Gillian Wearing and Vanessa Beecroft are two contemporary female artists whose use of performance art and the public sphere make their sometimes-shocking work even more influential. Both artists use performance art and/or public interactions as their median of self-expression.

Gillian Wearing was born in Birmingham, England and attended the prestigious Goldsmiths College. Much of Wearing’s works involves participation from complete strangers. Her first major work, “Signs that say what you want them to say and now Signs that say what someone else wants you to say” took place in 1992-1993. Within this work, Wearing found random strangers on the street and asked them to write anything they wanted on a piece of paper, which they then held up while Wearing photographed them. The responses we all different, ranging from a police officer who wrote “HELP!” to a businessman who wrote “I’m desperate”. Wearing’s interactions with strangers continued in 1994 when she asked random people to confess on video. While many of her works explore human emotions and intimacies, her work entitled “Drunk” is one that I have trouble understand. Within “Drunk”, Wearing filmed four drunk men wondering around a studio. This film does not seem to have any deeper meaning and it’s also unoriginal (any Siena student could film their drunk friend and have a similar outcome).

Similar to Gillian Wearing, Vanessa Beecroft uses the pubic sphere to hold many of her performance pieces. Beecroft, born in Genoa Italy, creates performance art pieces, often for specific places in order to comment on that locations history or social influence. Most of Beecroft’s performances involve live female models, which are often naked for the entirety of the performance. In 2005, Beecroft held her performance entitled “VB55” in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Germany. VB55 was made up of 100 naked female models, wearing panty hose. The women were assembled according to hair color and the pattern in which they were placed resembled the colors of the German flag. Most of Beecroft’s performances are similar to VB55, which attempt to comment not only on the location, but also the use of female bodies.

Wearing and Beecrofts’s performance art pieces can be seen as a bit controversial, especially Beecrofts. The use of naked women poses some concerns, which causes many of her performances to be closed off to a large part of the public. While the two women take different approaches in using public interaction, they both succeed in expressing their creativity and artistic talent. When comparing their works, I favored Wearing’s over Beecroft’s because of Wearing’s ability to get complete strangers to confess their inner thoughts and feelings. Nevertheless, both women are seen as highly influential in the contemporary world of performance and public art.

By Hildy