Vanessa Beecroft's live instillation at Neville Wakefield's "Nude as Muse" at the Standard hotel, Photo credit: JD Ferguson
Renegade curator Neville Wakefield and Playboy magazine transformed The Standard's stylish pool and bay front entertaining area into an artistic Garden of Eden last night by placing nude models, decorated by a mix of hip artists. The highlight of "The Nude as Muse" event, which was conceived by Brooke Geahan, was Vanessa Beecroft's performance piece with 14 zombie-like femme fatales grouped together in the pool. These statuesque reincarnations of Eve sported nothing more than blond and red wigs. "Miami is a sexy hot town, where a lot of skin gets shown," said Geahan, "but no one has ever done an event here that focused on the nude, which is the ultimate muse for art."
Wakefield tapped Kembra Pfahler, who came with one of her Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black bandmates in full costume (which mainly consists of blue body paint, giant black wigs and knee-high black boots); Terence Koh, who painted the nether regions of a male model white to create what he considered "an unfinished Statue of David"; Scott Campbell, who hand-lettered "You Can Only Sleep Your Way To The Middle" on his naked model's torso, completing it with "And You Should" on her back; and Hank Willis Thomas, who put a video camera on the back of a nude female model and a monitor over her private parts that showed who was checking out her behind!
Other artists involved included Richard Phillips, Xaviera Simmons, Lola Schnabel, Ryan McGinness (who was drawing nudes in Room 102) and over in Room 40, Sante D'Orazio showed a new video and stills of an altered 1970s porn movie, which had faces and private parts scratched out, that was humorously titled "Scratch Mine, Scratch Yours."
