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.

Identity versus Subjectivity

The realisation that "we all have multiple identities" at some point in one's scholarly and personal development promises a lot but delivers little. Faced with a global political context in which serious cases of violence and inequality operate along the axis of "identity," and in which exclusivist claims acquire the negative epithet of "identity politics," a recourse to a more indeterminate notion of the self can point the way "out" to a more tolerant, pluralist and cosmopolitan path. Unfortunately, several unhelpful conflations between terms are thrown up in the process, obscuring the dynamics of the lived experience of recognition.

One distinction has been helpfully framed by Dipesh Chakrabarty as identity vs. identification. His critique of Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence shows that the assumption that recognising "multiple, contextual identities" can prevent sectarian violence is misguided because what counts is, in fact, "the external and surface signs by which I or others might identify myself as a member of a particular group: my skull cap, my turban, my beard, my name, my clothes, my circumcised or uncircumcised penis." Thus, during the Gujarat riots Muslims would conceal their real names, and Hindu shopkeepers would take care to paint images of Hindu gods on their storefronts to avoid being targeted. While the "complex sense of identity" that marked their "normal everyday life" did not disappear, it became less relevant than the largely symbolic conventions of identification.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a918280932&fulltext=713240928 [in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (January 2010): 149-154]

Chakrabarty's argument is welcome, but it understates the particularised nature of the identity discussion itself. When we speak of identity, we have been led to speak exclusively of an elective affinity. I am Indian because I say I am, but I am also a Sikh, schoolteacher, city-dweller, parent, and so on. In fact, only some of these "identities" merit the name. Whether we like it or not, there is something immutable about identity that all the multi-culti well-wishing in the world cannot make go away. Chakrabarty and Sen would both refuse to acknowledge the dark secret that what makes a Muslim a Muslim, much like what made a Jew a Jew, is not just an uncircumcised penis as a "sign" or an assumption of the name. An entire history, place-based and kinship-based, made one known as a Muslim or Jew. Escaping this complex of material and symbolic factors entails either a radical and never-quite-possible displacement (moving far away where one's new neighbours don't know you or your relatives, and carry no prejudices to boot), or a multi-generational process of re-signification. Of course I am not claiming that identities are stable, and that people take on the attributes of the natural communities into which they are born. But moving from one identity to another is hard work in the real world, and may never be complete. Presumed alterities (being a Jew or Muslim "within" the "body of a nation"), once configured, persist through time.

Moments of crisis like 1947, 1984 or 2002 expose the impossibility of simply assuming the identity one likes. A Muslim hacked to death cannot appeal to "also being a schoolteacher and a father" to save his life. This is Chakrabarty's point. But my explanation for this phenomenon would be that "schoolteacher" is less of an identity than a subjectivity. Most of the categories by which we identify ourselves and recognise others share the common characteristic of being more amenable to being "worked on." I make myself, rather than am, a schoolteacher -- through repetition of certain meaning-making activities. To an extent, this is Foucault's point about categories like "homosexual" (the result of distinct ethical projects), and it can be applied to religion (Saba Mahmood thinks Muslim-ness works this way, through cultivation of the self). I am not claiming that identity and subjectivity are hermetically sealed concepts; they do lie on a continuum and sometimes a category can fall under one or the other. But I do maintain that those categories which are the least malleable and the more susceptible to being "coded" in the signs of identification proposed by Chakrabarty should be seen as more identity than subjectivity. This also means that, for a pluralistic and tolerant future, we need to start thinking in general about subjectivity more than about identity.

In my own case, my identity can be approximated as something like, a Romanian (with some mixed ancestry) child of professionals from Bucharest. This can be dispelled only with great difficulty. My name, my life history, and my education all conspire against easy adoption of other identities -- American, Indian, rural (should I choose to live in a village), labouring (should I choose to start working with my hands). However, being a graduate student, an intellectual, someone interested in Indian history -- all these things are subjectivities, which I carefully work on every day. They are less open to being challenged, but also less politically powerful. When I am concerned with the security and mobility of my person, nationality and class background come into play. This is partly why I would prefer to bypass the reduction of debates about forms of being and belonging to the terrain of identity, and to refuse both its privileges and challenges.