You Haven’t Seen It All
From the long list of amazing and surprising experiences I had last week—far from Spokane and my computer screen—the one I’d like to share is my visit to the Marina Abramovic retrospective, “The Artist is Present,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Admittedly, my first priority was seeing the Tim Burton exhibit (which didn’t disappoint), but I left feeling more impressed by Marina Abramovic—the woman and the art; which in her case, are one in the same.
To those not familiar with her, Marina Abramovic is a Serbian performance artist who began her solo performances in Croatia in the mid Seventies before moving on to Amsterdam—where she collaborated for years with her partner, Ulay—and then New York. I’d first come into contact with her several years ago at an exhibit somewhere on the west side (Chelsea or the Meatpacking district; all I remember was it was very windy) where she had a sparse apartment built high into the wall of the gallery. It consisted of three open-walled rooms, one with a table and chair and pitcher of water, one with a shower and toilet, the other with a wooden bench that served as a bed. Ladders that went up to these room/ledges had large knives in place of rungs. She “lived” and fasted in this space for the duration of the exhibition; viewers came to watch her exist in the space.
Many people dismiss performance art outright, just because it sound ridiculous, I suppose, or contrived and pretentious. And granted, I’m sure some of it is (are you thinking of the art teacher in “Ghost World”?); and furthermore, to describe the thing happening doesn’t do it justice. For instance, in the MOMA retrospective, Abramovic is present on a lower floor, simply sitting at a table. Viewers are invited to “sit quietly with the artist” for as long as they wish. That’s it. The artist and the spectator staring at each other in a huge high-ceilinged room. Even I yawn at this concept. But as soon as I sat down on the floor to see what all the fuss was about, I became absorbed into the concentration field; that is, the energy created by the silent interaction between the artist and spectator had a powerful meditative effect on me. The intensity of their eye contact, as well as the suspension that something could happen at any moment, totally apart from expectation, made it hard to leave the room.
The retrospective—exhibited several floors above the present artist—is overwhelming in many respects, as it covers forty years of Abramovic’s work, with and without her partner, Ulay, and includes live, nude performers reenacting many of her previous performances, as well as video footage and installation. Her work seems almost always to deal directly with death and the erotic, like in one video where she continuously brushes her hair until her head bleeds, and another where, nude, she repeatedly carves lines of a star into her stomach with a razor blade, puts on boots and a military cap and cries while listening to a Russian folk song, lies down on a block of ice until someone removes her, kneels and whips herself, and then sits down at a table and eats a spoonful of honey and takes a sip of red wine. At a biennial in Italy she sat in a basement with a bucket and white coat scrubbing six thousand pounds of bloody cow bones until they were clean, while video footage of her family in the former Yugoslavia played in the background. And most unsettling, in my opinion, is the installation of the performance she did in Italy in 1974 where she laid out a long table with an array of different instruments: makeup, perfume, syringes, many different types and sizes of knives, rope, food, and a gun with one bullet, among other things. She put a sign on the table that read (something like): I am the object, I assume full responsibility. She then stood in the gallery and invited spectators to do whatever they wished to her. At one point someone loaded the gun, put it in her hand, and put the barrel to her head.
I won’t get into the “meaning” of these performances, or offer any art critic-like analysis of her work in this post (that would call for a longer and more serious medium). But I will say this: It’s rare that art can elicit a visceral reaction, I think, and rarer still to see someone who for so long has been reinventing ways to make spectators stop in their tracks and balk. I think as writers it’s highly worth visiting such a unique merging of living and creating, especially from someone as powerful and dedicated as Marina Abramovic. The exhibit runs through May 31; you can read more about it here.
This makes me want to see the retrospective.
Thesis field trip?
Performance art is mostly not my forte, and brushing your hair till it bleeds, or inviting the audience to do what they want to you hits my creepy button way too hard, but I recently had a conversation with a woman in a writer’s group who was hired for a performance art piece- as part of the display of the work she was a guard at the museum display and she randomly sang at the patrons or otherwise interacted with them in odd ways. It was an interesting discussion and a fascinating perspective for her as a writer to have. The merging of art, living, and creating is definitely one of those border places new things sprout from.
Judith Thurman recently wrote an awesome profile of Abromovic for the New Yorker. You have to have a subscription to read the online version of it, but not to view this audio slideshow which includes Thurman’s comments: http://www.newyorker.com/online/multimedia/2010/03/08/100308_audioslideshow_abramovic
Thanks, Asa. I’ll definitely check that out.