Thinking About Marina

If performance art is supposed to disturb or otherwise unsettle, then the aftershocks of seeing Marina Abramovic's retrospective at MOMA can only imply, a job well done. I am not talking about what a quick scan through the press coverage reveals to be the main issue of the day: whether re-performing some of her classic works has diluted their effect, and has exposed the soft underbelly of once-radical gestures. I experienced overwhelming feelings, and though I did not sit across from her pallid, glacial self in The Artist Is Present, her body, face, words, and thick texture of her life hung around me for hours, like an aromatic but suffocating stink. The problem was that I didn't know which way these feelings went: towards being sold on her genius and buying into her every move, or towards the occasional nagging suspicion that everything in these galleries is laid on just a little too thick.

The contrast between her late 1980s work, at the end of her prolific collaboration with Ulay, when she travelled around the world hanging out with Australian aboriginals and Tibetan lamas, and her sparse, black-and-white early 1970s Yugoslavian pieces was immense. Somewhere, I thought, Abramovic went off the rails. The student of colonialism in me immediately reached out for the word, "essentialised." What was the Tibetan monk doing sitting across from Marina and Ulay? He was just representing something -- the mystic East, interiority, escape. He wasn't a body, that assemblage of flesh that Abramovic's early pieces laid bare to be manipulated, enjoyed, respected. Throughout her later years a creeping preoccupation with New Age-y elements, including discussions of "fields of energy" and propitious minerals (in one piece, the audience is encouraged to lie on a pillow of quartz), signals a departure from what seemed to me the "essential," bare and raw Rhythms series.

But what made Rhythms appear so immediate, largely beyond symbolism or abstraction? In one word, these pieces are about her, more specifically her body. It is not just a body that is stabbed, caressed, rendered unconscious or threatened by a loaded gun. When in Lips of Thomas (1975), she carves the five-pointed Communist star on her abdomen, she inscribes her personal history onto that body to show how they are inseparable. This is perhaps why the exhibit is suffused with biographical information, from old photographs to a series of remarkable stories from childhood that expose the violence of everyday life: the mutual physical abuse between her mother and father, a near-death experience with her brother, an accident with the automatic washing machine. After her breakup with Ulay, Abramovic's work moves to explore her past and her constituted self (in light of the present that was, then, the Balkan wars). In The Hero (2001), she pays tribute to her war hero father, while in her 2005 performance of Lips of Thomas at the Guggenheim she wears her mother's Partisan cap. Her tortured relationship with her parents that emerges from the sketches of her childhood reveals an artist that doesn't know how to, or more likely isn't interested in, breaking from the past.

In Balkan Erotic Epic (2005), the images of naked men copulating with the ground, and of women exposing their genitalia to the rain, surprisingly do not serve as critique. She doesn't materialise or visualise these folkloric traditions in order to expose them, but is interested in how they persist. Their visceral nature is more apparent with each passing minute, and the temptation for irreverence soon dissolves. But then again, Abramovic knows how to play with and exploit the irreverence inherent in the "Balkan." The video describing a horrifying process of starving rats and driving them to murderous insanity, part of Balkan Baroque (1997), concludes with a kitschy striptease. Tellingly, she inserts her mother and father (holding his faithful gun) into the same piece, connecting the everyday violence in her life with properly "historical" violence. Her father, the old Partisan, is a link to both.
When Abramovic turns inward, she is at her best, almost as if begging for psychoanalysis while all the while keeping herself distant enough to remain the steely artist. When she reaches for universalism and the purifying aura of simplicity (as in The House with the Ocean View, when she lived in a gallery without eating or speaking for 12 days), her myth is punctured and she deflates a little, like a puffed-up balloon.

To return to the body, I think Abramovic feels at once comfortable with it and challenged by it as a medium. In Rhythm 0 (1974), the infamous piece in which the audience was invited to use a variety of objects on her (including a loaded gun), or in Expansions in Space (1977), when she and Ulay repeatedly slammed their bodies against two mobile columns until they could no longer make them move, she describes the intent as going to the "edge," as finding out what the "limit" of the physically possible is. What she does with her body is not to free it from constraints, but to work it so hard that new constraints are produced or revealed. She is constantly aware of her body, and in this sense her notion of "performance" is extremely precise. None of this forgetting-yourself stuff: even in her invitations to the audience or in their spontaneous participation (e.g. in ending Lips of Thomas by taking her battered body off a block of ice), she remains the Artist in control. Most importantly, she never forgets the "point" of her pieces. In the re-creation of Point of Contact (1980), the performers are instructed to feel the energy of nearly-touching fingers in a particular way. In Rhythm 4 (1974), she places herself in front of an air blower and loses consciousness from the pressure; the audience watching a video recording isn't aware, and she judges it a "success" as she continues for 3 minutes in this state undetected. The aim is to get through the conscious/unconscious distinction, to persist in the same state. The maddening, frightening drive to completion underpins Freeing the Voice, Freeing the Body, Freeing the Memory (1976), where she, respectively: screams until she loses her voice, dances until she collapses, and recites words until her mind goes blank.

Abramovic's notion of "performance" can't ever be mistaken for "play." Her work can be, at times, overbearing because her intensity and control mark every movement and object that becomes part of her art. If Nabokov was the autocrat author, she is the autocrat artist par excellence. Looking at her seated for 700 hours and counting across the uneasy, fidgeting audience members, I could sense something very hard and forbidding, yet always, always impressive.