The Refusal of the Gaze: Vanessa Beecroft and the Dialectics of Looking

Vanessa Beecroft´s tableaux vivants. AI art

Introduction

The gaze has long preoccupied philosophy and aesthetics as a force that does more than merely register the visible. To be looked at is not a neutral act but one that shapes, disturbs, and even constitutes subjectivity. Jean-Paul Sartre famously described how the presence of another’s eyes destabilizes the self, while Jacques Lacan identified the gaze as a rupture in the visual field that reveals our condition as objects for others. For women, the implications are particularly acute: the gaze has historically positioned them as passive spectacles rather than autonomous subjects. Against this backdrop, Vanessa Beecroft’s performance installations offer a provocative intervention. By instructing her female performers to withhold acknowledgment of their spectators, she stages a refusal of recognition that unsettles the traditional dynamics of the nude and the aesthetic act of looking.

The Gaze and the Making of the Subject

Sartre’s Being and Nothingness captures the unsettling force of the gaze in two emblematic passages. The first describes a man alone in a park, secure in his freedom, until another suddenly appears and looks at him. In that instant, the self is “fixed,” no longer pure subject but an object in another’s field of vision. The second example involves a voyeur peeping through a keyhole: the moment he senses another behind him, his subjectivity collapses, and shame arises. For Sartre, the gaze is constitutive; it alters the very structure of consciousness by revealing us as beings-for-others.

Lacan radicalizes this notion. For him, the gaze is not simply the look of another person but a structural feature of visibility itself: a reminder that vision is never under full mastery. When I look, I am also looked at, caught in a network of perspectives I cannot control. Thus, the gaze marks the impossibility of pure sovereignty in seeing.

Women and the Gaze

If the gaze destabilizes every subject, it has historically determined women in particular ways. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that woman is constituted as “the Other,” her identity mediated through male perception. Later feminist theory, such as Laura Mulvey’s influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” argued that mainstream media constructs women as objects of the “male gaze,” to be looked at but rarely agents of looking.

Art history, too, demonstrates this asymmetry. Kenneth Clark’s The Nude (1956) codified the tradition of the nude as an aesthetic category that supposedly transcends mere nakedness. Yet this idealized genre depended on conventions that masked power relations. In Manet’s Olympia (1863), as T. J. Clark showed, the nude directly confronts the viewer, exposing the entanglement of art, sexuality, and class. Olympia’s stare disrupts the fiction of detached contemplation, reminding us that the act of looking is never innocent.

Beecroft’s Performances

Into this long tradition enters Vanessa Beecroft, whose live tableaux of women stand at the threshold between performance, installation, and fashion show. Her projects often feature dozens of women—sometimes nude, sometimes uniformly dressed—positioned in carefully arranged spaces. The audience, invited into these charged environments, finds itself surrounded by bodies that remain strangely unresponsive.

Crucial to Beecroft’s method is her instruction to the participants: they are trained not to acknowledge the spectators. This discipline may involve hours of standing still, maintaining composure, and suppressing instinctive social responses such as making eye contact or smiling. The result is not natural indifference but a rigorously constructed posture of non-recognition. Viewers encounter a wall of presence that refuses to validate their looking.

This refusal has profound consequences. In classical painting, the nude either avoids our gaze, thereby offering itself as pure object, or confronts us, as in Olympia, thereby implicating us. Beecroft stages a third possibility: the models neither entice nor confront. They simply persist, unmoved by our presence. In doing so, they expose the audience’s dependence on reciprocal recognition.

The Dialectics of Recognition

Here the relevance of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic becomes apparent. For Hegel, consciousness seeks recognition from another; the struggle for acknowledgment is the motor of self-consciousness. Yet when recognition is withheld, the relation collapses into frustration. The “master,” who expects affirmation, finds his power undermined when the “slave” refuses to validate him.

Beecroft’s work stages precisely this drama. The spectators, accustomed to the tradition of the female body acknowledging their gaze—whether through coyness, confrontation, or availability—find themselves denied. The models, by remaining impassive, destabilize the very structure of spectatorship. Their passivity becomes paradoxically active: by doing nothing, they exercise power over the audience.

This tension mirrors Sartre’s account of the gaze but with a reversal. Whereas Sartre described how the subject feels objectified when seen, Beecroft’s performers dramatize the opposite: they appear to annul the power of the gaze by acting as if it has no effect. The impossibility of such a stance is precisely what makes the performance compelling. The audience senses both the fragility of the act—any performer could break it at any moment—and its eerie persistence.

Clothing, Nudity, and the Parergon

The role of clothing in these performances also resonates with Derrida’s reflections on the parergon. In The Truth in Painting, Derrida explored how elements like frames or drapery—neither wholly inside nor outside the artwork—condition its meaning. Beecroft employs clothing, or its absence, in a similar parergonal fashion. When models wear minimal or uniform garments, or when they stand completely nude, the garments or their lack function as a frame that structures the experience. The tension between naked and nude, between ornament and body, becomes part of the work itself.

Thus, Beecroft exposes how even the smallest supplement—the towel in the Aphrodite of Knidos, or a pair of identical shoes on her performers—mediates the aesthetic encounter. Far from incidental, these details determine the nature of looking and the power dynamics it entails.

Conclusion

Vanessa Beecroft’s performances present a striking complication of the gaze as theorized in philosophy, feminist critique, and art history. By instructing her models to remain indifferent to their spectators, she stages the impossibility of escaping the gaze while simultaneously dramatizing a refusal of recognition. This refusal unsettles the traditional configuration of the nude, displaces the authority of the audience, and generates a dialectical tension akin to Hegel’s master–slave relation.

If Sartre and Lacan demonstrated that subjectivity is always structured by being seen, Beecroft shows how art can simulate an alternative: the gaze returned with silence, indifference, or blankness. The viewer, instead of possessing the image, finds themselves possessed by their own desire for acknowledgment. In that reversal lies the critical force of her art, which continues to unsettle the supposedly neutral act of looking and to expose its deeply gendered history.

References

• Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1989.
• Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956.
• Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
• Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. 1807. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
• Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
• Richards, K. Malcolm. Derrida Reframed. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. 1943. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992.