I knew very little about the ‘grandmother of performance art’ before I was asked to present on Marina Abramović. Though my research and presentation centred on specific performances, here I will avoid being descriptive and instead focus on the influence researching Abramović had on me personally and the kind of ideas I’d like to take from her into my own work.
I learnt that Abramović pioneered performance as a visual art form, what we may refer to as performance art.
For Abramović, this means marrying;
1. Concept with physicality
2. Endurance with empathy
3. Complicity with loss of control
4. Passivity with danger
(1)
For me, these mean;
- Embodying and symbolising a theoretical concept in a physical / creative performance
- Taking the performative action of a piece and making it a notable part of the concept, extending its duration to provoke a person, internal, emotional response in the audience
- Challenging oneself to go beyond the controlled environment of a performance, allowing for an external factor – be it time, audience participation or an unpredictable element such as fire – to the development of a piece and one’s own response to it as a performer
- Pushing the boundary between the safe, stationary known and the precarious, fluid unknown by challenging both performer and audience to act upon an instinct and respond organically to a situation
Rhythm 10, her reproduction piece based on Russian roulette with knives, aimed to merge the past and the present, exploring physical and mental limits with performance and attempting to recreate authentic/organic responses as well as consider the state of consciousness. (2) On the final point Abramović says; “once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do”. (3)
Though personally I would not be interested in exploring such physical risk in performance, I would be intrigued to know whether unplanned, unmediated performance could lead to learning new things about oneself, whether a kind of unknowable element could lead to thoughts or emotions one ‘absolutely could never normally’ find.
Rhythm 5, is a piece in which she created a sawdust 5 point star and set fire to it, before jumping into its centre. For Abramović , this work led to a realisation that there is a physical limit to performance; “when you lose consciousness you can’t be present, you can’t perform.” (4)
What really interested me were the implied notions of purging, sacrificing and transforming energy. I hadn’t before considered how fire could be used in performance for something more than spectacle, it really caught my attention as a beautifully symbolic way of combining the notions I mentioned above with the innate, raw connection I have with fire and the emotions it provokes in me.
I will also mention a three part piece called Freeing the Body, which included Freeing the Memory and Freeing the Voice, for a comment on the latter of these performances. (5) Watching a video performance of Freeing the Voice, I was struck with how much emotion is conveyed and developed through such a simple performance; where Abramović simply lays on her back and repeats a single sound over and over until she loses her voice. What caught my interest was the idea that the development of such emotion appears unplanned, as though the performance evolved in such a way of its own accord, because of the act of performing for such a long period of time.
This links back to my idea from Rhythm 10 about finding unexpected things through challenging, durational performance.
Were I to create a piece based on Abramović’s work, I would take my influence from the above pieces; her ideas of audience participation as exploring themselves through her performance, and the self-described notion of her work as a “quest for emotional and spiritual transformation”. (6) I’d like to create an installation, a durational piece in which I built a library of sorts; a collection of memories and experiences transformed into physical ‘books’ or sculptures. These memories/experiences would be specific elements of my life that I struggle to come to terms with in some way; lingering feelings about a breakup, underlying issues in other relationships I’ve never been able to address, fears, regrets etc. I then envisage inviting an audience to peruse my library, laying my past bare for them to explore, read and touch, perhaps I would add a performative element in reading or explaining items they had picked up or perhaps I’d just explore them myself too. I’d then like to have some kind of stand in which I could set fire to each of these things after they’d been ‘read’, perhaps again inviting the audience to take part in this ritual-esque performance, purging myself of all the things that I hadn’t been able to let go of. We could then watch the fire die down together. In full Marina spirit I could then imagine climbing into the stand and covering myself in the ashes, before inviting the audience to wash them off me – the phoenix reborn from the ashes of its past life.
(1) Lisson Gallery: Marina Abramović, Online: http://www.lissongallery.com/artists/marina-abramovic (accessed 2 February 2015).
(2) Abramović, Marina (1973) Rhythm 10, Online: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/rhythm-10-2/ (accessed 2 February 2015).
(3) Art Tattler: Marina Abramović (2008), Online: http://arttattler.com/archivemarinaabramovic.html (accessed 2 February 2015).
(4) Fischer, Lucia (2014), The Memorable Rhythm Performances, Online: http://www.riseart.com/article/2014-11-28-most-memorable-rhythm-performances-by-marina-ambrovic (accessed 2 February 2015).
(5) Abramović, Marina (1975/1976), Freeing the Body, Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihDy3dD-iUg (accessed 2 February 2015).
(6) O’Hagan, Sean (2010), Interview: Marina Abramović, Online: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/03/interview-marina-abramovic-performance-artist (accessed 2 February 2015).