Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire - Softcover

Thurman, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312427751 ISBN 13: 9780312427757

Publisher: Picador, 2008

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of 2007

Cleopatra's Nose is an exuberant gathering of essays and profiles, representing twenty years of Judith Thurman's writing, particularly her fascination with human vanity, femininity, and "women's work"--a term that, in her definition, encompasses haute couture, literature, and ruling empires. The subjects are varied--Cleopatra, Jackie Kennedy, Anne Frank; tofu, performance art, pornography--but as a whole these essays hint at the central preoccupations of a uniquely inquisitive mind.

About this title

About the Author:

Judith Thurman is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette. A staff writer at The New Yorker, she lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

ONE

The Wolf at the Door

The Italian performance artist Vanessa Beecroft lives with her American husband, Greg Durkin, and their seventeen-month-old son, Dean, in an isolated house off a dirt road on Long Island’s North Shore. Durkin, who has worked in the movie industry as a financial analyst but is currently a graduate student in sociology, found the place by searching the Internet for properties that were within commuting distance of Manhattan and had an indoor pool. Beecroft suffers from exercise bulimia—a compulsion to burn off calories that she considers excessive—and until recently she liked to swim a hundred laps every day. She also used to take ten-hour hikes, and she still goes for vigorous long walks through the nature reserve that surrounds her house. Before the baby started to toddle, she sometimes carried him along, slung on the ledge of a bony hip. "When I was pregnant, I didn’t allow myself to relax for a minute," she says. "I spent all day swimming, training, and doing aerobics. I’ve since slacked off a bit, because I find that yoga is the only workout that doesn’t make me too hungry."

Bulimia is an eating disorder epidemic among young women. (Beecroft is thirty-three.) In its most common form, a ravenous binge—equivalent to several meals, or even to several days’ worth of food—is closely followed by a session of self-induced reverse peristalsis. The practice is both psychologically addictive and socially contagious. According to an unscientific survey of my friends under thirty, there isn’t a dormitory bathroom in the country that doesn’t reek of vomit. Older women suffer from bulimia, too, probably in smaller numbers, although treatment statistics do not, obviously, provide a reliable head count. Actors, dancers, and models are particularly susceptible, and so are young male athletes, like wrestlers and jockeys, who have weight goals to meet. There is an extensive clinical and self-help literature devoted to the disorder (which is commonly medicated with antidepressants), along with dozens of websites and chat rooms, some of them clandestine trysting places for defiant anorexics and bulimics, who fondly call themselves by the dollish names "ana" and "mia," and who warn intruders seeking to cure them or girls "in recovery" not to enter. Members of the sisterhood trade pictures of their idols (Calista Flockhart and Lara Flynn Boyle are especially admired), proud accounts of their sometimes lethally ascetic practices, and advice on concealing them.

It is hard to think of a human stain—an addiction, sin, perversion, or taboo—that doesn’t, in a shame-free age, have its bard. Bulimia, however, is one of the most intractably unglamorous of dirty secrets, as humiliating as incontinence. Bulimics transcend their own threshold of disgust, although not easily the repulsion of others: they are a stealthy tribe. Clogged plumbing or rotten teeth sometimes give them away, but I have known women who have managed to conceal their daily rituals for years without getting caught by a parent or spouse. This interesting subject, one of propriety’s last frontiers, has been largely neglected by creative artists, with a few exceptions, Beecroft being among the most notable. She has been working since her adolescence on a project called XXX Book of Food: 360 watercolors and drawings that she intends to publish in the form of a cube-shaped book divided into colored sections. (Bulimics often separate the courses of a binge with markers of taste and texture so that each stratum is visibly discrete and, during gluttony interruptus, can be carefully ticked off the elimination manifest.) "I used to eat by color," she explains, "all orange one day, all green, yellow, or red the next. I wanted my obsession made formally explicit." She started the book as a diary in the early 1980s with the intention of showing it, one day, to a doctor. The first four years of entries were lost by a typist, but the remaining six (1987-93) make up a log of every morsel (or nearly) that she consumed, and a journal in words and pictures of the feelings—predominantly self-loathing—that her struggle with a recalcitrant appetite aroused, and still does. I found the cumulative tedium of this strange artifact poignant and compelling. So, perhaps, will anyone who, like Beecroft, has "wished demonically for something horrible to happen to me just to make me thin," and who has "weighed every one of my life’s experiences on the scale of how many kilos I have gained or lost from it. In the end, I don’t even care if people say I’m a good artist. I only care about whether or not I’m fat."

Beecroft’s self-discipline is Spartan, though she told me that she "has to have something very bad every day, like a piece of cake or a drink." Most of the bulimics I have known or read about aren’t so abstemious. They, too, gauge goodness and badness on a kitchen scale, and they may diet as strenuously as she does, but they relieve themselves of the tension inherent in long-term deprivation with vast quantities of delicious, forbidden junk. A woman in her seventies who has been a compulsive eater for most of her "petty, claustrophobic life" once told me that her daily "sprees" were its only source of "spontaneity and free choice," and while she knew they were "sick" and "wasteful," she couldn’t bear to give them up for that reason. Beecroft’s diary, however, covers a period when she lived on a monotonous regimen of the same health foods day after day: a bowl of unseasoned brown rice, an apple, a serving of raw carrots or home-baked bread. "I tried to throw them up," she recalls, "but I couldn’t, and when I started retching blood, I had to stop"—which is why she switched to extreme exercise as a purgative. "In my diary, I use the word ‘vomit’ metaphorically. It stands for the violence of the intention." Not merely, however. Once, as a teenager, she smashed a bag of walnuts with a hammer and ate the contents shell and all, winding up in an emergency room with acute peritonitis. The doctor told her that she needed a psychiatrist. She found one who had belonged to the Red Brigades. "I got really fascinated by his politics," she recalled. "Unfortunately, he was too expensive." (Eating disorders and Maoism seem to share a common ground: they are a form of utopian moral extremism—a belief that, with enough ruthlessness, it is possible to achieve perfection.)

Beecroft plans to exhibit the book at a major retrospective of her work that opens in October at Italy’s leading museum of modern art, the Castello di Rivoli, outside Turin. She is also willing to discuss her enthrallment to food with passionate candor, and to describe its role in the tableaux vivants—some fifty to date—that have made her a controversial star of the performance-art world. These spectacles, the initial ones produced on a shoestring, the later ones expensively staged, have been widely admired by curators and critics (but also frequently condemned as voyeuristic and exploitative). They feature large groupings of nude or undressed "girls" who stand mutely for several hours in a gallery or museum, occasionally breaking ranks to stretch or to sprawl, but remaining, in principle, strictly impassive to an audience that is, of course, fully clothed. In the earliest works, Beecroft assembled an eloquently motley collection of fleshy and slim bodies. Emboldened and enriched by her success, she hired scores of uniformly thin, depilated beauties and arranged them as human colonnades. ("I think of them as architecture," she says.) On different occasions, their trappings have included white bras, black body paint, Heidi wigs, control-top briefs, G-strings, gladiator sandals, panty hose, fedoras, faux-mink chubbies, and four-inch stilettoes. A percentage of the women, especially at the beginning, suffered from eating disorders, and they were all volunteers—friends, fellow art students, or interesting-looking female specimens whom she picked up on the street. Yet even when she started recruiting professional models and paying them their going rate, they had to be willing to undergo a painful (if boastworthy) trial of extreme discomfort and exposure. Beecroft herself doesn’t participate in a performance once she has given her instructions to the troops: she’s a general rather than a first lieutenant. Her charisma, however, has increased with her visibility, and women gladly, one might even say hungrily, do her bidding and become her tools. Designers—among them Miuccia Prada, Tom Ford, and Manolo Blahnik—have been eager to contribute props. A photographer and video crews document the pieces (Beecroft used to do the photography herself), and those images are the commodity that Beecroft’s dealers market to collectors. "Reproduction glamorizes the experience and leaches it of ambiguity and emotion," she says flatly. "I’m sorry it’s necessary. Pictures of the girls out of context make the work look too sexy. To me, the actual performances aren’t sexy at all. They’re about shame: the shame of the audience and, to a lesser extent, of the girls, but most of all my own."

Beecroft had doubted that a local taxi driver could find her hideout in the woods, so when I arranged to visit her for the first time, she offered to meet my train from the city. She pulled up in a silver BMW and apologized profusely for arriving a little late. With Dean in tow, she looked like the stressed Madonna in a moody, cinematic parable about suburban anomie. (Her mother, she says, was pregnant with her when her parents first saw Antonioni’s Blowup, which starred Vanessa Redgrave, and they liked the name.) Being lovely to look at and extremely photogenic has not hurt a career that bridges the worlds of art and fashion. Beecroft has a patrician forehead—smooth and high—and prominent cheekbones. Huge, thickly fringed brown eyes are set in a pale face dusted with freckles ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0312427751
• ISBN 13: 9780312427757
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448