Balkan Body and Soul
Jovana Stokic
Marina Abramovic, the artist whose credo is that in art one should challenge his or her limitations, showed once again in her extraordinary series of performances at the Guggenheim museum, Seven Easy Pieces, November 9-15, how she lives her art to the very limits of endurance of her own being. Abramovic’s persistent faithfulness to art that is mythical in its ethos reached its apogee in the Seven Easy Pieces.
Her belief pushes her to do everything with total and unreserved self-involvement without anything that is repetitive or routine manifested itself in the re-performance of her own work "Thomas’ Lips" (1975). Now, three decades later, "Thomas’ Lips" evokes with its ritualistic elements the dramaturgy of liturgical drama, and passion plays, transforming the eschatological dimension of the sacral into a profoundly subjective action.
Abramovic, who was born in the ex-Yugoslavia, and left it 30 years ago, reached for mementos of her personal history that relate to her communist and Orthodox Christian roots to underline their importance in her life and art. In this performance, she included a soldier’s hat with a communist star that once belonged to her mother who had fought against Germans in the Second World War. While carving the communist five-point star into her belly, the artist wept, listening to a Russian song about the eternal tragedy of the Slavic, orthodox soul.
Abramovic consciously evoked iconography that is both ideological (communist) and religious (Orthodox Christian) as her own heritage, that one can renounce and be ashamed of, but from which no one can escape. The artist shows us that this burden, which makes one suffer, as the artist showed us, can be transformed into authentic artistic existence. At the same time, this performance spoke of her need to redeem herself from the heritage.
Her new body of work, the video cycle entitled "Balkan Erotic Epic," which was being shown at Sean Kelly Gallery, deals with the artist’s fascinations with the imaginative powers of Eros in her Balkan homeland, Serbia and Montenegro. The exhibition consists of five video projections, which, according to the artist "explore the ways in which sexuality and the human body were used in Balkan pagan rituals." Her own cultural heritage is once again visible, manifested here in Serbian folklore.
Following the descriptions from a collection of Serbian erotic poetry, the artist focuses on the power of the erotic potential in relation to nature. Thus, for example, one of the videos recreates a ritual in which women from villages go into the fields to make the rain stop. Showing their genitals to the heavens, women could scare the higher powers and the rain would stop. Twelve women dressed in traditional folk costumes reenact this ritual, running around in pouring rain while lifting their skirts. At the same time, the luscious production of this representation brings the ritual closer to a "Hollywood treatment" of the subject–far, far away from the ethnographic record. Indeed, there is little ethnographic accuracy in these representations.
Made as fiction, they are not in search of supposed authenticity. Abramovic’s videos in which she presents Serbian folklore, primarily via local costumes, are decidedly not a romanticized vision of national folklore if one views them in the context of the oeuvre of the artist who walked 2000 km on the Great Wall in China, lived for months with Aborigines in the Australian desert, with Buddhist monks in Tibet and in the mines of South Brazil.
In all these places, Marina Abramovic searched for a specific energy that transcends exoticizing other cultures. When she reaches for the matrices of her own cultural landscape, the artist also transcends the category of Balkan pathos. These representations, as much as they celebrate particular traditions, are also a counterbalance to the glorification of native values," therefore the focus shifts to the celebration of the beauty of human sexuality, unrelated to any national affiliation.
Abramovic’s representations of unrestrained sexuality acquire a new meaning in the context of the contemporary conservative mainstream cultural landscape in the US. In a context where puritan heritage influences the propagation of abstinence as the best prevention against diseases such as AIDS, one could perceive Abramovic’s unleashed sexuality as transgressive. Video projections within "Balkan Erotic Epic" show scenes where a dozen naked men fertilize the earth, while the artist herself massages her breasts, looking upwards toward skies. These representations disturbs not only prudish bigotry, the viewer could interpret them as usurping patriarchal logic.
As much as her representations have a folk tradition as their starting point, they renounce the conformist laws of submitting to tradition. Her works are provocative and playful interpretations of tradition that serve to unleash powers within ourselves. According to Abramovic’s vision, those powers reside in unrestrained eroticism. She inhabits the representational sphere where epic law stops being oppressive and lets the individual be playful.
