Assignment 5: Vanessa Beecroft and Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing was born in Birmingham, England in 1963. This conceptual artist involved the public in her works of art in a different way than people have seen before. An example of this is her piece that involved random pedestrians on the streets in England. Wearing would stop random people and tell them to write down a spontaneous thought and then photographed them with their sign.
This is an example of two people stopped whose sign says “Work Towards World Peace.” Another example of Wearing’s work is a video that she created called the “Sixty Minute Silence.” This involved members of the public dressed in police uniforms sitting as if they were getting a group photo taken for sixty minutes straight. Her work is very different than most other artists. Wearing states, “A great deal of my work is about questioning handed-down truths". I think that this is a great way of putting her work into words. She really tries to understand the public as a whole I think. It is a very different way of doing things, but I think it is effective. Work like Wearing’s, I think could really send messages to the rest of the population as to how to better society. She gets common ideals out into the world by photographs or videos.
Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist born in 1969. Her work was along the lines of performance art and she often used women in the nude. Her performances have been explained as both fabulous and terrible. I think that Beecroft’s work is controversial and strange to most and to some may not be considered as art. Her work is meant to provoke questions and is simple in its execution. At her performances, pictures are taken and videos are recorded to be shown as documentation.
I think that these two artists can be very similiar in the fact that they both use the public in their artwork. Beecroft used random nude women and Wearing used random people from the public to perform their pieces of art. They are both European so I think that they have similar ideals. Not only do these two artists both use the public in their artwork, but they also use the same medium. Both Beecroft and Wearing use photography and film to show their artwork. These are examples of their earlier work and both have since progressed to documenting more current issues in the works. I think that they are both good at what they do and I find their work interesting. I think that I probably like Wearing’s work better because I think it can relate to the public as a whole and everyone has spontaneous thoughts. I think Wearing’s work is very general which is positive. This shows that it can be viewed and understood by all.