| Within the cavernous, pristine interior of the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art, one witnesses an act of both extreme simplicity and unrelenting fervor. Marina Abramović sits at a long wooden table, donning a gown of thick midnight blue fabric; her countenance bears signs of intensity and sheer exhaustion, dually wavering between moments of complete force and utter frailty. In her new durational work, The Artist is Present, Abramović welcomes museumgoers to sit across from her for as long as they choose, taking turns confronting the artist with their own fixed gaze. It is a work that is as much about response as it is exchange. |  |
Persis Singh
Within the cavernous, pristine interior of the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art, one witnesses an act of both extreme simplicity and unrelenting fervor. Marina Abramović sits at a long wooden table, donning a gown of thick midnight blue fabric; her countenance bears signs of intensity and sheer exhaustion, dually wavering between moments of complete force and utter frailty. In her new durational work, The Artist is Present, Abramović welcomes museumgoers to sit across from her for as long as they choose, taking turns confronting the artist with their own fixed gaze. It is a work that is as much about response as it is exchange. Framed by soaring ceilings, countless cameras and four corners of glaring lights, hoards of visitors watch the quiet spectacle unfold––marveling at the artist’s endurance as she sits for a total of 716 hours and 30 minutes over the course of the exhibition’s 13-week duration.
The Artist is Present is the newest addition to the Belgrade-born artist’s expansive oeuvre, which is showcased in her comprehensive retrospective occupying the MoMA’s sixth floor. While the exhibition provides us with a thorough glimpse of Abramović’s prolific career, the show’s overall effect bordered on lifeless and uninspired, mostly due to the unsettling confluence of archival footage alongside several lackluster “re-performances” or recapitulations of her previous performative works. At times, each room––clearly delineated to mark the progression and various stages of Abramović’s career––felt overwhelmingly cluttered and visually chaotic. Despite the exhibition’s shortcomings, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, is no doubt an important exhibition––one that signals a definitive resurgence in the focus on performance art, as well as the repositioning of these vital performative practices within the larger continuum of art history. Abramović’s retrospective is another recent example of the sudden explosion of performance-oriented programming within major museum circuits, bringing what was once seen as a peripheral art form to its current position at the forefront of artistic dialogue. Exhibitions such as Abramović’s have incited critical discussion regarding the role of performance art within the museum, as well as the ways in which artists and institutions alike can both preserve and collect such ephemeral, time-based works. For me, the potency of this exhibition lies in these attendant issues that are raised, rather than in the power (or lack thereof) of the re-performances and documentation at hand.
Within the first section of the exhibition, which chronicled the artist’s early conceptual and rhythm-based works from 1969 to 1975, the extreme physicality and psychological intensity of Abramović’s practice is captured in her Rhythm series of performances, as with Rhythm 10 from 1973. As with much of the work throughout the exhibition, this performance is relayed through grainy archival photographs placed alongside a text-based description of her performative gestures. In this piece, Abramović tape-records herself rapidly stabbing between the fingers of her left hand using 20 different knives––through the painful process of repetition, she listens to the first recording and attempts to follow the order, or rhythm of each stab within the previous cycle. In her other works from this period, Abramović similarly utilizes her body as both subject and medium, subjecting herself through various physical trials, pushing the boundaries of mortality and the thresholds of pleasure/pain. As if to echo this very notion, the sound of moaning reverberates throughout the gallery space, originating from the final work in a triptych of large-scale black-and-white projections, Freeing the Memory, Freeing the Body, Freeing the Voice, from 1975. In Freeing the Memory, Abramović allows for the free-flow of language, continuously speaking every word in Serbian that comes to mind until the point when these very words escape her. In Freeing the Body, the artist ensconced her head with a black scarf and danced rhythmically, if not robotically, to the beat of an African drum, enduring eight hours before collapsing from sheer exhaustion. In the final, most cacophonous piece, Freeing the Voice, Abramović lies on the floor with her head tilted backward, her face distorted as she screamed continuously over the course of three hours, until her voice is worn away to a series of hoarse utterances. Through the masochism of Abramović’s performances, a sense of psychological purification and cathartic transformation are achieved. As seen throughout her earlier works, most notably in Rhythm 0––in which 72 objects, ranging from lipstick to a loaded gun, were laid out to be used by viewers on the artist in any way desired––the body is made public through performance; it becomes subject to both scrutiny, spectacle, and violence before an audience, and in turn, functions as a transformative vehicle for individual exploration and self-reflection.
On November 30, 1975, Marina Abramović met Ulay in Amsterdam and soon after embarked upon a new chapter of her career, in which the duo lived nomadically, traveling from city to city in a Citroen bus. During this period, they produced work that explored the dynamism and tension of their own inter-relationship––this “relation work” simultaneously engaged with spatio-temporal factors, allowing for the creation of a new artistic persona, “that self,” which collapsed the very notion of authorship into a mere force that existed in their collective presence. The works produced over these 13 years are some of the most powerful and electrifying of Abramović’s career; their austerity and minimalism belie a more palpable force that was engendered within each and every performance, a certain energy that is still felt even through the gritty black-and-white archival footage. In performances such as Relation in Space (1976) their first performance together or Breathing In/Breathing Out (1977), Marina Abramović and Ulay pushed the limits of their own physical and mental endurance, engaging in repetitive acts of collision, screaming, running, slapping, spinning, collapsing, and breathing. As with AAA-AAA (1978) and Rest Energy (1980), these works centered upon the transfer of energy between their bodies, so much so that the cogency of these works seemed to depend on the very intensity of their emotional and physical partnership. In my mind, such powerful work could only be borne from the specificity and intimacy of this relationship, having created work laden with tremendous ardor and emotional valence.
This is precisely why the MoMA re-performances from the Abramović–Ulay period felt so anemic and ineffectual. In contrast with the filmic documentation of these performances, these contemporary reiterations felt devoid of the sense of gravity and intensity that is far more perceptible in the surrounding archival footage. The triage of re-performances within this space was transformed into a series of banal spectacles. The construction within the center of the gallery space that housed two re-performances, Point of Contact (1980/2010) and Relation in Time (1977/2010), oddly resembled the structure of both a puppet theatre and peep show. This bizarre architecture of exhibiting these re-performances heightened my own sense of voyeurism and thus, diluted the intensity of each piece. With Imponderabilia (1977/2010), I first experienced this work aurally––two young women let out enormous squeals as they passed through the narrow corridor of bodies. As I reached my turn and squeezed through the human passage, I felt neither discomfort nor embarrassment, rather, ambivalence followed by annoyance at the group of teenage boys gawking and pointing at the two naked women before them. On the other hand, the final work from this period, The Great Wall Walk (1988) formed an extremely poignant, symbolic gesture––one that spanned an arduous 90 days. In this performance, Abramovic and Ulay traverse the entire expanse of the Great Wall of China––Ulay walked from the western end of the wall, while Abramović walked from the east. Finally, the artists tearfully reunited half-way, from which their long-time partnership came to an end––consequently signifying a new phase of practice within Abramović’s career.
The final section of the retrospective encompasses a period characterized by a diverse range of solo performances and installations spanning the past 15 years. While Abramović’s personal roots have always heavily informed her artistic practice, her more recent works mark a decided turn towards an engagement with the cultural ethos of the Balkans. Moreover, the artist examines her own complex, contradictory history––one that involves the unlikely influence of both Communist nationalist propaganda and Orthodox Christian dogma. I found such works, many present in the form of video installations, including Balkan Baroque (1997) and Balkan Erotic Epic (2005) to be overly contrived and not nearly as carnal or compelling as her earlier works. However, within a side gallery, one can view the empty installation from her 2002 performance at Sean Kelly Gallery, The House with the Ocean View. This room offers a more reflective space where the artist’s absence almost activates the sinister qualities of the installation’s structure. In reading the text that outlines Abramović’s ideas for her “living installation”––namely her desire to shift the overall energy field within the space through 12 days of intense discipline––one could almost chillingly imagine the extraordinary endurance, mindfulness, and presence she exuded within that specific time and space.
Towards the end of the exhibition, the final re-performance was perhaps the most convincing of them all. Set aside in a separate alcove of its own, Luminosity (1997/2010) entailed a female performer sitting precariously atop a bicycle seat over an extended period, arms slowly raised and lowered, while situated within a patch of brilliant light. Within this slightly more “intimate” context, I could read her exhaustion and vulnerability. Above all, I experienced her presence in a way that I had not with the other performers. As Abramović would agree, performance art really centers upon a particular moment in time and space, intermeshed with the reciprocity between artist and audience. However, in the Abramović’s attempts to immortalize her performative gestures, something is invariably lost. Can work that is so deeply autobiographical and imbued with her sense of authorship, or performances that are so strongly linked to a particular time, space, and context really be convincingly redone? Why can’t these works remain what they’ve always been––inherently fleeting gestures that should remain unattainable and bereft for future audiences? During the early years of performance art in the 1960s and 70s, the transitory, uncollectible state of these works was central to the existence of each piece. Thus, the very nature of these performances took on an inherently anti-art/political role, challenging the primacy of the art object throughout art history and resisting capitalism’s tendency to commodify culture. If these works are to be re-performed in a contemporary context, how does it alter the integrity and original spirit of these pieces? This could be asked of Abramović’s re-enactments of five seminal performance works in Seven Easy Pieces (2005). As seen from her retrospective at MoMA, the performance’s relics––its archival footage, along with its documents, texts, and scores––do possess a certain beauty and magic of their own. Much of the power of these performances lies in the way time, history, and shifting societal contexts create a certain enigmatic aura that perpetually surrounds and reframes them––that and of course, the fact of knowing that you simply just had to be there.
