Difficult Bites with Easy Pieces
Suzie Walshe
Just as it was slipping off the art radar, New York has fallen back in love with performance art. The major signifier in the rekindling of this formerly epic love story is PERFORMA05, the first biennial of performance art in New York City. As part of this monolithic affair more than 20 venues throughout the city presented a multidisciplinary program of live visual art performances, film screenings, lectures and exhibitions that began at the beginning of November. This, according to director and curator RoseLee Goldberg, has made New York the place to be.
Coinciding with PERFORMA05 (and significant contributor to its success) was Marina Abramovic’s "Seven Easy Pieces" at the Guggenheim. For a week– seven hours each night the Yugoslavian born "grandmother of performance art" transformed the Rotunda hall of the Guggenheim museum into a site of appropriation, re-enacting critical performances of the 60s and 70s by Bruce Nauman (Body Pressure), Vito Acconci (Seedbed), VALIE EXPORT (Action Pants), Gina Pane (The conditioning) and Joseph Beuys (How to Explain Picture to a Dead Hare). Through the series, which has been in "production" for 12 years, Abramovic explores the possibility of redoing and preserving performative works that documentation has forgotten.
The brilliance of Abramovic is that she appropriated the works in order to make them consequential and relevant today. She altered her own work, Lips of Thomas (originally performed in 1975) making the piece more evocative. In the performance Abramovic drank red wine and ate a kilogram of honey, she then carved a star in her stomach with a razor blade, and then whipped herself until she "no longer felt pain." She then lays down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above caused her to bleed more profusely. During specific intervals of the performance she wore a pair of old military boots and hat. While wearing the attire, she stood staring helplessly out at the crowd, tears rolling down her face as a Russian folk song (entitled "Slavic Souls") echoed through the building. These slight but significant changes altered the work–propelling it toward new territory. By translating cultural symbols into political actions–here wearing the hat and shoes as a signs of loss–she creates new meanings for them; in this performance more than any other, the body speaks. It tells the story of a contested political history, Abramovic challenges the traditionally passive role assigned to woman in war.
In this sense her action is both political and aesthetic–and in its action, aims to transform existing language and its effects. In her work, Abramovic pushes her body to the limits of the physically and mentally bearable; Lips of Thomas recalls ecstatic religious practices into which Christian rituals of self-flagellation and stigmatization entered.
In the past, certain pieces of art have made me extremely emotional but rarely, if ever, has art made me cry and certainly never within a gallery context. Cold detached giants like the Guggenheim never seem to be the type of places suitable for scenes of sentiment. It’s a shock when a piece of work manages to supersede the self-consciousness and inhibitions that settle in such a place. Perhaps it was just the jet-lag (having flown in from England that morning), but I found myself overwhelmed with emotion–crying, disgusted, scared and outraged at myself for watching. This all left me feeling exposed–for myself, the people around me, but more than anything for her, leading me to think about emotion and sentiment as a different source of knowledge within the gallery space. The experience of witnessing such an event was riddled with doubts and the ethics of participating.
I now cared about her and had become worried for her safety, questioning whether she was still engaged with rational thought. As a spectator you are involved in a multi sensory relationship in which all of the senses are activated and therefore it becomes impossible to remain extraneous to her actions. Abramovic forces us to scrutinize the aesthetic–the image and the concept. I was looking for signs of (emotional) insincerity but really hoping to only find sincerity. I didn’t want this connection to be false.
Self-mutilation and flagellation ventured no further than this Lips of Thomas and the re-enactment of Gina Pane’s 1973 The Conditioning, where the artist lies on a metal bed with candles burning underneath her. Throughout the series there was less of the abjection than I expected. The work is still indisputably shocking but not singular in blood shock–maybe this facet of performance has become passé. After Viennese Actionism and the self-inflicted hemorrhaging that was the 70s performance zeitgeist it may not be necessary any more. Even Abramovic said, "I stopped doing the cutting pieces because I became a very good cutter: I could cut so easily… and then the action was no longer charged." The aesthetic of such has become formulaic to performance art. Abramovic still continues to silently explore the idea of transforming yourself and your environment through ritual–even someone else’s ritual. To her, injury, darkness, isolation and solitude are all opportunities for purification and rebirth. At her core she is still investigating the alternative semantics of the body–those suppressed by layers of Western rationalism.
On the second night Abramovic performed Acconci’s Seed Bed (1972)–the infamous work involves the artist masturbating beneath the stage. As the audience walks above her, libidinous thoughts and disembodied moans were amplified around the hall. Presenting this scenario as a premeditated action in a clinically white and non-erotic space, she challenges both what is acceptable in an art venue, as well as who has control over how the female body is observed.
The final piece (her own work) constructed specifically–Entering on the other side was the only performance that touched on the melodramatic. Previously, the edgy 70s aesthetic had saved each work from becoming theatrical. Tonight she stood, elevated 15ft above us all, wearing a cascading volcano of a dress that covered the stage entirely. The work questions her position as subject/object and the possibility of transcending this, however distracting from all of this was the dress, which seemed to exist with the sole purpose of diverting the eyes of the viewer from the eyes of the performer.
Abramovic was competing night after night with one of the most famous buildings in the world; having to independently activate and energize such a space is close to impossible. The security guards made her job even more difficult–intent on transforming anything that came close to interaction into an uncomfortable confrontation. These levels of separation between the artist and audience shift the audience’s mind frame away from that intended originally.
I would imagine that when first performed there was no barrier between the audience and the artists. Vulnerability is an inherent facet of the art form and even through security is of course understandable; barking orders across the performance area at visitors in between shouting into their radio controls is less acceptable. It appears to go against the nature of the art form. Performance art engages the public through its immediacy.
If we ignore Matthew Barney’s (try even though it’s difficult) 2003 retrospective, then it’s fair to say that the Guggenheim is not exactly a boundary breaker. The gallery is basically one stop on the tour bus that houses a collection of nondescript crowd-pleasers. "Seven Easy Pieces" tried its best as a catalyst towards rectifying this problem. The seven-day event attracted 500-1500 viewers every night–people showed up, stayed for hours, sitting on the floor, leaning on balconies, walking up and down, hoping to get the "Abramovic experience" from every possible angle.
This whole event offers us the opportunity to investigate relations– throwing performance art back into a pool of nebulous ideas and issues. More specifically, the categorization of the work fluctuates from performance to living sculpture and live installation, to looped video art like action. Context is important for art, but everything to performance. Perhaps this tells us performance isn’t on the fringes of society anymore; it has become little more than an extravagant adornment accompanying a highly organized and disciplined attempt to make art conform to prescribed value systems. Early on in the series I was disappointed that she wasn’t pushing herself further. Each time I would turn up she seemed to be doing a watered-down version of the original performance. I couldn’t help but feel she was doing a PG version of great performance art, simply because it was within the mainstream confinement of the museum.
Performance art was about subculture, existing outside the mainstream. But as we all sat at the final performance watching Marina in her blue ball gown, it was clear something had changed. She had made it, but what exactly had she made it through? Pushing cultural imaginations can’t be for nothing. As an audience we now regarded her as a work of art, which goes against the very nature of performance–previously opposed to the idolization of the object. We were no longer there for the art; it was about infamy, celebrity and her Ms. Abramovic–body art icon.
The distance created in "Seven Easy Pieces" by the safety nets consigns the audience to a passive role. We still have to play by the rules–as the viewer we still make this transformation from passive observer into ardent participant. In a sense completing the work…that is, once we have made it past security.
