jolie fantasy of salvation through adoption — perhaps a combination of both — Beecroft began efforts to formally adopt the boys.
But Sudan has no laws around adoption and, indeed, no cultural concept of it. In this way, the now-famous portrait that resulted, like the story behind it, is not merely an artistic provocation, but an outrage to many, an extension of colonialism rather than a refutation.
For 16 months, New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly followed Beecroft around. The resulting documentary, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, has become a lightning rod for both the artist’s followers and those with strong opinions about international adoption. Echoing other reviews, a seething post on the blog of New York magazine last year read: “The doc cluster-bombs her faddish fascination with Sudanese orphans and paints Beecroft as a hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist.”
Brettkelly had no idea Beecroft was such a divisive figure when they met; in fact, she had never heard of her. The director was travelling the world working on a documentary about New Zealanders living abroad. She landed in Sudan's Darfur region, where she and her crew slept in a camp for aid workers and visitors. Amid that crowd, the strikingly beautiful Beecroft and her team of photographers and assistants stood out.
“We hooked up with her every night,” says Brettkelly, who is 42 and appears to share Beecroft’s glamorous tendencies, wearing a shimmering, floor-length black dress during an interview in a Toronto hotel room. “She said she was a performance artist and I had no idea what that meant. I thought she was just a dancer doing some wacky dancing in flowy, tie-dyed skirts.”
Brettkelly laughs now at her naïveté, but it served her well. When she discovered that Beecroft was interested in adopting, Brettkelly asked if she could film the process, and Beecroft agreed. “I kept asking why and she told me, ‘Because you know nothing about me,’” says Brettkelly.
Brettkelly only figured out she was dealing with a renowned conceptual artist when she joined Beecroft at the Venice Biennale in 2007 for a performance called VB61: Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?. There, Beecroft delivered a variation on her signature installations, in which groups of women stand or sit without moving for hours at a time. The direct feminism of those works — Beecroft, who has had a lifelong eating disorder, is in constant conversation with the female body as object — absorbed new meaning in Venice. The documentary shows Beecroft arranging 30 African women across a white floor, trailing red paint across their still bodies.
“I was incredibly moved,” Brettkelly says. “The stuff in L.A. with white models hadn’t done much for me, but this I understood.”
Both the art and the adoption end up receding in The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins. Instead, Beecroft’s private damage moves to the forefront: Her father and mother both make appearances in the film, describing an isolated, intellectual, precocious childhood in the Italian countryside. At one point in the film, Beecroft’s husband, Greg Durkin, now a film executive, is flabbergasted that she has initiated the adoption without informing him.
When Brettkelly showed Beecroft a 3½-hour cut of the doc, her subject was initially pleased. But after viewing the edited version, Beecroft sent Brettkelly a laundry list of things she wanted changed, and eventually enlisted a lawyer. Brettkelly says she didn’t alter the film based on Beecroft’s complaints, and it certainly doesn’t feel like a vanity project. The doc is sympathetic to Beecroft, who struggles with depression, but it isn’t always flattering. In one particularly difficult scene, Beecroft is shooting the babies in a church in Sudan when a few local women pound the door, outraged that the children are being photographed naked, and accusing Beecroft’s translator of corroborating with “the whites.”
Brettkelly recalls that as the screaming escalated, she considered putting down the camera and getting involved. “My camera man was beside me and I said, ‘Oh God, what do I do? What do I do? Am I going to step in here?’ But really quickly I could see these women didn’t need some white woman to step in. They knew what was right and wrong in their world, and I thought, ‘Okay, I’m fine right here, behind the camera.’ ”
Anyone who wants to write off Beecroft can zone in on her casual white privilege, especially when she bars the door to the church and mutters, “Christ, these people.” But Brettkelly’s film also constantly reminds the viewer that Beecroft is a fiercely driven artist, doing whatever it takes to produce the work she genuinely thinks will change the world. Subtly, the doc asks whether male and female artists are scrutinized or judged in the same way. Is it too simple to dismiss a fashionable, beautiful woman preoccupied by food and the female body — the former considered trivial and the latter an obsession historically left to male artists?
Of their relationship today, Brettkelly says, “It’s incredibly rough. She’s very up and down. She was tough at times, but also incredibly generous. It’s not a friendship, but it has intimacy. I’m always very careful how I am with her. She’s a woman who has achieved amazing things. She’s a brilliant artist. I can’t judge how she has to operate in that world.” Brettkelly pauses. “But to judge someone in a developing country interacting with the locals, that’s a different story.”
Despite the threatened lawsuit, Beecroft appeared at Sundance in 2008 and defended herself, and has become more famous because of the film, collaborating with Kanye West on a performance to launch his last album. She and her husband are also in the process of a divorce, according to Brettkelly.
The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins continues to divide audiences. Brettkelly describes a screening where a man stood up and said, “I find this appalling. It’s disgusting.” Another woman in the audience cut him off. “She said: ‘I completely identify with her. She thinks differently than us. She’s an artist. She’s showing us a way into issues we don’t talk about.’ There aren’t many people who feel lightly about Vanessa. It’s either love or hate.”
Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.
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