The Circular Gaze and Objectification of the Female Body: VB35 at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (original) (raw)

V. International Interdisciplinary Conference on Gender and Women’s Studies

The disputable issues encircling the representation of the female body in contemporary art are inextricably linked with the phenomenon of sexual objectification, which primarily represents the subject as an object of desire and plays a significant role in gender disparity and violence. In 1998, Vanessa Beecroft exhibited one of her controversial VB performances entitled VB35, also known as Show, at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The contemporary artist displayed high-heeled doppelgänger-looking female models under the domed rotunda of the museum, either in lingerie or nude, to her spectators juxtaposed around the cylindrical ramp of the building. Positioned in space and obsessively controlled, the body displayed as tableaux-vivants in the performance correlates with several requisite subjects of the contemporary debate, including sexual objectification and the concept of the gaze. Based on Beecroft’s allegedly feminist perspective and VB35 performance, I discuss the artist’s representation of the female body as an immobile object of desire adopting a Mulveyian framework. I support my argument by analyzing two art critics’ articles on VB35 to explore the museum’s contribution to objectification with its spatial settings and the aura of consecration. Notwithstanding the initial idea of Beecroft’s use of the female body to criticize consumer society and ‘challenge the gaze of male’ in her performances, I question the inevitable paradox and jeopardy of commodification when the female body is exposed to the eyes of the beholder as an image to be looked at, especially in sexualized outfits. Although it has been more than twenty years since the artist tabled her subjects to the appetite of viewers, a critical concern remains to-date: How is it possible to expostulate the consumption of the female body by doing the very same while opposing the issue?

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