Abramović is a performance artist
that’s been around for long enough to call herself the “grandmother of
performance art.” When she first started out, her performances were a form of
denouncement of the culture she grew up in, but she stuck with her chosen art
form, and her work evolved to contain much more meaning than simple rebellion. Driven
by her search for spiritual and psychological enlightenment, to find the
connection and difference between the body and the mind, she has pushed her
performances so far that she admits to being changed by them.
One of Abramović’s most well-known
pieces is Rhythm 0. It was a
performance piece performed in front of an audience, rather than recorded and
displayed later, in which the audience was an active participant in the
performance. Marina Abramović remained still and passive for 6 hours while the
audience was invited to act upon her using any of the 72 objects that were laid
out nearby—some harmless, some lethal. The audience started off interacting
with Abramović timidly, but in time progressed to aggression, leaving the
artist in pain and feeling violated.
This is likely one of the most
powerful pieces I've ever heard of. It fascinates me, and yet scares me so much
that I do not think that I would have wanted to be present during the
performance. There’s so much it says about human nature, about the curiosity
aspect of it. First, that a human would willingly endure such violation and
humiliation for the sake of art is astounding. There was no concrete benefit to
Abramović toughing it out: she was not tangibly rewarded for it, she did not do
it to save her life, or to save anyone else’s life. She did it solely to push
boundaries in order to satisfy her curiosity and make a statement. Then there’s
the behavior of the audience to discuss—the curiosity that would cause them to
begin to interact with her—a brazen, impassive, and foreboding figure—to begin
with. The curiosity that would cause them to go to extremes to provoke her—to
toe the boundary much the same way she was, but with potentially much more
harmful results. The most powerful thing about this piece is that it brings up
questions. Did the audience feel free to harm her because they dehumanized her in their minds due to her not fighting back? Or did they harm her because of a childish anger
in response to her dehumanizing herself—out of frustration with not getting any
validation or feedback from her?
Another impactful piece was her
collaboration with Ulay to make “AAA-AAA”, a performance piece in which the two
of them speak “Aaa-” at each other for as long as they can until they need to
take in more air. They progressively get louder and closer to each other, until
they are yelling and screaming the same sound into each other’s mouths. Watching
that single video is more exhausting than running around museums all day. It
might not make your legs ache, but for anyone that is sucked into empathizing
with all of the emotions and subtleties and displays of dominance in the video,
it’s emotionally draining. It’s a video that speaks of things that probably
should be in psychology textbooks, but isn’t. That scientific aspect, that
experimentation, melded together with all the emotions it produces, is what
makes it so incredible.
Interview “Marina Abramović” by Karlyn De Jong and Sarah
Gold accessed through the Art Full Text database.
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