A case for erotic materialism: Giorgio Agamben, Toxic Titties and Vaginal Davis on/in/as Vanessa Beecroft

This article studies critical and artistic responses to the performance art of Vanessa Beecroft – by Giorgio Agamben, Toxic Titties and Vaginal Davis – in order to explore desire as a critical framework. Its feminist lens is invested, not in sanitizing desire from the gaze, but in foregrounding it, in a methodological move that I call erotic materialism. I argue that Agamben’s mobilization of Beecroft’s VB55 (2005) for his philosophy of nudity relies on an effacement of the philosopher as a situated, desiring spectator. Agamben obscures the role played by desire in his own work and in Beecroft’s art, in which sex is deterritorialized for/by the market. By contrast, Cassils and Clover Leary of the Toxic Titties, who modeled for VB46 (2001), use their embodied, desiring experience as part of their materialist analysis of – and artistic intervention against – Beecroft’s work. Vaginal Davis, similarly, uses a performance as Beecroft (“VD is VB”) to tease out, expose – and even locate pleasure in – the social regulation of desire and value in Beecroft’s work. If, in Beecroft’s pieces, the erotic is a discursive field deployed for commerce, then the Toxic Titties and Vaginal Davis turn the scene of high art commerce into a field of embodied critique, risky pleasure, and desiring exploration. I conclude by analyzing the striking tonal differences between the earnest, corrective erotic materialism of the Toxic Titties, and the “terroristic,” camp, exploratory erotic materialism of Vaginal Davis.