“The audience is like a dog”
A portrait of the phenomenal performance artist, Marina Abramović.
“The audience is like a dog. They can feel immediately that you are afraid, that you are insecure, that you’re not in the right state of mind — and they just leave…”
Biography
Marina Abramović was born in Yugoslav in 1946. The artist is best known for using her own body as both subject and vehicle to create her performative artworks. Since the beginning of her career, Abramović has worked independently to create provocative and challenging performance works, almost to the point of jeopardising her integrity sometimes. Eventually, she felt the need to demand more involvement from audience and she attained it setting up increasingly engaging staging.
Marina Abramović got involved with interventions, sound and video art , installations, photographs and solo performances over her 4 decade long artistic career. Between 1976 and 1988, she brought about different collaborative performances with Ulay, a German photographer, and performance artist. The collaboration saw the exhausting repetition of painful actions in order to explore male and female, active and passive dualities.
While shocking and passing over boundaries, Marina Abramović has become one of the most significant and representative artists of our time, although always surrounded by a controversy. She made art reborn from a traditional and quite static perspective: the ‘artist’ is once again a true glamorous art-world icon.
In 2012, she decided to engage herself in a wider project to support what is known as performance art: the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (MAI) was born. The institute is both a living archive used to preserve historic performance pieces and a laboratory space where exploring immaterial, time-based art such as performance, dance, theatre, film, video, opera, and music through the involvement of technology and science practitioners. Passing by it, the audience will even experience one of the most innovative practices, the Abramović Method: physical and mental exercises given by long duration observation.
Emblematic Works
The Artist Is Present
“The Artist Is Present” is a 2010 MoMA retrospective which traced the prolific career of the artist. In order to make her historical performances accessible to everyone and to create a strong audience engagement, this exhibition involved live re-performance of artist’s works staged by other artists and a strong and direct interaction between Marina Abramović and her audience through a solo performance. With this new project, Abramović marked the longest duration of time of all her single solo pieces and had overturned her latest too much theatrical performance pieces. “The Artist Is Present” was clearly a novelty in a museum setting.
“Performance becomes life itself and life become art.”
During the entire duration of this original “exhibition”, all performances started before Museum’s opening and continued even after its closing hour. In this way, each performance highly engaged the audience who experienced the timelessness of the works. Specifically for her solo exhibition, Marina Abramović decided to sit at a table and giving to the audience the opportunity to sit down in front of her, one at a time, and to engage in a silent direct exchange. No conversation and no direct communication but just a strong “energy dialogue” between the two actors involved. From the first day of the exhibition until the last one and all day long, the artist sit in the museum’s atrium table as she was in a “Square of light”, welcoming the viewer. Without it, the performance will not be possible: she needs her audience like “air to breathe”.
On the Museum’s sixth floor, a chronological installation of Abramović’s work revealed her different modes of representation, documentation, and exhibition of her time-based and media-based works. An audio of the artist’s voice was recorded in order to explain to the audience the illustrated catalog which followed the installation.
For the artist, exhibiting in such an important venue was not a simple artistic milestone but a chance to finally answer to all people who were asking “But why is this art?”. She simply replied with her artistic point of view, permitting the audience to experience the most physically and emotionally demanding performance of all time. And she knew this was the perfect performance of all time just because the mere idea makes her nauseous. And from that moment on, performance art has been legitimated and as such, more likely to be accepted by everyone.
“It is one thing to be divergent when you are 20 or 30 or 40,” she said to the camera, “but excuse me, I’m 63! I don’t want to be divergent anymore!”
Finally, “The artist is present” has become a documentary of her radical performances and a real representation of her indissoluble art-life duality.
Marina Abramovic: «Rhythm 10»
‘Rhythm 10’ is one of the artist’s early performance. It has two different moments of development: first, the preparation and, then, the real performance. About the preparation, Marina Abramović starts with putting a white paper on the floor with twenty knives with different sizes and shapes. Then, she places two cassette recorders with a microphones in order to record her performance. The performance starts. The whole structure is formed by a set of artist actions while stabbing different knives towards the spaces between her fingers and repeating her movements more than once after having listened to her recordings.
“I switch on the first cassette recorder. I take the knife and plunge it, as fast as I can, into the flesh between the outstretched fingers of my left hand. After each cut, I change to a different knife. Once all the knives (all the rhythms) have been used, I rewind the tape. I listen to the recording of the first performance. I concentrate. I repeat the first part of the performance. I pick up the knives in the same sequence, adhere to the same rhythm and cut myself in the same places. In this performance, the mistakes of the past and those of the present are synchronous. I rewind the same tape and listen to the dual rhythm of the knives. I leave.”
In such marked actions, the artist tests the relationship between the mental and the physical world, while reinterpreting the concept of rhythm. The first version of this performance was presented during a festival in Edinburgh in 1973, employing 10 different knives.
Some Exhibitions
1974 «Rhythm 0» at Studio Morra in Naples, Italy
1980 «Rest Energy» filmed in Dublin
1997 «Balkan Baroque» installation
2002 «The House with the Ocean View» performance at the Sean Kelly Gallery, in New York
2012 «The Abramović Method» at PAC in Milan, Italy
