Walk through Walls. A Memoir
New York, Crown Archetype, 2016, 370 pages
Review by Francesco Mazzaferro
Part Two
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Fig. 2) The cover-page of the journal Europa arte informazione/kunst-information, N. 10, October 1975
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Why has performance
art become part of the new normal in art and aesthetics?
The autobiography of Marina Abramović has been
published in the same days in which the first retrospective exhibition of Ulay,
the performance artist who had a liaison her in the 1970s, was opened in
Frankfurt [29]. Ulay’s exhibition at the Schirn, which I have just visited,
shows several joint pieces with Marina. I will not comment in this blog on the
numerous (and often very intense) pages on the ups and downs of their relationship,
contained in Walk through Walls.
Rather, I would like to raise a different question. Forty years have passed
since the two artists – together with many others – inaugurated body and
performance art in Europe; the current interest of the larger public for their
work implies that these creative forms, once at the margins of art, have by now
become part of what I am intentionally calling a “new normal” in aesthetic
taste. Why? What has happened?
When in Belgrade in 1975 people saw for the
first time the cover page of the bi-lingual Italian and German art magazine “Europa. Arte informazione / Kunst –
Information”, displaying a nude performance of Marina at the Diagramma Art Gallery in Milan the year before, she was forced to resign from the Academy of
Fine Arts of Novi Sad. The 2010 exhibition Marina
Abramović. The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art of New York
was instead an impressive success; on that occasion, the artist’s performance
lasted uninterruptedly over three months, during the museum’s opening hours. The
exhibition was seen by 850.000 visitors, of which 1,500 actively participating
to the performance [30].
In order to respond to the question, I would
like to highlight at least three developments: they concern body and
performance art, the recording of performances and the concept of duration as
key component of art.
Body art in the age of body
transformation
Speaking about Ulay, Marina explains that body
art was all about “solitude, pain,
pushing limits. Ulay’s Polaroids of that period often showed him piercing his
own flesh in various bloody ways. In one work, he tattooed one of his aphorisms
on his arm: ULTIMA RATIO (meaning final argument or last resort, referring to
force). Then he cut a square hunk of flesh containing the tattoo out of his
arm, slicing so deeply that the muscle and tendon were visible. He framed and
preserved the tattoo flesh in formaldehyde. For another image, he held a
bloodstained paper towel over a self-inflicted razor wound in his belly. A
series of shots showed him slicing his fingerprints with a box cutter and
painting the white tiles of a bathroom with his own blood. Then there was the
little jewelled brooch, in the shape of an airplane, that he pinned to his bare
chest” [31].
There is no doubt these continue to be extreme
practices, which are shocking also for todays spectators (the Frankfurt exhibit
displays Ulay’s skin piece, within a frame). And yet, today the social acceptance
of the transformation of the body, for instance through tattooing and piercing
has become – at least for younger generations – a global phenomenon. People do
not inflict anymore pain in order to be radically different from others, but
they signal their belonging to a generation where personal identity is made
visible through alteration of the skin. Most probably only few (at
least in relative terms) tattooed youngsters know well the body art of the 1970s,
but it goes without saying that the performances of those years are not seen
any more as breaching moral taboos.
Video art in the age
of social networks
Turning to video art, a passage from Walk Through Walls explains that
happenings and performances in the 1970s were linked to the attempt to enhance
the use of available technologies. The autobiography describes the performance Relation in Space, presented by Marina
and Ulay at the Venice Biennale. “We were
naked, standing twenty meters apart. We were in a warehouse on the island of
Giudecca, just across the lagoon from Venice. A couple hundred people were
watching. Slowly, at first, Ulay and I began to run toward each other. The
first time, we just brushed past each other as we met; on each successive run,
though, we moved faster and faster and made harder contact – until finally Ulay
was crashing into me. Once or twice he knocked me over. We had placed
microphones near the collision point, to pick up the sounds of flesh slapping
flesh. Part of the reason we were nude was to produce the simple sound of two
naked bodies colliding. There was a music to this sound, a rhythm. But there
were other reasons, too. For one thing, we wanted to create a work that was as minimalist
as possible, and nothing is more minimal than the nude body in an empty space.
Our statement for the piece read, simply: ‘Two bodies repeatedly pass, touching
each other. After gaining a higher speed, they collide’. But for another thing
we were in love, we had an intense relationship – and the audience couldn’t
help sensing this relationship. But of course there was also much they didn’t
know about it, much that each audience member projected onto us as we continued
to do this performance. Who were we? Why were we colliding? Was there hostility
in the collision? Was there love, or mercy? When it was over, we felt
triumphant (we also both hurt like hell from our bodily collisions)” [32].
The use of videos was, at that time, seen as a
revolutionary tool to display the performance exactly like it was, without any
manipulation. It is also the necessary counterpart to performance: “Videos are the most immediate document of a
performance, retaining the piece’s energy far better than still photography ever
could” [33].
With the dissemination of smartphones and the
explosion of social networks in the internet, the spread of performance
has unconsciously become – for better and for worse – a mass activity.
Certainly, in the 1970s the availability of image recording had already become
economically feasible to the majority of the population, and therefore also to
young artists. However, today everybody can – at any time and from any location
– perform actions and upload them in social networks which ensure a broader
public. Obviously, this does not mean that everybody of us can act as a
performance artist (in the same vain: the general availability of painting
tools has not made all of us painters). In fact, what is shown in the
electronic media are not anymore activities aiming at enlarging the sphere of
individual liberty, but (in the largest majority of cases) ordinary facts of
every day’s life. At times, people even record real criminal acts, like
aggressions, for the mere sake of showing it in the net to a larger public. In
other terms, almost everything is (or is felt) permitted, and the enlargement
of the space of liberty (and even of its abuse) is now supported by the
availability to all of the technical instruments. However, once again, what seemed a specialised technique to the most, at the time of the launch – like video art – belongs today to a common practice.
When art consumes our most
precious good: time
Marina Abramović’s creations are often
described as minimalist art, in fact as part of the so-called ‘arte povera’. And yet, it is important
to be aware that her performances consume the most valuable and least
substitutable good we have: time. If her medium were literature, her hero would
be Proust, and not the authors of epigrammatic lyrics. In many respects, her
transformation of art from the physical production of a commodity into the
organisation of an extended time process is something which is in line with a
secular process in the life of the human kind. It is not any more materials
which are scarce, but minutes. Abramović’s ephemeral and durational art recalls
this to us.
There are certainly pieces (like Rest Energy, see below) that cannot be
performed longer than 4 minutes, at the risk of life for the performers.
However, duration is the key to her art, as shown in many other cases. The Great Wall Walk in 1988 lasted ninety
days, during which Marina and Ulay walked across the Chinese wall, although
during those days there was no continuous contact to the public. To the
contrary, the House With The Ocean View
lasted in 2002 along 12 consecutive days on stage, the Artist is Present in 2010 took 75 days (736 hours), 512 hours at the Serpentine Galleries
was extended over 55 days in 2014.
In the House
With The Ocean View, for instance, Marina lived “on three platforms for twelve days, consuming only filtered water and
performing all bodily functions – showering, peeing, sitting, sleeping – in
full view of the public. One platform would hold a toilet and a shower, one would
have a chair and a table, and one would have a bed. Each platform would be
connected to the floor by a ladder – only the ladders would have sharp carving
knives, blades up, in place of rungs. I could step from one platform to the
other through openings in the side walls” [34]. “Each day, my routine consisted of moving between the three units: the
bath, the sitting room, the bedroom. It was very important that every activity
I performed be on the highest level of consciousness, whether it was taking a shower,
peeing, sitting in the chair and drinking water, lying on the bed resting, or –
especially – standing at the edge of one of the platforms, above the knife
ladders, for as long as possible” [35].
Time is the real scarce good today, above all
for the spectators, but she demands exactly this from them: to use their time
for art. For the performance “Marina
Abramović presents” at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in 2009, “to enter the museum, the public had to sign
a certificate promising they would stay four
hours without leaving” [36]. And therefore, Abramović’s art is not an
‘arte povera’, but paradoxically an ‘arte ricca’, really very rich, baroque,
excessive. Think again of the Abramović-Cellini comparison (see Part One). In 1500 – in a
situation of global scarcity of goods – the golden artefacts of Benvenuto
Cellini were so precious to the powerful of his time that popes, monarchs and
dukes accepted to ignore his crimes in order to make sure he would continue to
produce them. Today, we value what we do not have: time. There are two ways to
do it: either to cut short everything we do or to recognise the importance of
time-extensive processes, which almost nobody but a performance artist can
organise for us in an exciting and creative way, although we know that we will
never be able to fully enjoy that richness. Nobody, in our age, is so time-rich
to be able to watch at an entire video of a several hour performance.
New forms of poetic
Drawing a first conclusion, what was perceived
forty years ago as a form of cerebral expression of a revolutionary elite, has certainly become easier to understand to the larger public. In the 1970s performance artists tried to enlarge the scope of art to merge it with their alternative
life; they did it to the price of breaking moral taboos; they were willing to exploit relatively new technologies. All of this has become part of our daily life. And one of the most revolutionary features
of that art in formal terms, i.e. its long duration, makes it more precious in
a time where time consumption has become the most scarce good, for the good and
for the bad.
And yet, if these considerations display the
reasons why today’s spectators do not consider anymore body and performance art as
anti-social activities, and can even recognise themselves in them, they are not
sufficient to explain the poetic effect which Marina Abramović’s art exercises
on an extraordinarily high number of people in every part of the planet. Let us
try together to understand what are the components of the poetic revolution which she has been able to fulfil in the course of the last forty years.
The starting point:
Art as a process
The intuition that duration and process should
become the essence of a new art, while the object should be given a much less
relevant role in art (and could therefore be ignored), came to Marina when she
was still in her early years, in 1960. “When
I was fourteen, I asked my father for a set of oil paints. He bought them for
me, and also arranged for a painting lesson from an old partisan friend of his,
an artist named Filo Filipović. Filipović who was part of a group called
Informel, painted what he called abstract landscapes. (…) He arrived in my
little studio carrying paints, canvas, and some other materials, and he gave me
my first painting lesson. He cut out a piece of canvas and put it on the floor.
He opened a can of glue and threw the liquid on the canvas; he added a little
bit of sand, some yellow pigment, some red pigment, and some black. Then he
poured about half a liter of gasoline on it, lit a match, and everything
exploded. “This is a sunset” he told me. And then he left.” [37].
"This made a big
impression on me. I waited until the charred mess has dried, and then very
carefully pinned it to the wall. Then my family and I left for vacation. When I
came back, the August sun had dried everything up. The colour was gone and the
sand had fallen off. There was nothing left but a pile of ashes and sand on the
floor. The sunset didn’t exist anymore. Later on, I understood why this
experience was so important. It taught me that the process was more important
than the result, just as the performance means more to me than the object. I
saw the process of making it and then the process of its unmaking. There was no
duration or stability to it. It was pure process. Later on I read – and loved –
the Yves Klein quote: ‘My paintings are but the ashes of my art’ ” [38].
This conclusion remained firm in her mind for
decades: “I constantly repeat to my
students something Brancusi said: What you’re doing is not important. What is
really important is the state of mind from which you do it. Performance is all
about state of mind” [39].
Performance as total
art
The transition from painting to performance
occurs already in Belgrade, and is possibly part of a process to free herself
from the control of the mother, who was director of the Museum of the Revolution and Yugoslav delegate to UNESCO, and had
therefore close connection to all ‘officially recognised’ avant-garde artists
in the country. It was also a way to escape home, where she had her painting studio.
“I kept painting in my studio at home.
But then one day I was lying on the grass, just staring up at the cloudless
sky, when I saw twelve military jets fly over, leaving white trails behind
them. I watched in fascination as the trails slowly disappeared and the sky
once more became a perfect blue. All the once it occurred to me – why paint?
Why should I limit myself to the two dimensions when I could make art from
anything at all: fire, water, the human body? Anything! There was something
like a click in my mind – I realized
that being an artist meant having immense freedom. If I wanted to create
something from dust or rubbish, I could do it. It was an unbelievably freeing
feeling, especially for someone coming from a home where there was almost no
freedom” [40].
In 1969 Marina decided to devote herself to
performance art, and proposed to the Belgrade Student Cultural Center, the SKC,
newly created following the vague of Europe’s student revolution “her first idea for a performance idea: to install
basins for washing clothes along the corridor of the youth centre” [41].
While this does not seem to have been a particularly radical form of
contestation, it was nevertheless rejected.
Pain as a source of
creative energy
As the title of the autobiography also
stresses, the capacity to withstand pain is both an important component of
performance art as well as of Marina’s personality: “Pain was something like a sacred door to another state of
consciousness. When you reached that door, then another side opened” [50]. Gillo
Dorfles openly spoke, concerning Marina Abramović, in terms of masochism [51].
In Walk through walls, she points out
instead to the education she received as daughter of two resistance war heroes;
as from childhood she was told it was of the utmost importance to withstand
pressure. “The experience is
indescribable. The pain is a huge obstacle. It comes like a storm. Your brain
tells you, Well, I can move if I really have to. But if you don’t move, if you have the willpower to make no compromise
or concession, the pain becomes so intense that you think you’ll lose
consciousness. And it’s at that moment – and only at that moment – that the
pain disappears” [52].
Whatever the reasons, Marina always sticks to
the instructions, while Ulay repeatedly fails to do it. This difference becomes
one of the psychological edges which will ultimately break their relationship.
Art, energy, soul
With time, spiritual energy becomes a key
factor in the interaction between the performer and the public. Here is the way
Marina describes the last session of the Seven
Easy Pieces, a 7-day performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. That
evening a 7-hour performance is displayed: Entering
the Other Side (see the picture number 15 in the first part of this post):
“I stood high above the rotunda on a
twenty-foot platform, wearing a blue dress with a giant, circus tent-like skirt
whose spiral form (inspired by the Guggenheim itself) covered the scaffolding
and draped down to the floor. The Dutch designer Aziz had created the dress
from 180 yards of material and generously donated it to me. As I stood there I
waved my arms in slow, repetitive motions. The room was completely silent for
seven hours. Because of the rush to put me on the platform in time for the
opening, no one had thought to give me a safety belt – and I was so exhausted
after performing for seven days, seven hours a day, that I could have fallen
asleep standing – and literally fallen – so it was crucial to stay awake and in
the moment. Finally, close to midnight, I spoke: ‘Please, just for the moment,
all of you, just listen,’ I said ‘I am here and now, and you are here and now
with me. There is no time.’ Then, at the stroke of twelve, a gong sounded, and
I climbed down inside the giant skirt and emerged to greet the audience. The
applause went on and on; there were tears in many eyes, including mine. I felt
so connected to everyone there, and to the great city itself” [54]. The
artist was 59, and bringing the 7 day performance to an end had been a
considerable effort.
The spiritual relation between performer and
public becomes personal with the performance “The artist is present” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of New
York in 2010, where she is sitting for 736 hours in front of more than 1,500
individual spectators. “In The House
with the Ocean View, I had a relationship
with the audience, but The Artist is Present was a whole different story, because now the relationship was
one-to-one. I was there, one hundred percent – three hundred percent – for each
person. And I became extremely receptive. (…) What I found, immediately, was
that the people sitting across from me became very moved. From the beginning,
people were in tears – as so was I. Was I a mirror? It felt like more than
that. I could see and feel people’s pain” [55]. “Some people only sat in front of me for a minute, some sat for an
hour or more. One man sat twenty-one times, the first time for seven hours” [56].
NOTES
[29] The exhibition is entitled: “Ulay life-sized”,
and is being held at the Schirn in Francoforte from 13 October 2016 to 8 January
2017. See: http://www.schirn.de/ausstellungen/2016/ulay_life_sized/
[30] Abramović, Marina and Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls: a memoir, New York, Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, 2016, viii -370 pages. Quotation at page 318. See also: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/marinaabramovic/
[31] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, pp. 85-86
[32] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 87
[33] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 229
[34] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 263
[35] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 266
[36] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James -
Walk through walls … quoted, p. 297
[37] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 30
[38] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, pp. 30-31
[39] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 224
[40 Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 31
[41] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 44
[42] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 43
[43] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 48
[44] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, pp. 65, 64-65 and 73-74
[45] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 57
[46] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 60
[47] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 61
[48] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, pp. 88-89
[49] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 99
[50] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 89
[51] Gillo Dorfles and Marina Abramovic. Anno
domini 2012, Art tribune (in Italian). See: http://www.artribune.com/2016/02/gillo-dorfles-recensione-marina-abramovic-2012/
[52] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 136
[53] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, pp. 116-117
[54] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, pp. 283-284
[55] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 309
[56] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls … quoted, p. 314
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