Marina Abramovic Is the Artist Who’s Present
This story was first published in Coronadiet’s old site on July 8, 2020.
In 2017, the Tribeca Film Festival saw performance artist Marina Abramovic speaking with Amores Perros and The Revenant director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. During the panel, Abramovic offered an insightful reply in response to an audience member’s question:
“I think that for me, the pain is extremely important. The pain is the door of secrets. Because only when you go through real extreme pain, you can actually feel transformation… The things you’re afraid of, the things that are mysterious to you, the things that are painful, the big tragedies in your life, accidents, loss of loved ones, they are the big deals that really trigger the change. So the pain is in a way, an incredible positive push to another state of reality.”
At the age of four, Abramovic was dressed as a devil by her mother for a Halloween party. This image, combined with her World War II hero parents’ disciplined and regimented upbringing, congealed to form half of her identity. The other was supplemented by her loving grandmother whose spirituality filled in the missing piece to a dichotomy that has served as a foundation for Abramovic’s art to this day. In 1974, the Serbian artist dared to invite audience members to freely use any of the 72 objects provided — among them scissors, chains, an axe, and a loaded pistol — against her. The MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach likens the performance to the Stanford Experiment, namely a science experiment that reveals human nature. If art reveals human nature, what better vehicle to carry out art than the human body, the very vessel of a human’s nature?
Abramovic’s performance art achieves this on an incomparable level. In many of her works, the body serves simultaneously as her subject, canvas, and medium. She explores her personal limits, whether they be physical or mental, by alternating between control and submission. Later in her career, Abramovic’s artistic trinity doubled in form as she began to collaborate with Ulay, a German artist who became her longtime companion and lover. During one point in their relationship, the couple lived for five years as modern nomads, driving and living out of a van with a singular article of decoration on its exterior: “ART IS EASY” was printed on the top of the windshield, embodying a period when Abramovic was artistically and romantically fulfilled. Abramovic and Ulay’s iconic performance piece titled Rest Energy tested the bounds of their connection and trust, as Ulay pulled an arrow back with the weight of his body and pointed it to Abramovic’s heart while she did the same with a bow. With every passing minute, the couple’s accelerating heart beats were captured by tiny microphones attached to their chests. In The Lovers, the final piece of their Relation Workproject, Abramovic and Ulay started on opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and spent three months reaching each other. With its completion, The Lovers’ relationship ended as well. After cultivating a symbiotic connection that lasted over a decade, the couple’s private tension expanded to a point of eruption. The arrow had struck its target.
A decade ago, the MoMA held a chronological retrospective of Abramovic’s work where the artist debuted her newest piece titled The Artist Is Present. In preparation, Abramovic selected young artists to re-perform five of her historical pieces and required their attendance at a workshop which took place at her Hudson Valley residence. There, the artists faced a strict routine involving the confiscation of cell phones, fasting for three days, and participation in activities that led to their total presence in the moment, hence, The Artist Is Present. Whether voluntary or not, Abramovic had subjected the artists to a lifestyle similar to the one she experienced growing up in which the demands called for a soldier’s level of stamina and determination. With the opening of the exhibition, Abramovic performed every day for three months during museum hours, resorting to installing a makeshift contraption within her chair which would allow her to relieve herself. Abramovic entered the exhibition in the winter and concluded at the start of summer, allowing her performance to take on a cycle of renewal and a life of its own. Progressively, the table that was installed at the beginning of the performance for structural purposes was removed after two months, leading to greater physical and mental vulnerability for Abramovic. Nightsea Crossing, which consisted of 22 performances where Abramovic and Ulay sat opposite of each other, brought attention to specific dislikes in Western society: inactivity, silence, and fasting. In many ways, The Artist Is Present is undoubtedly reminiscent of this series. Only now, Abramovic has defiantly demonstrated that the performance could be completed independently.
Abramovic’s success hasn’t come effortlessly and certainly not as readily as the three words “art is easy” make it out to be. The phrase originated from a time when she was free to love and work with the same man, making no compromises in order to create radical art that, at the time, Abramovic would have loved to know would establish her as one of the greatest performance artists alive.
