'Art is not just about another beautiful painting that matches your dining room floor. Art has to be disturbing, art has to ask a question, art has to predict the future.’
Marina Abramovic
Most of us have heard her name or at least seen some of her experimental performances. The ‘grandmother of performance art’ echoes in an empty room with one chair and hundreds of eyes. Marina Abramovic brings herself in the most natural form to engulf the audience’s attention, like a strange black hole in the universe and, afterwards, transforms it into something meaningful.
She is lifting the veil of comfort, making space for the freedom of expression, facing the physical and mental pain, as well as embracing the unpredictability of the people who connect with her being, her energy. As she crosses lines and limits to discover and deliver her message to the public, Marina asks her audience painful questions:
“Every time I get an idea, if I'm afraid of that idea, this is exactly the idea I'm going to do to liberate myself and also to understand where fear comes from.”
Very often I’m asking myself, can we really understand the danger of climate change or a political concern, such as consumerism, without being aware of our actions and ourselves? This is what Marina helps us to do; she is becoming a mirror that reveals the shadow side; your insecurities and your fears. Her eyes and her stare travel like a snake into the depths of your being, looking for your hidden secrets, for your hidden emotions.
Born in Serbia in 1946, she grew up feeling trapped in the military education of her parents, who were partisan fighters during World War II under the communist system of the country. She mentions in multiple interviews that her parents were strict and religious, and this left a mark on the way she perceived the world around her. This repressive upbringing brought her closer to a spiritual death day by day but, at the same time, provoked Marina to perform as an act of liberation:
“I don’t do things I only like, I do things that are difficult. I am curious. Freedom is the most important thing for me. To be free of any structure that I can’t break.”
I think that one of the most powerful and painful performance of the artist was Rhythm 0, realized in 1974, at the Galleria Studio Morra in Naples. On a big table as an altarpiece she had 72 objects (between them a rose, a feather, honey, scissors, a scalpel, a gun with a single bullet, flowers, matches, chains, grapes and shoes) that could please or hurt and the public had the opportunity to use as wanted on her body, without being held responsible for their actions.
Taking the full risk on what’s going to happen, Marina - like a shaman figure is exposed to 6 hours of feeling powerless in people’s hands. The animalistic human nature reveals the most destructive actions, leaving you speechless.
After the third hour, the artist was tied to a table, a knife between her legs, clothes ripped. Someone cut her and drank her blood, and she even experienced sexual assaults.
An uncontrolled and violent show that echoed women’s objectification and the asymmetric power relations of society.
Can you feel the pain and the stress in her body? Can you feel the pain of all the women who were used as objects, burnt at the stake and or a gun pointed at them?
Nicholas Mirzoeff writes in “Critical Enquiry” that: “The right to look is not about merely seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each inventing the other, or it fails. You, or your group, allow another to find you, and, in so doing, you find both the other and yourself”. His statement prompts reflection on the nature of Marina’s performance; that she gave people the opportunity to reveal and share themselves as she did with them, through the use of multiple objects on a “free” body.
I think Abramovic succeeded in her experiment, exploring the collective action and responsibility, whilst exploring questions of human nature, freedom, power, responsibility, and consent.
Besides illustrating female objectification and the darker side of human nature, the performance also reveals the existence of group dynamics: on one side the aggressors and on the other the protectors, which resulted in conflict between participants in the performance.
As a parallel to the act, we can think about Yoko Ono’s performance Cut Piece, where the artist also explores participatory art, the audience being invited to cut off her clothes. Both performances question the vulnerability and objectification of the female body and the “reciprocal way in which viewers and subjects become objects of each other”.
Also, as a comparison, there is the work “Silueta Series” of Ana Mendieta, where she is engaging the body in the environment, exploring intimacy and collective connection despite distance. Mendieta addresses a wide range of issues surrounding sexuality, spirituality, cultural displacement, feminism and identity. Her works are being washed, burned, reintegrated or melted away, eventually ceasing to exist, preserved through the photographs taken and exhibited.
I believe that Marina’s performance is about a relationship with the audience, as well as with society. That is the electricity and the beauty of it. It has instant effect on the peoples’ psyches, enrolling them in the performance and prompting reflection on the social frames within which we live.
Comentários