http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87
Marina Abramović
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marina Abramović (
Serbian Cyrillic: Марина Абрамовић),
Serbo-Croatian pronunciation: [marǐːna abrǎːmoʋitɕ]; born November 30, 1946 in
Belgrade,
Serbia is a
New York-based
Serbian[1]
performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for
over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the
"grandmother of performance art." Abramović's work explores the
relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and
the possibilities of the mind.
Early life
Marina Abramović's great uncle was
Patriarch Varnava of the
Serbian Orthodox Church.
[2] Both of her parents were
Partisans[3] during
the Second World War:
her father Vojo was a commander who was acclaimed as a national hero
after the War; her mother Danica was a major in the army, and in the
mid-sixties was Director of the Museum of the Revolution and Art in
Belgrade.
Abramović's father left the family in 1964. In an interview published
in 1998, she described how her "mother took complete military-style
control of me and my brother. I was not allowed to leave the house after
10 o'clock at night till I was 29 years old. ... [A]ll the performances
in Yugoslavia I did before 10 o'clock in the evening because I had to
be home then. It's completely insane, but all of my cutting myself,
whipping myself, burning myself, almost losing my life in the firestar,
everything was done before 10 in the evening."
[4]
Abramović was a student at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965–70. She completed her
post-graduate studies at the
Academy of Fine Arts in
Zagreb,
SR Croatia in 1972. From 1973 to 1975, she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts at
Novi Sad, while implementing her first solo performances.
From 1971 to 1976, she was married to
Neša Paripović. In 1976, Abramović left Yugoslavia and moved to
Amsterdam.
Selected early works
Rhythm 10, 1973
In her first performance Abramović explored elements of
ritual and gesture. Making use of twenty knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the
Russian game
in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of
her hand. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from
the row of twenty she had set up, and record the operation.
After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listened
to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to
replicate the mistakes, merging past and present. She set out to explore
the physical and mental limitations of the body – the pain and the
sounds of the stabbing, the double sounds from the history and from the
replication. With this piece, Abramović began to consider the
state of consciousness
of the performer. “Once you enter into the performance state you can
push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do.”
[5]
Rhythm 5, 1974
Abramović sought to re-evoke the energy of extreme body pain, in this
case using a large petroleum-drenched star, which the artist lit on
fire at the start of the performance. Standing outside the star,
Abramović cut her nails, toenails, and hair. When finished with each,
she threw the clippings into the flames, creating a burst of light each
time. Burning the communist five-pointed star represented a physical and
mental purification, while addressing the political traditions of her
past.
In the final act of purification, Abramović leapt across the flames,
propelling herself into the center of the large star. Due to the light
and smoke given off by the fire, the observing audience didn't realize
that, once inside the star, the artist had lost consciousness from lack
of oxygen. Some members of the audience realized what had occurred only
when the flames came very near to her body and she remained inert. A
doctor and several members of the audience intervened and extricated her
from the star.
Abramović later commented upon this experience: “I was very angry
because I understood there is a physical limit: when you lose
consciousness you can’t be present; you can’t perform.”
[6]
Rhythm 2, 1974
As an experiment testing whether a state of unconsciousness could be
incorporated into a performance, Abramović devised a performance in two
parts.
In the first part, she took a pill prescribed for
catatonia,
a condition in which a person’s muscles are immobilized and remain in a
single position for hours at a time. Being completely healthy,
Abramović's body reacted violently to the drug, experiencing
seizures
and uncontrollable movements for the first half of the performance.
While lacking any control over her body movements, her mind was lucid,
and she observed what was occurring.
Ten minutes after the effects of that drug had worn off, Abramović
ingested another pill – this time one prescribed for aggressive and
depressed people – which resulted in general immobility. Bodily she was
present, yet mentally she was completely removed. (In fact, she has no
memory of the lapsed time.) This project was an early component of her
explorations of the connections between body and mind, which later took
her to
Tibet and the
Australian desert. Following
Rhythm 2, she set to develop the rest of the series of rhythm projects, continually testing her endurance.
Rhythm 0, 1974
To test the limits of the relationship between performer and
audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging (and
best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with
the public being the force which would act on her.
Abramović had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed
to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these
were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to
inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were a rose, a feather, honey,
a whip, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours
the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and
actions.
Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty,
but as time passed (and the artist remained impassive) people began to
act more aggressively. As Abramović described it later:
“What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they
can kill you.” ... “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes,
stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head,
and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After
exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the
audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”
[7]
Works with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen)
In 1976, after moving to
Amsterdam, Abramović met the
West German performance artist
Uwe Laysiepen, who went by the single name Ulay. They have the same birthday, in different years.
When Abramović and Ulay began their collaboration, the main concepts
they explored were the ego and artistic identity. This was the beginning
of a decade of influential collaborative work. Each performer was
interested in the traditions of their cultural heritages and the
individual’s desire for ritual. Consequently, they decided to form a
collective being called “the other”, and spoke of themselves as parts of
a “two-headed body”.
[8]
They dressed and behaved like twins, and created a relationship of
complete trust. As they defined this phantom identity, their individual
identities became less accessible. In an analysis of phantom artistic
identities, Charles Green has noted that this allowed a deeper
understanding of the artist as performer, for it revealed a way of
“having the artistic self made available for self-scrutiny.”
[9]
While some critics have explored the idea of a hermaphroditic state
of being as a feminist statement, Abramović herself denies considering
this as a conscious concept. Her body studies, she insists, have always
been concerned primarily with the body as the unit of an individual, a
tendency she traces to her parents' military pasts. Rather than concern
themselves with gender ideologies, Abramović/Ulay explored extreme
states of consciousness and their relationship to architectural space.
They devised a series of works in which their bodies created additional
spaces for audience interaction. In "Relation in Space" (1976) they ran
around the room – two bodies like two planets, mixing male and female
energy into a third component called “that self.” "Relation in Movement"
had the pair drive their car inside of a museum for 365 laps; a black
liquid oozed from the car, forming a kind of sculpture, each lap
representing a year. (After 365 laps they entered the New Millennium.)
In discussing this phase of her performance history, Abramović has
said: “The main problem in this relationship was what to do with the two
artists’ egos. I had to find out how to put my ego down, as did he, to
create something like a hermaphroditic state of being that we called the
death self.”
[10]
To create
Breathing In/Breathing Out the two artists devised a
piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s
exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen.
Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell
to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with
carbon dioxide.
This personal piece explored the idea of an individual's ability to
absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
In
Imponderabilia (1977, reenacted in 2010) two performers,
both completely nude, stand in a doorway. The public must squeeze
between them in order to pass, and in doing so choose which one of them
to face.
In 1988, after several years of tense relations, Abramović and Ulay
decided to make a spiritual journey which would end their relationship.
Each of them walked the
Great Wall of China,
starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. As
Abramović described it: “That walk became a complete personal drama.
Ulay started from the
Gobi Desert and I from the
Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye.”
[11]
Abramović conceived this walk in a dream, and it provided what she
thought was an appropriate, romantic ending to a relationship full of
mysticism,
energy and attraction. She later described the process: “We needed a
certain form of ending, after this huge distance walking towards each
other. It is very human. It is in a way more dramatic, more like a film
ending … Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do.”
[11]
Abramović reported that during her walk she was reinterpreting her
connection to the physical world and to nature. She felt that the metals
in the ground influenced her mood and state of being; she also pondered
the Chinese myths in which the great wall has been described as a
“dragon of energy.”
Seven Easy Pieces, November 2005
Beginning on November 9, 2005, Abramović presented
Seven Easy Pieces at the
Guggenheim Museum
in New York City. On seven consecutive nights for seven hours she
recreated the works of five artists first performed in the 60s and 70s,
in addition to re-performing her own "Lips of Thomas" and introducing a
new performance on the last night. The performances were arduous,
requiring both the physical and the mental concentration of the artist.
Included in Abramović's performances were recreations of
Gina Pane's
Self-Portraits, which required lying on a bed frame suspended over a grid of lit candles, and of
Vito Acconci's
1972 performance in which the artist masturbated under the floorboards
of a gallery as visitors walked overhead. It is argued that Abramović
re-performed these works as a series of homages to the past, though many
of the performances were altered from their originals.
[12]
Here is a full list of the works performed:
The Artist Is Present, March–May 2010
From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the
Museum of Modern Art
held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Abramović's
work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA's history.
[13]
During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed "The Artist is
Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she
sat immobile in the museum's atrium, while spectators were invited to
take turns sitting opposite her.
[14] A support group for the "sitters", "Sitting with Marina", was established on Facebook
[15] as was the blog "Marina Abramović made me cry".
[16] In September 2011, a video game version of Abramović's performance was released by
Pippin Barr.
[17] She said the show changed her life "completely" and claimed that the fact that
Lady Gaga
came to see it helped boost her popularity among a younger generation:
"The public who normally don’t go to the museum, who don’t give a shit
about performance art or don’t even know what it is, started coming
because of Lady Gaga."
[18]
Later life
Marina Abramović purchased a theater two hours north of
Manhattan in
Hudson,
NY, intending to establish a nonprofit organization, Marina Abramović
Foundation for the Preservation of Performance Art. She will use the
space to work and develop ideas with video and post-production equipment
and there will be a second property to house resident artists.
[19]
In 2009, Abramović was featured in Chiara Clemente's documentary
Our City Dreams and a book of the same name. The five featured artists – also including
Swoon,
Ghada Amer,
Kiki Smith, and
Nancy Spero – "each possess a passion for making work that is inseparable from their devotion to New York," according to the publisher.
[20]
Abramović is also the subject of an independent feature documentary
movie entitled "Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present" that is based
on her life and performance at her retrospective "The Artist is Present"
at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. The film was broadcast in the
United States on
HBO.
[21]
In January 2011, Abramović was on the cover of Serbian
ELLE, photographed by Dushan Reljin.
Abramović is a Patron of the London based
Live Art Development Agency.
[22]
Abramović maintains a friendship with actor
James Franco, who interviewed her for the
Wall Street Journal in 2009.
[23] Franco visited Abramović during "The Artist is Present" in 2010.
[24] The two also attended the 2012
Metropolitan Costume Institute Gala together.
[25]
Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction novel
2312 mentions a style of performance art pieces known as "abramovics".
