Marina Abramović with James Kaplan
Walk through Walls. A Memoir
New York, Crown Archetype, 2016, 370 pages
Review by Francesco Mazzaferro
Part Three
 |
| Fig. 3) Marina Abramović,
Biography, in collaboration with Charles Atlas, Stuttgart, Cantz Verlag, 1994
|
[Versione originale: dicembre 2016 - nuova versione: aprile 2019]
The autobiography
of Marina Abramović has many interpretations. In the latter part of this review
we are wondering whether and how reading her memoirs can help us to understand
some developments in Italian art during the last forty years. It is an
important issue, so much so that the publisher 24 Ore Cultura, in cooperation with the Pavilion of Contemporary
Art (PAC) in Milan, dedicated to the artist's works in Italy the first of two
bilingual volumes - in Italian and English - for the exhibition The Abramović Method, curated by Diego
Sileo and Eugenio Viola in 2012 [57]. In addition to the writings of the two curators, the first tome included
contributions by Renato Barilli, Achille Bonito Oliva, Germano Celant and Gillo
Dorfles, and therefore by the four Italian art critics whose names contributed
most to the promotion of her art in the seventies, both in our country and
outside. Art critics Antonello Tolve and Angela Vettese commented instead more
recent performances of the 2000s.
During the Seventies, Marina’s first international success were tied to our country, with
performances in Rome (1973), Milan (1974), Naples (1975), Venice (1976) and
Bologna (1977) which have been further celebrated until today. The relationship
with Italy has remained strong and constant, going beyond art; it materialized
in many friendships and a liaison of twelve years (including marriage and
divorce) with the Italian artist Paolo Canevari. In more recent decades, it were
held in Italy also important initiatives, such as "The Biography Remix" in Rome in 2004 and "The Abramović Method" in Milan in 2012, just mentioned.
The Seventies
In the Seventies, Italy was for Marina
Abramović one of the stepping stones to international success. In my view, the
reason of her frequent visits was twofold. On the one
hand, Italy was one of the creative centres of performance art, from where one was
able to hold contacts with major European and American artists; working in
Italy offered Ms Abramović the opportunity to meet artists from all over the
world. On the other hand, the bilateral cultural relations between Yugoslavia
and Italy were intense, both due to geographical proximity and through the
network of contacts of the Italian Communist Party, which at that time was
moving towards the direction of the so-called Eurocommunism and therefore saw Yugoslavia as an interesting
equidistance model from the two blocks. It must however be added that these are
my personal views only: Walk through
walls does not contain any political assessment on what happened in those
years in Italy (and, more generally, in Europe).
The first contact with Italy was due to Contemporanea, a Roman initiative by
Achille Bonito Oliva and Graziella Lonardi Buontempo 1973. It was an
interdisciplinary exhibition, divided into ten sections: art, film, theatre,
architecture, photography, music, dance, books and records of artists, visual
and concrete poetry, and finally alternative information. It was one of the
first exhibitions to promote the idea of ephemeral art, and also the first
pattern for an interdisciplinary exhibition of contemporary art model around
the whole world. In fact, it preceded by many years the famous
interdisciplinary exhibition Les
immatériaux, organized by the philosopher François Lyotard and the art
critic and curator Thierry Chaput at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1985.
The exhibition was held in an underground car
park (by way of 'new catacombs', as the organizer said in a later lecture on
that show [58]
) in the
Villa Borghese park. The car park had been just finished but was not yet used
for the original purpose. The exhibition aimed at documenting contemporary art
between 1955 and 1973, comparing Europe and the United States. To this aim, 45
artists of the old world and 45 of the new continent were invited. One hundred thousands paying visitors went to see the Rome exhibition during three months, with
an extraordinary success for those days. Simultaneously, on the initiative of
Ms. Lonardi Buontempo, Christo packed Porta Pinciana and a part of the Aurelian
Walls.
Here is what the
authoress wrote in Walk through walls:
“In late 1973 I went to Rome as part of an
exhibition called ‘Contemporanea,’ curated by the Italian critic Achille Bonito
Oliva. There I met such important performance artists like Joan Jonas,
Charlemagne Palestine, Simone Forti and Luigi Ontani, and the key Arte Povera
figures Marisa and Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Luciano Fabro, Giovanni
Anselmo, and Giuseppe Pennone. It was heady company. But as my horizons
broadened and I understood how conceptualism was taking hold, I yearned to make
my own art more visceral. That meant using the body – my body. In Rome I
performed Rhythm 10 once more [n.d.r. see Part Two], this time with twenty knives and
even more blood than before. Once again, I got a big reaction from the
audience. My mind was ablaze – it felt as though the possibilities for
performance art were infinite” [59].
A year later, in 1974,
Rhythm 4 was performed in Milan, thanks to Luciano Inga Pin, an art
critic who was promoting body art in his Diagram Gallery. "
In Yugoslavia and in the rest of Europe,
word was spreading in the art world about this reckless young woman. Later that
year I went to Galleria Diagramma in Milan to perform Rhythm 4
. In this piece I was naked, alone in a
white room and crouched above a powerful industrial fan. As a video camera sent
my image to the audience in the next room, I pushed my face against the
hurricane blowing out of the fan, trying to take as much air into my lungs as
possible. In a couple of minutes, the great torrent of air filling my insides
caused me to lose consciousness. I had anticipated this, but as with Rhythm 2
, the
point of the piece had been to show me in two different states, consciousness
and unconsciousness. I knew that I was experiencing new ways to use my body as
material. The problem was that, as with Rhythm 5, I was perceived to be in danger. And while in the earlier piece the
danger had been real, and this time it was only perceived, the Milan gallery
staff, fearing for my well-being, rushed in and “rescued” me. It wasn’t needed,
it wasn’t intended, but it all became part of the piece" [60].
The next step in Italy,
at the Studio Morra of Naples, is still legendary in the still young history of
performance art from the seventies until today. The back cover of the catalogue
of the retrospective at MoMA in New York in 2010 is dedicated to a photo taken
from that performance. "
The
photographs of me naked in Galleria Diagramma were especially scandalous. These
reactions to my work led me to plan my most daring piece to date. What if
instead of doing something to myself, I let the public decide what to do to me?
The invitation came from Studio Morra in Naples: Come here and perform whatever
you want. It was early 1975" [61].
The Morra Studio
- whose
business is now continued by the Morra Foundation (http://www.fondazionemorra.org/) - was
created 1974. Since then - as we can read on the website of the Foundation -
the Gallery "has focused its
interest in the neo-avant-garde of the seventies; in particular, it was among
the first in Italy to offer the artists of Viennese Actionism and Body Art. In their exhibition spaces, they hosted artists like Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Urs
Luthi, Gina Pane, Joe Jones, Marina Abramović, Bob Watts and Peter Kubelka" [62].
“My plan was to go to the gallery and just stand there, in black
trousers and a black T-shirt, behind a table containing seventy-two objects: A
hammer. A saw. A feather. A fork. A bottle of perfume. A bowler hat. An ax. A rose.
A bell. Scissors. Needles. A pen. Honey. A lamb bone. A carving knife. A
mirror. A newspaper. A shawl. Pins. Lipstick. Sugar. A Polaroid camera. Various
other things. And a pistol, and one bullet lying next to it. When a big crowd
had gathered at eight P.M., they found the instructions on the table” [63]. The
artist assured in writing to the public that those present could use these
objects to do anything on her, and that she would take full responsibility.
Thereafter, she invited them to take the initiative.
“
For the first three hours, not much happened
– the audience was being shy with me. I just stood there, staring into the
distance, not looking at anything or anybody; now and then, someone would hand
me the rose, or drape the shawl over my shoulders, or kiss me. Then, slowly at
first and then quickly, things began to happen. It was very interesting: for
the most part, the women in the gallery would tell the men what to do to me,
rather than do it themselves (although later on, when someone stuck a pin into
me, one woman wiped the tears from my eyes). For the most part, these were just
normal members of the Italian art establishment and their wives. Ultimately I
think the reason I wasn’t raped was that the wives were there” [64].
“
As
evening turned into late night, a certain air of sexuality arose in the room. This
came not from me but from the audience. We were in southern Italy, where the
Catholic Church was so powerful, and there was this strong Madonna/whore
dichotomy in attitudes toward women. After three hours, one man cut my shirt
apart with the scissors and took it off. People manipulated me into various
poses. If they turned my head down, I kept it down; if they turned it up, I
kept it that way. I was a puppet – entirely passive. Bare breasted, I stood
there, and someone else wrote IO SONO LIBERO – “I am free” – on the mirror and
stuck it in my hand. Someone else took the lipstick and wrote END across my
forehead. A guy took Polaroids of me and stuck them in my hand, like playing
cards. Things got more intense. A couple of people picked me up and carried me
around. They put me on the table, spread my legs, stuck the knife in the table
close to my crotch. Someone stuck pins into me. Someone else slowly poured a
glass of water over my head. Someone cut my neck with the knife and sucked the
blood. I still have the scar. There was one man – a very small man – who just
stood very close to me, breathing heavily. This man scared me. Nobody else, nothing
else, did. But he did. After a while, he put the bullet in the pistol and put
the pistol in my right hand. He moved the pistol toward my neck and touched the
trigger. There was a murmur in the crowd, and someone grabbed him. A scuffle
broke out. Some of the audience obviously wanted to protect me; others wanted
the performance to continue. This being southern Italy, voices were raised;
tempers flared. The little man was hustled out of the gallery and the piece
continued. In fact, the audience became more and more active, as if in a
trance.” [65].
“And then, at two
A.M., the gallerist came and told me the six hours were up. I stopped staring
and looked directly at the audience. ‘The performance is over,’ the gallerist
said. ‘Thank you.’ I looked like hell. I was half naked and bleeding; my hair
was wet. And a strange thing happened: at this moment, the people who were
still there suddenly became afraid of me. As I walked towards them, they ran
out of the gallery. The gallerist drove me back to the hotel and I went to my
room alone – feeling more alone than I’d felt for a long time. I was exhausted,
but my mind wouldn’t stop buzzing, replaying scenes from the wild evening. The
pain that had been absent when I received the pinpricks and the cut to my neck
now throbbed. The fear of that little man wouldn’t leave me. Eventually I fell
into a kind of half sleep. In the morning I looked in the mirror, and a whole
clump of my hair had turned gray. In that moment, I realized that the public
can kill you. The next day, the gallery received dozens of phone calls from
people who had participated in the show. They were terribly sorry, they said;
they didn’t really understand what had happened while they were there – they
didn’t know what had come over them. What had happened while they were there,
quite simply, was performance. And the essence of performance is that the
audience and the performer make the piece together” [66].
In 1976, Marina and Ulay perform Relation in Space at the Venice
Biennale, a piece already commented on in the second part of this review.
Achille Bonito Oliva wrote on it in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, in an article that overall crushed the
Biennale under the title “Quel
pasticciaccio brutto della Giudecca”, namely "That mess on the Giudecca canal" [67].
The last Italian performance of those years remembered
in the memoirs took place at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art of Bologna in
1977, in the new exhibition centre opened two years before in the fair quarters
of the town. Between 1 and 6 June 1977, Renato Barilli and Francesco Solmi held
there the first Settimana Internazionale
della Performance [68] (International Week of Performance), as part of the
local Art Fair.
These were the years in which Abramović and
Ulay were living a nomadic life. From a phone booth in the Netherlands, they came
to know about the invitation "
to
participate in the International Performance Week, in Bologna. A lot of
important artists were going to be there - Acconci, Beuys, Burden, Gina Pane,
Charlemagne Palestine, Laurie Anderson, Ben d'Armagnac, Katharina Sieverding
and Nam June Paik" [69]. In addition to the many Italian performers, also
the Viennese actionist Hermann Nitsch participated in that week; Marina Abramović
however, who expressed many doubts on him in
Through the walls, failed to mention him.
“We wanted to come up with a major new piece. It was June 1977. We drove up to the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna
ten days early, on our last drop of gas. We parked in front and went to talk to
the museum director about a place to stay. (We could always sleep in the vain,
but sometimes it was nice to have bathroom facilities.) He said we could bunk in the janitor’s closet.
Perfect. We set to work on planning our performance. The result was Imponderabilia. In developing the work, we thought about a simple fact: if there were
no artists, there would be no museums. From this idea we decided to make a
poetic gesture – the artists would literally become the door to the museum” [70].
“Ulay built two tall vertical cases in the
museum entrance, making it substantially narrower. Our performance would be to
stand in this reduced opening, naked and facing each other, like doorposts or
classical caryatidis. Thus everyone coming in would have to turn sideways to
get past us, and everyone would have to make a decision as he or she slid by:
face the naked man, or the naked woman?” [71]
The artist's autobiography reveals two really
interesting and surprising elements, which show some aspects of the cultural
life in Bologna 1977. Those who, like me, lived there those days know very well
that it was a very delicate moment for the Emilian capital, which in March of
that year had seen moments of real guerrilla in the city centre, with the
left-wing extra-parliamentary movements contesting violently at the same time
the legitimacy of the conservative central government and the administration of
the Communist mayor Renato Zangheri. Well, the artist revealed that, at that
juncture, the Bologna city council was in such financial troubles that they
were not able to pay the agreed fees to the artists. The latter soon began to
suspect “that if they promised to mail us
our money, we would never get it" [72]. They sought therefore to be
paid in Bologna: "and every day
there was an excuse: There was a strike. The office manager’s cousin was in the
hospital. The secretary had just left. Somebody forgot to bring in the key to
the safe" [73]. The original English text also contains a brief
sarcastic sentence about the country ("It
was Italy") that in the Italian version translator has disappeared.
How could Abramović and Ulay get paid? A few
minutes before the performance started, Ulay rushes naked in the office of the
Director's secretary, caught her when she was unprepared and obtained for
himself and Marina a cash payment. He was so unsure of what would happen to that
money during the performance that he hid the banknotes - wrapped in a plastic
bag - in a flush toilet of the art gallery. "We were the only artists who got paid, incidentally" [74].
The second aspect is that the performance
(which originally was to last six hours) was interrupted by a diligent deputy chief
of the local police forces, who interdicted it on the basis of the prohibition
of obscene acts in public places (Roberto Barilli also narrated the episode, in
a detailed contribution to the catalogue for
The Abramović Method exhibition, at pages 52-55 of the first
volume). What had not yet happened in previous years in Rome, Milan, Naples and
Venice, i.e. the police intervention stopping the performances, took place in Bologna,
the Italian city that most of all enjoyed the reputation of liberality in those
days.
It should also be said that the police raid
probably contributed to the success of the performance, attracting media
attention. A few months later, in August 1977, Gillo Dorfles, a leading Italian
critics of the twentieth century art, dedicated to the performance a witty
article in the main Italian daily Corriere
della Sera, to comment on the interrelationship between art and social
customs, and even to make a compliment to the Bolognese public, which had
behaved in a so composed way. "To
get used, therefore, to physical contact with others, with strangers; to touch
others (as we would not like to be touched by them). Perhaps this is the meaning of one of
the many Body-Art performances released to the public during the last
"Art Fair" in Bologna. It was a he and a she (in this case, two
well-known artists: the Belgrade-born Marina Abramovic [sic] and the Dutch
Ulay), who - perfectly but chastely naked - stood motionless inside a doorway,
through which, with a space of about forty centimetres between the two, viewers
had to make their way. The public
fulfilled the task conscientiously and with composure; and, it seemed, without
embarrassment, trying to do as soon as possible in going through the door – the
porte étroite - and, in crossing it, they
did not even have time to notice when they touched or not the two young people
(with two very attractive bodies in less public conditions)" [75].
Imponderabilia has become since then a classic of
performance art in the world. It was re-performed by other artists several
times, including continuously throughout the course of the retrospective
exhibition "The Artist is Present"
at MoMA in New York, during the three months of that exhibition in 2010.
Two more, immediately following, performances in
the Emilia region - listed in the Milan catalogue of Italian works - did not
appear in Walk through walls. They
were Relation in Time (held in Bologna)
and Work Relations 2 (in Ferrara).
The first has also become very famous since then, for the hair weave between
Abramović and Ulay.
The break in the
Eighties
In the following decade, Marina’s Italian
appearances became less assiduous. Italy remained a country from which many of
his friends originated, but it prevailed the interest in other regions (India,
Australia, Nepal, China) during a process of discovery of non-European
cultures. Moreover, the international community of body art, so cohesive in the Seventies around a core of founding
artists, tended to dissolve. In Italy, the eighties were also the times of the
so-called 'riflusso', to use the
expression of journalistic jargon (literally: reflux) used to describe the
abandonment of the extreme ideologization, which had been one of the reasons
for the interest of young people for expressing a radically protest in art in
the 1970s.
Even the type of her performance art changed in
those years: the artist's focus shifted from the previous extreme gestures and
the challenges to her own body to the so-called tableaux vivants, performed by either artists or the audience. They
were images of pictorial quality, captured in photographs in order to reflect
on the relationship between people, landscape and history. Following that
model, Marina gave the performance Modus
Vivendi, clearly inspired by painting, in the village of Genazzano (as part
of the performance festival called The
raft of Babel, held in 1983). Some figures (such as the Pietà) will be
repeated in subsequent years on many occasions.
The only significant presence in Italy in the
eighties, mentioned in the memoirs, dated back to 1984, when Marina and Ulay were
in Trapani to shoot
Terra degli Dea Madre
(an highly unusual Italian expression meaning something like the Earth of Mother Goddesses). It was a short (fifteen
minutes) video written and directed by the two artists. It was a meditation on
the relationship between men and women and their different way of expressing
sorrow and grief in a Sicilian society depicted as still very primitive; the
sense of mystery was reinforced by the fact that Marina spoke off camera using
a non-existent language. The video - in which neither of the two performers
appeared, and therefore properly belongs to the genre of the short film, rather
than performance - was filmed to be shown as part of an installation at the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1986: the installation consisted of two
chairs, a TV set (showing the video) and a megaphone (spreading voice and
sound). Looking at the images available on the internet, I got the impression
that the video revealed a sense of fascination for and, at the same time,
diversity and distance vis-à-vis the Sicilian society, a differentiated emotion
clearly also leaking out from the pages of the autobiography: "
We had spent time there [in Sicily]
before,
and the division between the sexes fascinated us: the women were always
in-doors, dressed in black and sitting in clusters as they talked together; the
men were always outside, talking in their own groups. We wanted to base our
film on these phenomena. We were in Trapani, which is in the middle of nowhere.
When we first got there, we wrote a newspaper advertisement saying that we were
looking for women from age seventy to a hundred to appear in our film, and also
any virgins from eighty to ninety years old. We would pay them for their time,
we said. The ad went in the paper. And then we sat in our hotel for three days,
and no one came. Absolutely nobody. Then, on the fourth day, a very proper old lady arrived, dressed
like an elegant widow. She had a friend
with her, similarly dressed, but the first lady did all the talking. She said,
‘What do you want? Tell us the story.’ So we told them, in all our enthusiasm,
about the film we had in mind. We were drinking coffee together, in small
Italian cups. The woman looked at me. Then she said, ‘We ’re going to help you;
we’re going to talk to our brother.’ And
on the next day, the entire town mobilized to help us. We were given an old
mansion to film in, as well as full permission to film anywhere outdoors. Young
men materialized to help carry the equipment, and even more important, our equipment was safe. There in Sicily, where
everything was controlled by the Mafia, I felt like your belongings could
vanish in three seconds if you didn’t watch them like a hawk. Now we could
leave our cameras in our unlocked car and nothing would be touched – the Mafia
protected us. I think they just liked us, because we were so insanely strange:
they were entertained by us. We even found two virgins, eighty-six-year-old
twin sisters. They blushed very sweetly when their moment on camera came" [76].
Return to Italy
In 1997, Marina returned to performing in Italy,
at the urging of Germano Celant (the father of the definition of arte povera in the seventies, and one of
most active Italian art critics on the international scene) who was entrusted
the direction of the Biennale that year. The terrible war in the Balkans was bringing
the attention of the Belgrade-born artist back to Europe; Yugoslavia had broken
up in a tragic way, the war had been terminated with the Dayton Peace Agreement
in 1995, and the authorities of Montenegro at the time of Đukanović – the leader
looking suddenly for a new identity after having remained tightly embraced to
Serbia during the war years - asked her to represent the country at the Biennale,
since her father was Montenegrin. The artist was attracted by the argument of
identity, but broke very soon any relation with the representatives of the
authorities. Marina, who at that stage of her life was reflecting in parallel
on the causes of the end of her love story with Ulay and the bloody ruin of her
country, proposed them a representation combining very raw aspects: she wanted
to organize an installation with mice and bloody bones of cattle, to tell the
public the Balkan legend of the mouse-wolf. Montenegro’s Minister of culture broke
then any relations with the artist, preferring a collection of local painters with
ethnic-popular themes and denouncing the performance artist as a traitor. At
that point, she had no chance anymore to participate in the Biennale; Celant
proposed therefore an emergency solution that would prove a harbinger of
success: he offered the still free basement of the Italian pavilion, to present
to the public exactly the same piece which had been refused by the Montenegrin
authorities. With this work the artist eventually won the Golden Lion.
This is what Marina wrote on this:
“The title of my piece, Balkan Baroque,
didn’t refer to the baroque art movement,
but rather the baroqueness of the Balkan mind. Really you can only understand
the Balkan mentality if you’re from there, or spend a lot of time there. To
comprehend it intellectually is impossible – these turbulent emotions are
volcanic, insane. There is always war somewhere on this planet, and I wanted to
create a universal image that could stand for war anywhere [77].
In Balkan Baroque, I sat on the floor of the basement of the Italian pavillon, on an
enormous pile of cow bones: five hundred clean bones underneath; two thousand
bloody, meaty, gristly bones on top. For four days, seven hours a day, I sat
scrubbing the bloody bones while still, silent images from my interviews with
my mother and father – Danica folding her hands over her heart then putting her
hands over her eyes, Vojin waving his pistol – flashed on two screens behind
me. In the un-air-conditioned basement, in the humid summer air of Venice, the
bloody, meaty, gristly bones rotted and filled with maggots as I scrubbed them:
the stench was unholy, like the stench of bodies on the battlefield. The public
filed in and stared, repulsed by the odor but transfixed by the spectacle. As I
scrubbed the bones, I wept and sang Yugoslav folk songs from my childhood. And
on the third screen was a video of me in glasses, a lab coat, and heavy leather
shoes, very scientific-looking in a Slavic way, telling the story of the Wolf
Rat” [78]. It was a terrible story, which explains how a rat catcher compels
dominant mice to madness, preventing them to gnaw their teeth and blinding them.
Than the rat catcher would introduce the mad dominant mice in the burrows of mice, so that they would kill as many of his peers before being overwhelmed. At the end of that
really horrid story, the performer suddenly initiated a frenzied and sensual
dance. “A horrifying carnage and an
intensely disturbing story, followed by a sexy dance – then a return to more
bloody awfulness. Four days, seven hours a day. Every morning, I had to come
back and embrace this pile of maggoty bones. The heat in that basement was
overpowering. The small was unbearable. But that was the work. For me, it was
the essence of Balkan Baroque-ness” [79]
The series of performance actions and tableaux vivants in Italy continued at
the beginning of the new millennium: Energy
Clothes (Como, 2001), Mambo at
Marienbad (Volterra, 2001), Stromboli
(2002), Cleaning the Mirror
(Naples, 2004). None of them was mentioned in Walk through walls. Still, the memoirs often cited Italy, both for
family acquaintances (Marina lived with Paolo Canevari in New York for twelve
years, but often spent summers in Italy) and for more professional relations,
particularly with Lia Rumma’s art gallery (http://www.liarumma.it/) in Naples and Milan, since 2002.
In 2004 it was held, at the Palladium Theatre
in Rome, the first performance of
The
Biography Remix, directed by Michael Laub. It was an updated re-enactment
of
Biography, a theatre piece that had
been composed as autobiographical reflection in 1992. The art publisher
Charta released on that occasion
The Biography of Biographies, today
virtually impossible to find on the book antiquarian market.
The cooperation with Italians friends (for
example with the photographer Marco Anelli) remained strong even after the marriage
with Canevari broke in 2009. Marina presented the video performance entitled
Confession at the Venice Biennale in
2010. The same year, she produced
Back to
Simplicity (in the Ciociaria region, 2010), a work aiming at purifying from
the tensions she had experienced in New York for the major retrospective
The Artist is Present at MoMa, but also meant
to help recover from the pain of the repeated failure in her sentimental life:
"
I was in so much pain that I had to
make some kind of contact with innocent life, so Marco photographed me with
newborn baby lambs and goats. It helped me feel better, but the relief was
temporary" [80]. All these works, both in Italy and in New York,
always saw the collaboration of Marco Anelli as a photographer.
After two years, the retrospective exhibition in
Milan entitled
The Abramović Method
marked the culmination of a long transition from the experimentation on her
body (which had seen an important stage in Milan, with
Rhythm 4, 1974) to the
definition of a canonical method of performance that would no longer apply to
the individual artist only. The method should in fact be passed on to future
generations, and also be taught to the public. People were therefore chosen from the audience and given a fast training, thereby becoming the protagonists
of the performance, while the other spectators watch them. It no longer mattered
what they would represent (in terms of actions or symbols); it was above all
the process, and the relationship that developed between the improvised
performers and spectators, which was crucial. Just read the instructions, below
the immediately preceding picture, to understand that a cycle of artistic
reflections on time and art life had been completed in Milan; those were the
same reflections which had been at the centre of the artistic creation of
Marina Abramović all her life long.
NOTES
[57] Marina Abramović, Italian works, edited by
Diego Sileo and Eugenio Viola, 24 ORE Cultura,
209 + 96 pages, 2012.
[58]
Even today, the 1973 exhibition is commented as
a fundamental moment for understanding the evolution of the perception of taste
in the twentieth century in Italy. Achille Bonito Oliva gave a lecture on
Contemporanea at the Maxxi museum in
Rome on 28 July 2012. The lecture can be listened at the web address: http://www.radio3.rai.it/dl/radio3/programmi/puntata/ContentItem-50a334cc-586a-4bc8-b94a-734d7b4d0085.html.
[59] Abramović, Marina and Kaplan, James - Walk
through walls: a memoir, New York, Crown Archetype, an inprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, 2016, viii -370 pages. Quotation at page 64.
[60] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, pp. 66-67
[61] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, p. 67
[63] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, pp. 67-68
[64] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, pp. 68-69
[65] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, p. 69
[66] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, pp. 69-71
[67] Bonito Oliva, Achille –
Quel Pasticciaccio brutto della Giudecca, in: Corriere della Sera, 18 luglio
1976.
[69] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, p. 96
[70] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, p. 96
[71] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, p. 96
[72] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls … quoted, p. 98
[73] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, p. 97
[74] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, p. 98
[76] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, pp. 161-162
[77] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls... quoted, p. 266
[78] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, p. 237
[79] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, p. 239
[80] Abramović, Marina with Kaplan, James
- Walk through walls… quoted, p. 326
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