This month's Elle has a juicy article about the artist Vanessa Beecroft, and the piece opens as she drags the reluctant reporter to a Kundalini class taught by Tej Kaur at the Golden Bridge studio in Hollywood.

Beecroft has been called a controversial narcisist, even colonial for her naked performance driven pieces and her proclivity for airing eccentricities (or pathologies) like exercise bulimia. Her latest project, and the impetus for the article, is a film documenting her quest to adopt African twins despite her husband's objection to the whole charade.

It's always interesting to see how the mainstream media characterizes yoga and in this case, it becomes an esoteric, out-there practice -- one more controversial aspect of Beecroft's "art".

Here's an excerpt toward the end of the article where Beecroft explains she was drawn to yoga to help deal with the bad reviews of her movie and her disintegrating marriage:

Beecroft is doing her best to respond to this perceived injustice in a new way, with the help of daily euphoria-inducing Kundalini yoga at Golden Bridge. “I am trying not to react, to be still,” she says. “I am doing Kundalini with these Sikhs because I want to understand better what this story is telling me by these series of events that are pretty unfortunate.”

Whether Beecroft really wants to change remains to be seen. It’s ambiguous, as usual, whether the yoga is for her personal growth or for her art. The yoga class, she confesses, “is something a bit exotic” to make the domestic stasis bearable. The class, like Los Angeles itself, is also a productive place for a zeitgeist channeler like Beecroft to be as she untangles her concerns about Africa, the environment, and her relationship with her aging body (the sculptures that will be in her next performance reference aristocratic funereal forms). This is the studio to attend if you want to do Breath of Fire next to a star; here, the students have the accoutrements of urbane enlightenment down, little lambskins for their mats worn just enough and stealth-wealth waffle-weave T-shirts sewn on the bias.

I don't know about you, but I like my yoga accoutrements; I also like Breath of Fire and fashion. If that's urbane enlightenment, sign me up.