Celebrating Women's History Month with the Grandmother of Performance Art
Marina Abramovic’s dedication to her work is evident upon first glance at its extremism. Creating situations that the audience has never experienced before, her steadying gaze rapidly transports all participants into a space of raw experimentation, rejecting everything in order to find the undiscovered edge. Using her body as her medium, Marina constructs highly conceptual performance art pieces that confront ideas of expectation. Often inciting audience participation, these living artworks often reveal uncomfortable animalistic traits that live inside unassuming and quite civilized people.
In Naples, 1974 Marina assigned herself a passive role for six hours as she began the performance piece, Rhythm 0. Inviting the audience towards 72 objects, a sign released them of responsibility for their actions and encouraged them to use the objects against Marina as so desired. Ranging from roses and honey to a gun and a scalpel, the wide assortment presented a fearful array of possibilities. When presented with her total abdication of will, the crowd divided into those seeking to violate her and those seeking to protect her. Observing with a statuesque stillness, Marina became a work of art herself until the clock struck 2 am and she calmly got up and walked out; the crowd dissolving ahead of her, avoiding confrontation.
Fast forward forty some years and Marina began passing her work onto the next generation with a reflective exhibit of her life’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Comprising an entire floor of the museum, five of her historical pieces were re-performed by young artists, each carefully trained under Abramovic’s watchful eye. After passing through the historical pieces, each MoMA viewer was funneled towards the final experience; sitting face to face in stillness and silence with Marina herself. A champion of perseverance, Marina completed over 700 hours of quiet endurance; sat in the same position for three months for seven and a half hours a day, six days a week. Gaining publicity as the months grew on, the exhibit was frequented by celebrities and later became an eponymous film in 2012, “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present.”
The film reveals Marina Abramovic the woman in complete juxtaposition with her performance persona. Caught on camera, she is lighthearted and funny, while equally thoughtful and wise-- a far cry from the disassociated gaze she adopts while in performance. Documenting the months leading up to the show, there was much tedious correspondence and administrative tasks to be done and Marina did not at all shy away from sharing the discipline often required of artists. In deciding to embark upon the challenge of her performance “The Artist is Present,” she is often shown in scenes of uncertainty about the process, even captured wondering aloud if she will be able to complete the mountainous task.
It is reassuring to see her impressive Zen temperament give way to the vulnerably recognizable human underneath. Despite her great feats of endurance, she still suffers self-doubt and worries about the practical aspects of each performance. The Marina in performance transcends this plane of understanding while the Marina in preparation is decidedly relatable and pragmatically concerned about the risks involved. This seamless transition between personas marks her work as that fueled by pure belief; the strength of her decision to do each performance becomes the cornerstone that allows each act to withstand and surpass the physical limitations of the body. Marina’s transparency about the physical demands of her work allows the critical audience to identify more closely with each piece, rejecting easy objectification for a more complex curiosity into what motivates a perfectly rational human being into such acts of self-imposed perseverance.
Explained by Marina as the gift of her communist upbringing, her strong sense of inner disciple allows her physical body to converge with the absolute submissiveness of a statue. The ideal mindset for each Marina Abramovic performance seems akin to the absolute presence and stillness of mind achieved in meditation. In training the young artist to re-perform her works at MoMA, she emphasizes the process of consciously emptying oneself, becoming a vessel for the art to occur. Her strong connection with nature and spiritualism also provides a meditative parallel in her show preparations. By taking very pragmatic steps to train and nourish her body both before and during the months of performance allowed Marina to accomplish the feat of over 700 hours of sustained stillness.
Marina Abramovic’s approach to performance art has illuminated a new path towards the medium being included in mainstream exhibit spaces; her pioneer status has earned her the nickname “the grandmother of performance art.” Representing a bold resistance against objectification, Marina’s lifetime of performances have challenged viewers around the world to expand their perceptions of the human form and its direct relation to art. In all of her pieces, one curiosity rings clear: the place where the possibilities of the mind meet the limits of the body.
