Much has been written over the semester about Marina Abramovic’s exhibition at the MOMA, and all of the entries have provided us with fascinating perspectives on the experience.I visited the MOMA again recently, and was intrigued by how a shift in the crowd’s energy had a major influence on the exhibit overall.It seemed as though a reverential energy enveloped the space, unlike my initial visit.The first time I visited the exhibit, the room had a strange buzz of energy that did not quite seem to fit the performance properly.This was apparently due to some celebrities that had recently participated in the performance, and many of the people seemed to be there to try and catch a glimpse of someone famous instead of experiencing art.However, my recent visit left me with a vastly different view of the performance.
Before entering the exhibit, I had visited some of Duchamp’s pieces.There was a quote of his that appeared in our discussion of Nicholas Bourriaud’s writings that kept coming to mind.Duchamp states that, “Art is a game between all people of all periods.”This was running through my mind as I watched Abramovic’s performance, and seemed to have an influence on my overall experience.I found the relational aspects of the exhibit to be more powerful than my previous encounter.When I returned home, I read parts of Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics again and felt that this passage was a perfect description of my time spent at Abramovic’s exhibit:
The form of an artwork issues from a negotiation with the intelligible, which is bequeathed to us.Through it, the artist embarks upon a dialogue.The artistic practice thus resides in the invention of relations between consciousness.Each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. (1)
I felt as though this helped to explain why my initial experience was not as interesting as my second visit to the exhibit.I realized that I did not fully allow a dialogue to take place with the art itself.I was too caught up in other things to have a full encounter with the art, and forgot to uphold my part of the relational art experience, thus was not able to fully engage with the work.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much I appreciated the coverage of the exhibit on the MOMA’s website.It definitely serves as an extension of the exhibit itself.I found that I have watched the live stream of the performance from time to time, and am always immersed in footage.I appreciate how we are able to access the website in order to reunite with the relational experiences that we first encountered at the exhibit.It also made me wonder at which point the interactive aspects of the website were incorporated into the exhibit overall (was this first considered by Abramovic during the initial conception of the exhibit, or was it primarily designed by the MOMA?).
This video – a virtual re-enactment of the re-enactments of Abramovic's works in Second Life – is a follow up to my previous post on Marina's 'The Artist Is Present."
(Note you might need view the video directly on youtube because you need to sign in as above 18 years old viewer)
My second blog post is again less a theoretical investigation on a particular matter than a question or an experiment.
I have to admit that the recent show of Marina Abramovic does less strike and entertain me because of the artworks themselves (although I have to say that I respect and appreciate her body of work very much) or because of theoretical references we tempt to force on art works; rather it interests me as a new step or understanding that she provides us on performance art. I am not sure whether this is a critical point or it is just how performance art is developing in its organic way and whether there should be less resistant against this development. We'll see.
But what I mean with a new step in performance art is that I think Abramovic denied a very specific element of performance art which is the event, the actions performed on-site and on the specificity of time. Time specificity and site specificity. So what happens if we deny this element and just concentrate on the concept or the script of the performance? A script which usually is in itself open and again based on the site and the time in which it will be performed. Even the term 'to perform' is in my opinion not the right term. But because of the lack of English I can not suggest another term at this moment. So what happens here if we just take the script and the plan of an already happened event/performance; what happens if just take the documentation of it and let it be re-enacted by other performers? Can we still talk about performance art? Or are we talking about objects? Isn't it the same as 'living sculptures' of Gilbert and George?
In the case of Marina's 'The Artist is Present,' I think that all we perceive in her show are objects in the form of documentation material or sculpture. Nothing there is time- and site-specific anymore. Everything is ruled by a plan. Even the exhibition design was based on the plans and scripts of the performances. There is no space for process. There are guards and rules who tell you how to be in this space. Everything is an re-enactment and theater. It is nostalgia. It is past. The artist is not present. The artist is object. The artist is past. And I will be able to buy the artist.
It was nothing short of a profoundly unique experience to witness Marina Abramovic's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday, April 24th, 2010. I say this not just because of the profound impact that her work left on me for the days after witnessing the re-performances and re-presentations of her literal "body of work"; this experience was novel as it was the first time MoMA has curated a retrospective on the oeuvre of a performance artist.
I had an inclination of what to expect after having lunch with my artist friend on the Wednesday prior to visiting the museum. She explained the piece that Abramovic herself was to be performing on the second floor of the museum, The Artist is Present, as the artist's ultimate work. My artist friend's explanation served to be a far more modest, cursory description of the performance, as the experience is far more serene yet grand than she made it out to be. Upon entering the museum and ascending the stairs to the Marron Atrium that exists as a space traditionally in constant flux exhibiting temporary collections, large-scale pieces, and video installations, one encounters massive floodlights at each of the four corners of a large square marked off on the floor by tape, the square almost the size of the space itself. In the center of the square sits Abramovic on a chair at one end of a wooden table wearing a long, red gown that is simultaneously confining her body and yet somehow cascading around her legs and onto the floor, making herself at once separate from and one with the chair on which she is positioned. There is a chair positioned at the other end of the table facing the artist in which museum visitors are invited to sit and engage in an unspoken dialogue with the artist for an indeterminate amount of time. Her body appears in this same position every day for the length of museum hours until the retrospective closes on May 31, 2010.
Endurance is a large part of Marina Abramovic's presentation of her body/of work. Sitting or standing for hours at a time, subjecting her body repeatedly to collisions with other objects, beatings, lashings or deprivation, Abramovic tests the limits of human comfort with acts of tedium, stress, and concentration. As she submits her body to these series of acts – examples can be drawn from her three parallel pieces from 1977 entitled Freeing the Memory, Freeing the Body, and Freeing the Voice in which she speaks, dances and screams until she has pushed her body to the point of failure –Abramovic seeks to push her body out of its comfort of stasis and stagnant, un-becoming being. In committing to performing these acts in front of a live audience (or at times the future audience implied in the act of filming the performance), the artist insists on creating a dialogue with herself and her audience, creating herself as both the subject and the object of her body/of work. Much like her piece The Artist is Present, Abramovic questions the notions of object and subject and of artistic and audience.
If, as Nicolas Bourriaud asserts in his text Relational Aesthetics, "each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world" (i), then Abramovic's aim of blurring the line between artist as subject and audience as object (and vice versa) lies in her confrontation of her body with the spectator. Consistently appearing nude without engaging in sexual acts and subjecting her body to the will of her audience like she did with Rhythm O – asking the audience to use one of 70 or so different objects, some of them potentially lethal, on herself and taking full responsibility – the artist is confronting her audience's notions of the body and of the traditional work of art while at the same time dispelling concepts of sexuality and humanity.
"...it is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through...It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion" (ii)
– Nicolas Bourriaud
None of Marina Abramovic's works exemplify this quote from Bourriaud more literally than her piece The House with the Ocean View (2002), a space constructed for living out a minimalist existence in the hopes of purifying the artist's body and mind. Consisting of three rooms with nothing more than a shower, a toilet, 12 changes of clothes and gallons of purified water, Abramovic lived in this elevated space for 12 days with three ladders made of butcher knives offering her only chance for escape. While the artist was only present in the space via a filmed projection of one of her performances of this work, the stark space, beautiful in its modernist simplicity and austerity, the picture below offers one glimpse into her 12 day experience in the performance space.
"I didn't have verbal communication. It was only with the eyes. I became so sensitive that – it sounds almost religious – I had this amazing opening of the heart that hurt me. This is why I believe time is so necessary: the public needs time to get the point. When I spend 12 days in a gallery, its energy is changed. Artists have to serve as oxygen to society, and that is what I do" – Marina Abramovic, from an interview for ARTnews.
Katharine Relth
(i) Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics. France: Les presses du reel, 1998 (22). (ii) Ibid, 15.
I took my children, Luca age seven and Jackson age 11 to the MOMA for my field report. We had a wonderful day and it was interesting to see and feel the museum from a child’s point of view. When we arrived there was a long line and both of my children started to complain. We jumped on line, and because of the ten-minute wait we started to socialize with the people all around us. Just waiting on line was a relational experience for us; it appears people enjoy seeing children at museums!This was a good omen, I have never taken my kids to any museum other than The Museum of Natural History and aquariums and zoo’s. I was not sure if my boys and the MOMA were ready to meet each other?
We walked around, looked at many beautiful paintings and finally stumbled upon the Marina Abramovic installation, “The Artist is Present”.Bourriaud states that what the artists produces, “first and foremost, is relations between people and the world, by way of aesthetic objects."This installation was a little world of its own and for me and my children experiencing this piece of art was definitely a “state of encounter.”
The whole atmosphere felt like a cross between a movie set and a church. There were big lights shining on the artist and her partner and cameras were placed at each end of the exhibit. There also was a hushed silence, and a feeling of reverence or group prayer hovering in the air. My children were immediately captivated and my younger son said, “Mom let’s sit down, it’s weird but I am not getting that bored feeling in my stomach." So we sat down and experienced Marina Abramovic in a beautiful flowing red dress sitting across from a young woman in a jean skirt and white sneakers. Abramovic and the woman intently looked into each other’s faces and the experience was silent and beautiful. Most of the people watching in the audience quietly chatted with each other and it was so invigorating to sit and watch the artist and her subject interact. The intimacy between the two women was spellbinding and it felt refreshing to witness this true human connection without any filters. I felt like I had a social bond with the artist and her subject and I also felt like I was sharing what it means to be human with my children and the other spectators.Afterwards, I had a conversation with my children about what the work meant. For me, itwas like a metaphor for how an artist works and what it means to “put yourself into your work”. Also, it was a truly relational experience, something akin to a collective group worship, where every spectator is fiercely engaged in the process of learning about themselves and their experience in the world. Thank you Marina Abramovic!
Tino Sehgal's piece "This is progress" at Guggenheim was something of a disappointment for me: it did not seem a successful example of socially engaged art. The work belongs to the realm of what Nicolas Bourriaud calls "relational aesthetic": its meaning should be elaborated in a collective effort, through the encounters between the artwork and the viewers. Claire Bishop's famous criticism of the work of several artists supported by Bourriard (e.g., Rirkrit Tiravanija) raises the question of the character and the quality of the inter-subjective relationships that arise in such socially engaged artworks – the issues essentially ignored by Bourriaud. Bishop's concern in her response to Bourriard's texts is the possibility of formulating aesthetic criteria for judging socially engaged art. According to Bourriard, relational artwork is automatically capable of producing positive human relationships by means of its "social form", which immediately makes it political and emancipatory. But is it really so? Bishop argues that the mere social structure of an artwork encouraging inter-subjective interaction often leads to trivial, self-satisfied art, which circumvents truly political issues. Bishop suggests that for relational art to be successful, it should "provide a more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the world and to one other". Such grounds for Bishop are political issues: social inequality, exploitation, etc (e.g., Thomas Hirschhorn's work).
I think it is fair to ask questions about the character and the quality of the inter-subjective interactions with regards to Sehgal's piece. What kind of the relationship is produced between the viewers and the performers of the piece? What is the meaning of the question that opens the piece ("What is progress?"), who asks it and why is it being asked? What are the roles of the artist, the performers and the viewers? How are they structured and why?
Sehgal's piece seems to be a good example of the relational art in which the "social form" is the end in itself: the piece is deemed socially engaged and successful because it provokes a conversation between the viewer and the performers of the piece. The whole structure of the piece is aimed at prompting such conversation regardless of its content and of the motives of the participants, and without much concern for creating a meaningful relationship between the interlocutors, in the absence of which the conversation is unlikely to be anything deeper than the accidental exchange of truisms between two commuters on a train. Although the conversation is seemingly open (the only limitation is the theme: What is progress?), the piece itself is curiously over-determined: its beginning and end are two fixed positions between which the viewer is guided with relentless determination and the encounters are strictly codified in almost all the details: the age and the social status of each successive interlocutor, the amount of time allocated to each episode, the rigid system of transitions, the impersonal character of the conversation, the business-like efficiency of the ending. The very favorable review of the piece by Holland Cotter, characteristically, contains a slightly disconcerted remark: "I was about to press on with this when Bob stopped and said gently, as if on cue, "The piece is called "This Progress,' " and walked off." At the same time, despite the highly controlled structure of the piece, its meaning is extremely loose: everyone is invited to answer for themselves what progress is. As the case usually stands with such broad questions removed from any specific context, the answers are either random observations or vague generalizations. The starting point for the conversation might have being almost any other of the so-called profound questions – what is the nature of art? what is time? what does it mean to be a human being? – without making much difference for the functioning of the piece. Anyone can say anything because there is not much to say (or there is too much to say, which eventually amounts to the same thing).
In contrast to Bishop's position, I do not think that for the social art to be successful it necessarily must raise political questions. But I am, with her, interested in a productive discussion about the social art. An artwork should not be praised for a single reason that it provides a chance for communicating with other people and for experiencing yet another random encounter. Not all communication is meaningful and not any experience is worth having. As Gilles Deleuze remarked, “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation."
As opposed to Tino Sehgal’s show, Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at the MOMA left strong and lasting impression on me. Her current performance in the MOMA atrium is a very strong piece, emotionally charged and disturbing; undoubtedly it is also a feat of endurance. It establishes a very personal connection between the artist and those among the audience who choose to participate in the piece. The rest of the audience, although only spectators of the piece, are still conscious of the particular relationship developed between Marina and each of her successive co-performers. The piece is especially effective when considered it in the context of her work from the last few decades shown upstairs.
Seeing the documentations of so many of Abramovic’s historic performances in one show is an overwhelming experience: it makes one certain that she is among the greatest artists of the late 20th century. I am somewhat doubtful, however, about the use of the live actors in the re-enactments of several of her pieces. For me at least they looked the least interesting element in the show – mere illustrations of Marina's past work rather than actual living performances. The fact that these artists are seemingly anonymous and work in shifts only reinforces this impression. The important elements of a performance – the presence of the artist and his/her physical endurance, which create a bond between the artist and the audience – are totally lost. To make the reenactment element of the show more successful I think at the very least the performers' individual names and artistic backgrounds should have been made known to the public.
What follows will be a collective blog dedicated to mapping a number of connections between the writings of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the work of various media theorists, and contemporary art practice. It was begun to coincide with the course "Art After Deleuze: From Architecture to New Media", in the Media Studies MA program at The New School (Spring 2010).
