ABSTRACT
Women watch themselves being looked at’, wrote John Berger in Ways of Seeing. In 1972, Berger used an image-based approach to identify sexual difference, thereby suggesting (as a protofeminist thinker) that women are first and foremost a double, or a clone – an image of themselves. Artist-photographer Vanessa Beecroft takes this moment of forced self-recognition, and the shame that follows it, to the letter. Nudity requires ever-more nudity; not only skin, but an entry beneath the skin, into the flesh. The Birkenau birch trees that gave their name to the Nazi camp inform art historian Georges Didi-Huberman's theory of the image. Didi-Huberman finds in the bark an image of the image: both coat and skin, ‘a surface of apparition endowed with life, reacting to pain and destined to die’. The women sway in front of the audience like the birch trees shake above Birkenau, like the stars flicker in the sky, a fragile but resilient memory, both suffering and surviving.
