I love a good love story (esp. when it involves eccentric artists)
So if you have ever been in a romantic relationship with me – I’ve made you watch this.
If you’ve been my friend for 15 years (or 5 minutes) – I’ve made you watch this.
If I just started chatting you up in the deli line at Meijers 14 sec ago – I’ve more than likely made you watch this.
I am such a fan of the work of Marina Abramovic. Probably because she is eccentric, and dramatic, and pretty much – well - epic. I mean a woman who turns a breakup with a boyfriend into a 3-month cinematic production set along the Great Wall of China sounds like the kind of woman whose work I am interested in following (😉😉). She started from the Yellow Sea and he from the Gobi Deseret and they met in the middle to say their goodbyes.
Over mountains, over ruins.
One critic described it as “beyond operative in its proportion” and I’m sure the physical angst compared little to the mental terrain they covered as they walked toward one another. I mean that is certainly one way to feel your feelings.
Marina and Yuli, both performance artists, spent 12 years in romantic partnership while producing their Relation Work – some of which is quite unnerving to watch, and certainly controversial.
Marina Abramović & Ulay – Rest Energy, 1980: https://publicdelivery.org/marina-abramovic-rest-energy/
In one performance titled Imponderabilia staged in 1977 in Italy, 350 spectators passed through the naked doorway of their bodes before police put a stop to the performance. The piece re-imagined the role of audience, as the audience became part of the exhibit. Spectators were forced with some choices now - do I pass through and whom do I face? And I am left asking what might it all mean?
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/55661745373234392/
In another one of their Relation Work performances, Nightsea Crossing, the couple sat in chairs across from one another not moving or speaking for hours upon hours, day after day. Ulay points out that these types of performance tackle huge dislikes in Western Culture: inactivity, silence, and fasting. This particular performance would be the precursor to the work Marina would debut decades later at the famed Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in NYC.
I first discovered Marina through the youtube video below (the one that I make everybody watch😉) :
As the girl voted hopeless romantic in high-school I was, of course, entranced by the deep connection so readily apparent in the absence of words, amidst a crowd of hundreds.
I cry every time I see this video. And I have seen it quite a bit.
I later learned that there was a documentary about the staging of this piece called The Artist is Present (also the title of the performance). I outline some of what I learned in that documentary below.
In the MOMA performance, Marina sits every day for 8 hours for 3 months in a chair placed directly across from another chair. People are invited to sit in the chair across from her. Invited to sit and stare – no more, no less. Klaus Biesenbach, curator of MOMA at the time of the exhibit says, “It is a hugely courageous piece because it’s a piece that can fail.”
And yet it doesn’t.
Without words, without props, Marina appears to magically suspend time and space.
She appears to reset between each person who chooses to sit across from her, swiping her hand slowly in front of her face as a way to call back her energy so that she can give it again anew to each individual.
How genius – to take something seemingly so simple, a look, and expose out of it – layer upon layer of complexity.
What happens in that shared space, in that shared silence is incredible to witness. Lots of pain certainly, but also deep connection, admiration, and affection. Biesenbach says of those who participate in the performance, “Some are shocked. Some think they deserve the attention. Some fall in love with her”
Marina says of the performance, “When they are sitting in front of me, it’s not just about me anymore cuz very soon I’m just a mirror for their own self.”
This may explain why so many of us refuse to look at one another for any sustained amount of time. Looking means vulnerability, awkwardness, and risk. The potential discomfort of what we might see when we fight the compulsion to avert our gaze. To distract. To dismiss.
Seven hundred fifty thousand people saw that performance. I challenge you to look into the eyes of even only one person for two or three continuous minutes. As Marina says about those that took her up on the offer, “they [had} nowhere to escape except into themselves.”
In the documentary footage, one man put some type of black box over his head, and another girl began to disrobe. Both were immediately stopped and escorted away from the performance space. I so badly wanted to hear her thoughts on these two.
Does she see them as fellow artists trying to convey a message?
Boundary pushers?
Attention seekers?
Lunatics?
She is well aware that she too has probably been viewed as all of those things saying in the film, “After 40 years of people thinking you are insane and should be put in a mental hospital you finally get all these acknowledgements. it takes such a long time to be taken seriously.”
I also learned that Marina has a Ted Talk titled An art made of trust, vulnerability, and connection (a less lengthy commitment than the documentary if you want to learn more about her work). In the talk she discusses some of her various performances, 2 of which I’ve summarized below.
Rhythm O (1974)
Twenty-three year old Marina lays 76 objects on a table. These objects are conveyors of pleasure and pain (they includ a glass of water, a coat, a rose, a razor, a pistol, a bullet).
Also, at the table were these instructions:
“I’m an object. You can use everything on the table on me. I’m taking all responsible – even killing me. And the time is 6 hours.”
Marina says of the performance, “We’re afraid of suffering. We’re afraid of pain. We’re afraid of mortality. So what I’m doing is staging these kinds of fears in front of audience. I’m using your energy.”
This type of ‘experiment’ brings me back to my college Psych classes – the Milgam and Zimbardo experiments.
One man cuts her clothes with scissors. Another her neck. Still others offer the water and the rose.
I’m fascinated and scared by this level of susceptibility and what the performance implies about the darker aspects of the human psyche.
Balkan Baroque (1997)
“I wanted to create some very strong charismatic image. Something that could serve for any war anytime because Balkan war now is finished, but there is always some war somewhere.”
This was a statement Marina made in reference to her piece titled Balkan Baroque where she spent 6 hours six days a week washing blood off of two and a half thousand cow bones. She goes on to describe the overwhelming smell, and how “something stays in the memory” when you sit in the midst of all that slaughter.
https://mai.art/
Whatever you think of Abramovic, it becomes hard to deny that she goes where most of us aren’t able, willing, or wanting to go. She taps into a feeling space that most of us prefer to avoid, but may do well to explore.
