Gillian Wearing is notorious for using the public in her work. Many of her works have a similar concern with discovering details about individuals. This concern can be seen in one of her best known pieces and her first major work entitled: Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say. This piece is made up of a series of photographs of random people holding up pieces of paper in which they were asked to write something on. Wearing got them to spontaneously write words on a piece of paper expressing some kind of thought or emotion. This piece became extremely well known and essentially helped establish Wearing’s career. Many of Gillian Wearing’s other works include similar uses of the public, such as video taping people’s confessions, video taping drunk men in a studio and making a video that documented the typical behavior of British teenagers who go out at night to various clubs and consume a large amount of alcohol. Wearing states that a great deal of her work is “about questioning handed-down truths.” In her working with the public, Gillian Wearing is trying to discover new things about people, and in the process she claims to learn discover a great deal about herself.
Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models. Her work combines classical Italian tradition, radical performance art and fashion show theatrics. In many of her works, the live female is the primary material. The women are usually nude, and stand motionless and are unapproachable to the viewers. One of her exhibitions brings together 13 new wax and gesso sculptures cast from live models, lying on coffin-like bases, beside 20 live naked female models in white body make-up. Beecroft’s women are meant to be virtually indistinguishable from the sculpted casts. The primary material in Beecroft’s work is the live figure, which remains ephemeral, separate and unmediated by any device we normally accept as artform, such as painting or photography. In her performance VB16, Vanessa Beecroft sets a group of characters, a homogenous selection of almost nude young women, in a tableau vivant. All the components of the installation, the number and look of the girls, what they wear and how they pose, have been meticulously chosen by the artist to mirror her concerns, usually about her own body. In these exhibitions, the underlying reason for these nude women is to address her own internal conflicts with food and her body. Fashion is used by Beecroft not to individuate but to homogenize, and even nudity is exploited not as an expression of sexuality but rather as a way of reducing the models to an appearance of sameness. After all, nudity is our original uniform from birth. In her more recent works, Beecroft has used men dressed in military uniform to portray other ideas. In most of her works, Beecroft uses the public, particularly nude women and uniformed men, in order to abstract from the sculpture and turn it into a living model that is no longer timeless.
Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models. Her work combines classical Italian tradition, radical performance art and fashion show theatrics. In many of her works, the live female is the primary material. The women are usually nude, and stand motionless and are unapproachable to the viewers. One of her exhibitions brings together 13 new wax and gesso sculptures cast from live models, lying on coffin-like bases, beside 20 live naked female models in white body make-up. Beecroft’s women are meant to be virtually indistinguishable from the sculpted casts. The primary material in Beecroft’s work is the live figure, which remains ephemeral, separate and unmediated by any device we normally accept as artform, such as painting or photography. In her performance VB16, Vanessa Beecroft sets a group of characters, a homogenous selection of almost nude young women, in a tableau vivant. All the components of the installation, the number and look of the girls, what they wear and how they pose, have been meticulously chosen by the artist to mirror her concerns, usually about her own body. In these exhibitions, the underlying reason for these nude women is to address her own internal conflicts with food and her body. Fashion is used by Beecroft not to individuate but to homogenize, and even nudity is exploited not as an expression of sexuality but rather as a way of reducing the models to an appearance of sameness. After all, nudity is our original uniform from birth. In her more recent works, Beecroft has used men dressed in military uniform to portray other ideas. In most of her works, Beecroft uses the public, particularly nude women and uniformed men, in order to abstract from the sculpture and turn it into a living model that is no longer timeless.
