| For all the talk of Catholic self-denial and ritualistic sacrifice that has often surrounded Marina Abramovic’s work, it seems at least a little appropriate that Videoinstalaciones, a small but intensive survey representing some 35 years of Abramovic’s works on video, should be at Laboratorio Arte Alameda, a repurposed, colonial-era cathedral. Abramovic is, Blaines and Copperfields aside, the foremost performance artist of her generation and a religious icon of sorts in the art world. Still, for a show to focus solely on her video installation work, the veritable other half of her output, might come off as a bit lopsided. What’s a performance without the all-important ephemeral aspect? |  |
Dan DeNorch
For all the talk of Catholic self-denial and ritualistic sacrifice that has often surrounded Marina Abramovic’s work, it seems at least a little appropriate that Videoinstalaciones, a small but intensive survey representing some 35 years of Abramovic’s works on video, should be at Laboratorio Arte Alameda, a repurposed, colonial-era cathedral. Abramovic is, Blaines and Copperfields aside, the foremost performance artist of her generation and a religious icon of sorts in the art world. Still, for a show to focus solely on her video installation work, the veritable other half of her output, might come off as a bit lopsided. What’s a performance without the all-important ephemeral aspect?
When compared with Abramovic’s more recent performance works, the devastating 12-day-long The House with an Ocean View, or the 49 total hours put into her performance showcase Seven Easy Pieces, a video pales. A work like The Hero (which, in a grand gesture of curatorial prowess, crowns the church’s nave) tips the scales at only 17 minutes; the various channels of House of Spirits add up to something less than 15 minutes. The decision to keep the length of her videos short is, in some degree, pragmatic; today’s museum-going audience isn’t likely to have the time or patience to devote to her usual long-running fare, a fact Abramovic cites herself when discussing her approach to video. So how to replace that fundamental denominator of performance, the shared time which describes the relationship between audience and artwork—that crucial it-only-happens-once-ness—in a video, and still come up with something better than mere documentation?
Abramovic finds ways around it. Sometimes, by introducing an interactive aspect, the installations act as a sort of make-your-own-performance, just add the viewer. There’s Mambo, which at first, induces an odd mixture of pity and self-satisfaction, watching Abramovic plod her way through a dance recital. A feeling which immediately evaporates upon participation. The platform in front of the video, along with the shoes offered to viewers, are magnetized. Dancing is out of the question; to even walk on the platform is to feel as if your legs have been buried in putty.
Other times she works by obscuring time all together, creating moments in which movement and sound, two of time’s casual measuring sticks, get jumbled and crossed. In Balkan Erotic Epic, a three-channel mélange of genitals and Slavic getups, the circular swoops of the camera track a swarm of women, flitting this way and that, lifting their skirts skyward (Abramovic’s nod to an old Yugoslavian ritual performed with the purpose of warding off excess rains). On the floor is a projection of a group of naked men, face down, who are endlessly plodding themselves into the earth. To watch either for more than a minute is to induce a happy mix of visual whiplash and dizziness. On the aural end of things there’s At the Waterfall, a broad mosaic of a hundred-plus Buddhists in mixed states of prayer. In effect, there’s nothing to watch; at that scale, the monks are reduced to bobbing lumps of pale saffrons and mauves. It’s the sound of 100 voices chanting, best described as a turn-it-up-to-eleven version of putting your ear in a seashell, that buries and entrances: it’s not unusual to see a fellow museum-goer sit in front of it, totally rapt, for several minutes, not bad considering the average amount of time that most viewers spend in front of an artwork is often reported in seconds.
To walk through Videoinstalaciones is to witness the slow drift away from the more singularly-focused, almost monastic early performances to a more varied and often depersonalized installation practice. It’s to watch Abramovic grow ever keener on the difficult ushering of the finite durations of performance into the infinite space of a video loop. For all the visual tricks and on-site gimmicks (sometimes it’s as simple as playing directly to the camera), Abramovic shows a little effort goes a long way in reconstituting the space of the performance at the site of the viewer. While it’s never as good as the real thing, it does offer some small hope of performance anytime, just press play.
