Vanessa Beecroft: Jane Bleibt Jane

Edited by Chris Kraus. Conversation with Vanessa Beecroft, Chris Kraus, Miltos Manetas, Jeffrey Deitch, Donatien Grau, Hamza Walker, Stacey McKenzie, Vanessa Place.

SIGNED X VANESSA BEECROFT @ ARTBOOK H&W 


Performance artist Vanessa Beecroft (born 1969) is best known for her large-scale, regimentally choreographed performances and tableaux vivants involving naked or nearly naked women. In the 2010s she was a frequent collaborator with Kanye West, serving as creative lead for his "Runaway" music video and designing the first four presentations of his Yeezy collection. In Jane Bleibt Jane, Beecroft reflects on her career thus far through six in-depth conversations. Originating from a 2015 conversation between Christian Krachet and Walther Konig about the artist's work, the publisher then invited her to reflect upon her own performances. The title refers to a conversation with model Stacey McKenzie that Beecroft recorded in 2022 in collaboration with Chris Kraus—and to a film admired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, though no one involved has seen it.

Since the early 1990s, Vanessa Beecroft (b. 1969, Genoa, Italy) has developed a distinct visual language rooted in staged performance. Often composed of nude or semi-nude female figures, her live performances interrogate the tenuous ideals of beauty, the politics of display, and power dynamics through their exploration of vulnerability and control, collectivity and individuality, exposure and concealment. Beecroft’s practice spans photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture, each medium serving as a means to extend and re-contextualize the themes first articulated in her live works. Beecroft draws on classical influences, particularly from the Renaissance, to simultaneously evoke and subvert traditional representations of the human form. Her impact extends to the realms of fashion, film, and music, as she is one of the first contemporary artists to collaborate with major fashion houses, notably Louis Vuitton. In the words of Jeffrey Deitch “Vanessa Beecroft is one of the rare artists who invented a new way to make a work of art. Ninety-nine percent of artists are treading ground that’s already well established, they are making small innovations, and then there are very rare artists who come up with a whole new concept of how to make a work of art and expand our sense of what a work of art can be. Vanessa Beecroft has done that.”

Walther König 
Hardcover, 9.25 x 12 in. | 638 pgs