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"  Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.\u2014Frank O&amp;#039;Hara Tej Kaur, the white- turbaned teacher at Golden Bridge Yoga in Los Angeles, is instructing us to hold our splayed hands at eye level, then to put our thumbs together to create the letter V, pressing hard enough that they change color. &amp;quot;Stare at the V until you can see its image even when your eyes are closed,&amp;quot; she says, then plays chants on her iPod to begin an 11-minute meditation. V is for vision, vendetta, violence, vi\u00ADbrancy, valor, Valium, virgin, voracious, vital, vibrations\u2014and it&amp;#039;s the lone letter that shows up in the from line when the artist Vanessa Beecroft sends an e-mail inviting you to take yoga with her the morning after you arrive in Los Angeles from New York at 4 a.m. to interview her. It&amp;#039;s either a generous offer or a sadistic one; after spending three days with her, I&amp;#039;m still not sure. One minute into the meditation, triceps burn and many hands in the class drop. Beecroft&amp;#039;s arms stay steady, her thumbs pressing actively. Her beautiful, high-cheekboned, wide-planed face cranes forward as she chants, her chin tilted up in what I will come to realize is one of her physiognomic signatures, as though she were expecting the spirit to bend down from the clouds and kiss her on the lips. Tej has told us that this meditation is for stability. &amp;quot;You know people who are on a higher energy plane, who fall off, make people around them insecure?&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Be stable in your higher consciousness, for those around you and for yourself.&amp;quot; Beecroft herself is struggling with this very issue. The art star, known for her iconic live performances of naked women standing in public spaces, has recently uprooted herself from her studio and modernist house in the woods outside of New York to follow her husband to Los Angeles in an attempt to save their marriage. And a controversial new documentary called The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins that screened in January at the Sundance Film Festival, which follows her trying to adopt African twins, has already incited accusations of superficiality, narcissism, and colonialism. When it hits art houses, it will doubtless open the floodgates, as her work and life are wont to do, of both sympathy and contempt. Even if you don&amp;#039;t follow the art world, you&amp;#039;ve probably been influenced by Bee\u00ADcroft&amp;#039;s aesthetic. During her performances, near-naked models stand in geometric formation in galleries, museums, and fashion boutiques, often in designer high heels, their skin smoothed with makeup. The performers are instructed not to smile or talk and to stand for hours until they droop like unwatered tulips on their skinny stalks. To fund her often mobbed projects (all titled VB followed by a number, the next one, in June, being VB 62), she sells photographs of them. Those performances, and the slightly plastic, alien, disaffected looks of the photos, &amp;quot;entered into public consciousness very quickly and in quite a profound way,&amp;quot; says Jeffrey Deitch, who opened his downtown gallery space with her first U.S. solo performance in 1996. For evidence, look back, for instance, to the spring 2004 Prada ad campaign, in which wan men and women with artificially smooth skin stare into the camera, devoid of affect. Inspiring Beecroft&amp;#039;s work, aside from art and film history, has always been her own obsessive-compulsive relationship with food and body image. While her symptoms do not conform to typical anorexia or bulimia, she is tormented by what she consumes, convinced she is loathsome, fat, and impure if she strays from a minimal diet of organic vegetables and Kombucha tea. Her condition was exposed to the public in a now- renowned 2003 New Yorker article by Judith Thurman that was gobbled up by women who came of age with Beecroft, who was born in 1969. Whether she was providing, as one oft-cited critic put it, &amp;quot;Hooters for intellectuals,&amp;quot; or was a sadist, a postfeminist visionary, or a souless fashion fiend didn&amp;#039;t matter. We saw in her and her work a more extreme version of ourselves and wanted to keep looking, if only to figure it all out. Now Beecroft is on to something new. One stunning, scandalous image that could serve as an announcement for what we might call VBPARTII, LA is a 2006 portrait of Beecroft in which she has staged herself in a whitewashed concrete Catholic mission church in South Sudan as a Mary figure. She wears a virginal white dress with a burned hem that Martin Margiela created from a drawing she faxed him. A slit runs down the length of each breast, and there, in stark contrast to her fair skin and dress, two shining ebony twin babies suckle. If Beecroft was the mirror in the late &amp;#039;90s and early &amp;#039;00s for our tortured relationships with models, fashion, food, shame, and desire, then this latest African adoption controversy and the work that she is currently incubating promise to offer us a stage on which to understand (or just be further confounded by) where we are now: culturally obsessed with motherhood, anxious about aging, trying and failing to escape our narcissistic consumerism and become global citizens, and hoping, possibly through more yoga, to resolve the mind/body split once and for all. Beecroft was raised in a strange petri dish of isolated femininity by her intellectual Italian mother (they left her British father when she was two) in a small northern Italian village, painting and drawing constantly, atten\u00ADding avant-garde cinema with her mother (&amp;quot;I saw Scenes From a Marriage when I was five&amp;quot;), who imposed a macrobiotic diet (&amp;quot;Sometimes we had carrots for dinner&amp;quot;). As adolescence hit, she was gripped by shame at her changing body, which she placated by keeping a diary of everything she ate. This led to her first artistic breakthrough while at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. &amp;quot;I was focused entirely on philosophical and political issues,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But when a professor asked me to participate in a show, the only thing I could really bring as true evidence of me was the book of food. A drawing or photograph would not be as true. Then I brought the girls to enforce the diary. They were not models, but all of them had issues related to food; you could tell.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;d found her m\u00E9tier. Deitch is adamant that Beecroft&amp;#039;s shows are visions of female empowerment and not at all erotic, as though admitting to an element of sex would weaken their artistic merit. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re voyeuristic; big difference,&amp;quot; he insists. Well, in my Freud books, these two human tics afflict the same face. Her unabashedly objectifying shows are empowering insofar as men&amp;#039;s perceptions of the women are beside the point. When she notices me surreptitiously glancing at a suspiciously too-skinny blond hanging around the yoga studio, she whispers conspiratorially, &amp;quot;Yes, exactly, she is one who I would have put in my shows.&amp;quot; Beecroft speaks Miu Miu, she speaks art history, she speaks just 15 pounds lighter; she has our number. She has never had a day job or family money (which evaporated with her father), but she has been able to live, first humbly, now rather lavishly, through her art. She established herself in New York, then in 2000 married the sweet, nerdy-handsome non-art-worlder Greg Durkin, a steady ballast for her tempestuous redhead. Today, sitting at Golden Bridge&amp;#039;s Nite Moon caf\u00E9 after class, amid all the potential starlets and ex-models and old Topanga Canyon hippies at yoga, Beecroft, 39, carefully but unselfconsciously chic in a muted, metallic Margiela blazer thrown over American Apparel workout clothes, emanates a particularly alluring radiance. Her charisma is enhanced by a mellifluous Italian accent and the slight quality of otherworldly detachment she brings to the quotidian, perhaps because of her isolated, girl-in-the-forest upbringing or too much Bergman at a young age. Beecroft claims that even now, coping with her eating disorder continues to inform her art and daily routine. &amp;quot;Last night I had to work, so I ate chocolate,&amp;quot; she admits. &amp;quot;I wrote pages of stuff; but then this morning I scrubbed with this dry brush for an hour hoping my body would dissolve under the brush.&amp;quot; Still, something has shifted. Almost immediately after marrying Durkin (in a staged &amp;quot;VBGDW&amp;quot; ceremony where all the guests wore white Prada, Alberta Ferretti, Allesandro Dell&amp;#039;Acqua, and Trussardi), she got pregnant with Dean, now six, and three years later delivered Virgil. After having her two children, she muses, &amp;quot;I landed on Earth for the first time.&amp;quot; Suddenly, she&amp;#039;s says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m able to work on things that I really wanted to work on that are more sociopolitical and philosophical and less related to the female body.&amp;quot; The source for her wellspring of new project ideas is Africa, and, as is her way, her life and art converged. In 2005, Beecroft read an article about the genocide in Darfur and couldn&amp;#039;t shake it. She arranged a trip there through a missionary group, bringing an assistant, a cameraman, and a photographer, with a loose plan to create a documentary. She didn&amp;#039;t make it to Darfur; in fact, she didn&amp;#039;t make it much beyond one small room in a Catholic orphanage in South Sudan. &amp;quot;I was still nursing Virgil, who was one, and suffering from mastitis, so I asked if they needed mother&amp;#039;s milk,&amp;quot; she recounts, while guiltily devouring a vegan chocolate peanut butter cup. The twins, Madit and Mongor Akot, were brought to her. She spent almost two weeks nursing them and became deeply attached. It was also here that New Zealand documentarian Pietra Brettkelly found her and followed her for 16 months as she confronted obstacles in her attempt to adopt the twins: legalities (there seemed to be no precedent for a South Sudan adoption); opposition to a white, United States\u2013based woman adopting Sudanese children; her own husband&amp;#039;s refusal; and the return of the twins&amp;#039; father, with whom they ultimately ended up. The documentary has already triggered media snipes. New York magazine writer Logan Hill said that Beecroft is &amp;quot;a hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist.&amp;quot; A Washington Post article says she comes across as &amp;quot;annoying and clueless, like a dangerous child.&amp;quot; The film is edited to portray Beecroft as a symbol of the heedless, glamorous white woman descending on Africa and imposing her own Chlo\u00E9-sunglass frames of reference. Beecroft, for a performance at last year&amp;#039;s Venice Biennale called VB 61 Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?, hired African immigrants to lie on the ground in an old fish market while she splattered red paint over them in imitation of Jackson Pollack. In the film, the models are shown growing increasingly querulous about the wait; Brettkelly splices in a quick cut of Beecroft responding with diva-like exasperation, but anyone who has ever tried to organize a large group of people will probably sympathize with this as equal opportunity frustration. The only truly damn\u00ADing scenes are when Beecroft uses the twins as models for her South Sudan photo series. She&amp;#039;s unapologetic about her artistic opportunism. &amp;quot;If an image has a higher purpose to communicate something, I will do anything. Then I have no shame.&amp;quot; Although she prefers to use models as stand-ins in her work, which she describes as autobiographical, she chose to cast herself in the Mary picture: &amp;quot;It added value another woman wouldn&amp;#039;t have. I was white, I was the artist, and it really happened, so it&amp;#039;s a document and a symbol. I represent the wealth.&amp;quot; She does feel, as she puts it, &amp;quot;slightly robbed&amp;quot; that Brettkelly didn&amp;#039;t include more of her with her own children, making her look like an absentee mother. But she isn&amp;#039;t terribly concerned about this mischaracterization. What&amp;#039;s worrying her most these days\u2014the thought that follows her everywhere in Los Angeles&amp;#039; jasmine-scented spring air\u2014is that Durkin won&amp;#039;t come out of the cottage he has moved into behind their rented Hollywood Hills home.  Unfortunately, Beecroft neglected to mention to thoughtful, conscientious Durkin that she was trying to adopt the twins until she&amp;#039;d already worked up legal documents. Durkin, who had been resisting Bee\u00ADcroft&amp;#039;s push for a third child of their own, was appalled. With an academic background in sociology, he questions the ethics of removing the children from their own culture. He refused to go through the process, although he offered her a divorce in a way that seems more gallant than vengeful. Viewers of the documentary might judge Bee\u00ADcroft harshly for this massive oversight. In one telling scene, when the couple returns to Africa together a year later so he can meet the twins (now living in their father&amp;#039;s hut), Durkin speaks thoughtfully about how adoption is a misguided solution and the real work is fixing the country&amp;#039;s underlying poverty. Beecroft looks longingly at the camera and says, &amp;quot;When Angelina got the second one, she actually had the man who supported her, the man who would do anything for her, even adopt a child. I was crushed.&amp;quot; Okay, yes: superficial, reductive, maybe deluded. But what mildly crazy married woman who&amp;#039;d had a highly autonomous, creative life of her own before doesn&amp;#039;t hope that she can still act as that person but also have her husband&amp;#039;s unquestioning backup, have her cake and then have her husband ice it? And let&amp;#039;s not forget that Beecroft breast-fed those beautiful twins for days in a stinking room with starving, diseased children exactly the age of her own. While Beecroft was visiting the Sudan, Durkin accepted a job in L.A. as a VP of marketing at Warner Bros., found a house big enough for everyone, and said he was moving there. Once her plans to adopt the twins were foiled, Bee\u00ADcroft set off like a dervish, staging a show in Korea, a Sudan fund-raiser with Franca Sozzani in Milan (raising $80,000), taking the kids to Sicily for three months to work on a new project that will combine sculpture and live models and a documentary about the African diaspora. When Beecroft arrived in L.A. after another two-week Sicily trip, Durkin announced he was moving out. Realizing her topsy-turvy marriage was truly imperiled, &amp;quot;I said, I will stay now.&amp;quot; Although she had hoped this gesture would win him back, things only got worse. &amp;quot;I really, really thought, I can&amp;#039;t allow my husband to leave me and ruin my family because I am adopting two twins. And then my husband left!&amp;quot; Beecroft is doing her best to respond to this perceived injustice in a new way, with the help of daily euphoria-inducing Kundalini yoga at Golden Bridge. &amp;quot;I am trying not to react, to be still,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I am doing Kundalini with these Sikhs because I want to understand better what this story is telling me by these series of events that are pretty unfortunate.&amp;quot; Whether Beecroft really wants to change remains to be seen. It&amp;#039;s ambiguous, as usual, whether the yoga is for her personal growth or for her art. The yoga class, she confesses, &amp;quot;is something a bit exotic&amp;quot; to make the domestic stasis bearable. The class, like Los Angeles itself, is also a productive place for a zeitgeist channeler like Beecroft to be as she untangles her concerns about Africa, the environment, and her relationship with her aging body (the sculptures that will be in her next performance reference aristocratic funereal forms). This is the studio to attend if you want to do Breath of Fire next to a star; here, the students have the accoutrements of urbane enlightenment down, little lambskins for their mats worn just enough and stealth-wealth waffle-weave T-shirts sewn on the bias. Beecroft has been critically condemned for being too closely linked to fashion. This read seems like punitive scapegoating. As she shuttles back and forth to Golden Bridge in her 1984 Mercedes 300 DT converted to burn vegetable oil, it should be understood that Beecroft has to be in fashion for her work to be so satisfying. It&amp;#039;s not cunning, it&amp;#039;s instinctive. I can&amp;#039;t help noticing that a year after her Venice show, in which she so strongly referenced Jackson Pollock, Pollock gestures appeared all over the runways. She knows how much clothes can say these days. &amp;quot;The image of me with the twins wouldn&amp;#039;t have been so powerful if I didn&amp;#039;t wear the Margiela dress, because then it also had a sinister edge; I am the greed, the perfection of the dress is the ephemeral fashion element, the correlative, and the two kids represent vulnerability\u2014in-need, naked, and double so they can multiply as many times as you want.&amp;quot; If anything, it&amp;#039;s her complete willingness\u2014like a minimalist Tracey Emin, Pipilotti Rist, Karen Kilimnik\u2014to go where her womanly wiles taker her, and furthermore, to make them cool, to treat the whole convoluted bag as fodder with only the slightest glance over her shoulder, that makes Beecroft&amp;#039;s shows seem like such a gratifying affirmation. All of us smart, culturally and politically aware women with an eye for style carry within us a schism between the desire to indulge the acute narcissism of our age and the crippling awareness of how heart-stoppingly sick our civilization is. Beecroft&amp;#039;s current refusal, or inability, to hide, resolve, or compartmentalize the split is probably not the best thing for her own life, or for her husband&amp;#039;s, and maybe not even for her children. But it&amp;#039;s not unlike being a religious devout. In serving as a vessel for her artistic drives in a godless world, she&amp;#039;s letting us all take a look at what it might feel like to answer only to ourselves. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/art-design/a9115/body-of-work-18969/>