February 23, 2012
Call her sensational, sadistic, brilliant or utterly unforgettable; Marina Abramovic is nothing if not a force of nature. The Serbian-born contemporary artist, who has called herself “the grandmother of performance art,” uses her body as the central component of her powerful, often violent pieces, which have spanned several continents and the past four decades. Her works are all based on an active effort to engage the viewer in an emotive experience, to elicit a connection by means of her own actions. As the artist declared in an explanatory caption to one of her early works, “I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility.”
Abramovic has scrubbed raw, maggot-covered cow bones in the basement of a performance space in Venice, weeping as she sang folk-songs from her Balkan childhood. She has spent ten days confined in three elevated rooms in a studio in Chelsea, drinking, sleeping and urinating as she passed from one white box to the next, separated from her audience below by three ladders made of knives with upward-pointed blades. She has screamed into the mouth of another performer until they both passed out from lack of air.
Her works are compelling, visceral, fierce. Some call them self-mutilation; some disdain the cult of personality that has grown around the artist, who is very much the darling of the contemporary art world, the last of the great performance artists of her generation to continue the tradition.
She both fits within many artistic movements (feminist, post-soviet, political, religious), and defies categorization. The most striking element of her works is the artist’s own unflinching, steadfast commitment to her performances, in which, she claims, she enters a meditative state where nothing can touch her. In her personal life, Abramovic is soft-spoken and well-dressed, an excellent cook and a fearful driver. In front of an audience, all of this changes. “I become, somehow, not like a mortal.”
In one work entitled “Lips of Thomas,” which the artist performed in Belgrade in 1975, Abramovic enacted a shocking ritual in which the naked artist ate a kilo of honey, drank a bottle of wine, cut a pentagram (the red, five-pointed star is a symbol of the soviet state in which she was raised) into her stomach with a razor blade, and lay down on a cross made up of blocks of ice. After thirty minutes, her audience interfered and ended the performance. When Abramovic revived it at the Guggenheim in 2005, the entire ritual lasted seven hours.
This intensely emotive engagement with her audience comes from the internal transformation of her performance state. As the artist sees it, “if I can go through the door of pain to embrace life on the other side, they can, too.”
Her most recent work, “The Artist is Present,” which was the centerpiece of a retrospective at MoMA in 2010, consisted of two chairs in a central, lit space in the museum’s main atrium. The artist sat in one of the chairs, silent and unmoving, staring straight ahead as visitors filed in and out of the chair across from her. Some sat for several minutes, one for an entire day. Those who met the artist’s gaze smiled, fidgeted nervously, made faces, wept. She remained seated in this position from opening to close, for the full three months and 736 hours of the exhibition. One can say many things about Marina Abramovic, but none would diminish the unmistakable power she has over all who encounter her.
Abramovic’s talk at Hamilton will be entitled “The Past, the Present, and the Future of Performance Art,” and will take place in the Chapel on Wednesday, February 29, at 6 pm. The artist was brought to Hamilton by Kevin W. Kennedy Professor of Art Katharine Kuharic, who has been interested in Abramovic for decades, and seen all of her recent performances. Prof. Kuharic regards Abramovic as the “most important religio-political artist working today” and views her work as a “removal of the logical, conscious self into another realm.”
Prof. Kuharic, who is good friends with the artist’s gallery dealer, arranged Abramovic’s visit, which has been several years in the making. The talk was made possible by the Art Department, the Kirkland Endowment, the Office of the Dean of Faculty, and the Dan Dietrich Foundation, Kuharic calls this event a “major milestone for our Art Department,” along with the opening of the new museum this fall. Hundreds of students from Colgate and Pratt are expected to come to campus for this event.
The last talk Abramovic gave was earlier this winter, at the Berlin Film Festival, where her latest work was being pre-screened. 7,000 people were in attendance.