March 1, 2012
Arguably the biggest name in contemporary performance art, Marina Abramovic has continuously put on performances that have shocked, moved and inspired audiences, who usually play a highly important role in her pieces. This Wednesday, she spoke to a crowded Wellin Hall on the subject of the “Past, Present and Future of Performance Art” in a talk sponsored by the Visiting Artist Series.
Abramovic was poised, confident, and open, alternating between frank humor and touching reflection with gentleness that made it difficult to imagine her in many of the gruesome pieces for which she is so famous.
The audience’s first glimpse of Abramovic was via a video played on a looming projection screen at the back of Wellin’s stage. The artist’s eyes, then gradually, her face and torso, stared down from the screen as she spoke through voiceover in her heavily accented English.
“Away from home. Away from studio. Away from family. Away from friends,” she greeted the audience. Video Marina went on to talk about her artistic origins and method, touching on many of the things people find so intriguing about her. She was “lucky to have discovered [her artistic inclinations] at such a young age,” she said; she was always drawing as a child and had her first exhibition at the age of 12. She explained that her willpower, which enables her to remain stoic in often physically grueling performances, was inherited from her communist parents, who she described as “stoic and dedicated,” willing to sacrifice anything to their cause.
When the video gradually faded out and real Marina stepped in, the audience remained silent. The artist took one deep breath into the microphone and then she, too, was silent. Every single person in the room, whether a fan of Abramovic or even aware of her work, must have recognized the artist’s incredible ability to captivate her audiences, a talent that has been instrumental in driving her to artistic superstardom.
“How do you know when you’re an artist?” Abramovic began. “How do you know to breathe? You don’t think about it, you just know.” Appropriately, Abramovic opened her talk by linking art with the fundamentally necessary process of breathing. She is an artist for whom art often not only imitates, but actually is life. To be a good artist, she stressed, “you must sacrifice everything.” Abramovic’s deeply personal, deeply demanding works certainly prove this point.
“It just came to me one day, like revelation,” she described, “that I can use my own body.” And indeed, Abramovic does use it — in her words “like a pencil,” — as a tool for expression.
If the body is Abramovic’s pencil, then pain is her graphite. The majority of her work is structured around one of what she describes as “our three major fears”: pain, suffering, and death. Abramovic points to suffering as a motivation for experiencing change and finding a resolution.
“I stage my fears,” she explained, noting that it was initially her fear of blood as a child that first motivated her to turn to self-mutilation in her performance. As Abramovic is facing her own fear and pain in her performance, she expects her audience to be experiencing their own types of change.
Thie idea of interpersonal connection with the audience is present in her work on a larger thematic level as well.
Born in present-day Yugoslavia, Abramovic described her homeland as a “bridge between the east and west,” and cited her fascination with the body as deriving largely from far-eastern practices involving bodily control. Monks who can stop their own hearts, or go without food for years are inspirations to Abromovic, and she strives to find a similar relationship with the body in her work and present it to Western audiences who have no capacity for such control because, she argues, we have become “invalids of technology.”
Ultimately, Abromobic describes performance art as something which is “about the invisible, the immaterial.” Really good performance art (and much of her own) is often impossible to explain, but it is undeniably transformative, for both the artist and the audience.
“I’m going to show you what I like,” said Abramovic when introducing her extensive video sequence of fellow performing artists. She presented and explained clips by several other well-known artists such as Chris Burden, William Wegman and performing duo Gilbert and George. Never straying too far from the body, Abromovic’s presentation was divided into sections titled “head,” “feet,” “chest,” hands,” “stomach,” “body limits,” “the performing body,” and “body drama.”
Ever ready for a hurdle, Abramovic didn’t miss a beat when the clips failed, saying, “let’s talk about failure.” She continued to talk about her own struggles and the challenges and satisfactions of portraying them for an audience. But despite the audience’s energy, the critics’ responses, the preparation and hype surrounding an artwork, it all comes back, for Abramovic, to the body. “In the end you’re really alone,” she concluded, “that’s what art is about.”