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Third Text

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Marina Abramovi

Tim Martina a PhD on Robert Smithson for Goldsmiths' College, University of London,

To cite this Article Martin, Tim(1995) 'Marina Abramovi', Third Text, 9: 33, 85 92 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09528829508576581 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829508576581

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Marina Abramovi
Tim Martin
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1 See Igor Zabel, 'OHO', M'Ars. Magazine of the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, V/3,4, 1993. 2 See Bojana Pejic,

Being-in-the-body: On the Spiritual in Marina Abramaoi's Art,

Edition Cantz, Stuttgart, 1993, p 33.

Exhibiting the work of Marina Abramovi presents certain implications for a museum and for art criticism. Her long career has included substantial challenges to the institution of the museum, not least in the form of her regular attempts to blur the distinction between art and life, one which museums, galleries and criticism can serve to reinforce. The work is also heavily laden with a broadly spiritual content, drawing inevitable questions about the role of a museum in legitimating her views be they political or religious. Certainly the history of modern art has been more comfortable with and tolerant of spiritual content than political content, even though this distinction too can be blurred. In Abramovi's current touring exhibition, a large array of documentation afforded a rather impassive frame for her performances, allowing the viewer an element of distance from her work and an opportunity to reassess it with hindsight. Indeed, much of the content of the work is apparent only in the catalogue and interviews, rather than insistently present in the exhibition. By way of a brief introduction to the work of Marina Abramovi, it can be noted that she comes from a Yugoslav military family, her father a highly decorated general who served with Marshal Tito, and her mother holding the rank of major and head of a national art museum. Her background provided a certain amount of Serbian orthodoxy and privilege in a communist egalitarian society. The prevailing political ideology was a Marxist nationalism which succeeded in breaking the axis of ethnic and religious allegiances. It was in this environment that her work began its course of development. Yugoslavia was surrounded by a desolidified iron curtain, a permeable barrier which accepted the entry of modernist and abstract art even for the construction of state monuments. As art was autonomous from religion and, in theory, from the state, the cultural milieu of the artist's youth, then, was fully engaged with : a European modernism. Throughout the 1960s, groups such as OHO experimented with installations somewhat in the manner of arte povera, as well as environmental works related to land art. OHO artists strove for an increasing dematerialisarion of the art object, which led not so much towards the philosophising tendency of Anglo-American conceptual art as towards the religious and esoteric content inherent in pre-communist Balkan traditions. The new artists of Abramovi's generation began to include moral and ritual elements in their work.2

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3 See RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, Thames and Hudson, 1995, p 163. 4 See Louwrien Wijers, Ben D'Armagnac, Waanders Uitgevers, 1995. 5 In the one day symposium on Abramovi at MOMA, Oxford, on June 3, 1995, the critic Jan Avgikos raised this idea of the gap in relation to the artist Robert Smithson. Both artists have shown an interest in crystals and east European theology; their considerations of nature, however, differ considerably. 6 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, London, 1987, pp 85-86.

In Yugoslavia, the state demonstrated a respect for the autonomy of art, leaving it free from the manipulations which had befallen art in other eastern European countries. This separation of politics and art, however, was based on a mutual understanding that art was to remain harmless as a mode of socio-political critique. Abstract art was free, but neutralised as a radical practice, vulnerable to easy misinterpretation. Abramovi found this modernism to be fundamentally decadent in its hedonistic pursuit of sensuous pleasure and cognitive determinacy. It had no legitimate public role, no ability to crystallise or unify society. Her unique response to this predicament was based on the creation of performances rather than objects, exchanging painterly silence for bodily presence and ritualised action. She thus asserted a public role for art, drawing down the distinctions between art and life, investing her work with new meanings, and guaranting her right to make an avant-garde challenge to Yugoslav modernism. In the map of performance art, Abramovi, more than most of her contemporaries, made of the genre an aesthetic form of prayer.3 Her ritualised self-injury was intended to produce states of consciousness which tested the limits of human knowledge and endurance. Her close friend, the Dutch artist, Ben D'Armagnac, even died as the result of a physically stressful performance in New York in 1978;4 Abramovi, similarly, nearly died on two occasions, such was the force of the movement of art towards life. This differs somewhat from the more social, psychoanalytic and philosophical intentions of much contemporary British and American performance, from artists such as Gilbert and George, Stuart Brisley and Joan Jonas. Abramovi, in this respect, comes at the end of a logic which dematerialised art, thus committing herself to an extraordinary end-game. Performance art changed the ground rules of modernist discourse quite radically at the time. Bodies were real, whereas art was a symbolic code which approximated reality. Although essentially ignored in Yugoslavia, these two domains were not to be crossed in the mid-1970s without disorienting established structures. In part, the artist used her body as proof of the beliefs she claimed were real. Based on video documentation, there is certainly no doubting that the proof was all too real, sanguine and sincere. However, her performances evoke a knowledge which is difficult to substantiate despite the corporeal evidence. The audience in this situation is left to experience a multitude of gaps:5 between audience and artist, between audience and God, between a disinterested aesthetic appreciation and the distinct possibility that we might feel morally compelled to intervene in the performance. Both in conversation and in performance, Abramovi 'threatens' to involve us, forcing a collapse of libidinal, market and power economies onto her body, while ironically remaining undemonstrative regarding sex, money and politics. I was engrossed by the videos of early performances shown in the new MOMA context room. Here, in Interruption in Space, 1977, we see her repeatedly walking into a wall, no clothes for protection, with a full audience, the flesh really smacking against the cold white concrete of an art gallery. Blood trickles, but she is numb to language and body. In a photographic documentation of The Lips of Thomas, 1975, she carves the five-pointed red star of the Yugoslav flag around her navel with a razor blade while standing in a Belgrade public square. If one suspects that she is about to cause a public commotion, there may be good reason. Her performances can become 'crowd crystals', to use the phrase of Canetti.6 Abramovi attracts a crowd by providing an opportunity to unburden spiritually agonies rationalised otherwise. In her early work in Yugoslavia, she offered her audience a unified presence which radically rewrote the predominant conceptions of what Zabel calls materialism and humanism, and what Pejic refers to as the

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Rhythm 10, from Biography, 1993, Hebbeltheater, Berlin.

7 An interesting example of this comes from Sid Vicious. An American audience became so upset when he carved initials into his chest with a razor blade, that they dragged him off the stage and beat him. 8 This is a term she often uses in interviews. See Bernard Goy, 'Marina Abramovi', The
Journal of Contemporary

Art, New York, Vol 3 no 2, June 1990, p 54.

domination of materialism and the wealth created by new industrialisation. Her expressive performances, emotionally exhausting for the viewer, require a personal involvement in a momentary exchange wherein both viewer and artist become significant for each other in a most bodily manner. In some instances, the demand for empathy is so somatic and gut-wrenching as to cause a severe 7 counter-reaction in the form of repulsion. Otherwise, this exchange develops into a form of gratification at both a social and individual level. If we stay in this space with her for long enough to overcome and stabilise the initial impact of her brutal self punishment, then we enter into what she calls a 'bridge'8 of satisfaction, which spans the gap between viewer and artist. If we partake of the expressive and even spiritual transaction which she provides, it gives gratification, though possibly not of the sort she initially intends. No account of her spiritual interests and drives, indeed no account of the content of her work, fully explains why it sometimes succeeds in releasing for the audience

88 a remarkable charge of pleasure. A good deal of this concerns the effect of what the audience witnesses in the performance; but also it concerns implications of what it means to be an audience. An explanation might begin with two psychoanalytic models for artistic practice. The first model is based on Freud's view of art as an infantile, regressive, non-neurotic form of substitute satisfaction;9 the other on a Kleinian (D.W. Winnicott) view that art affords relational gratification at a personal and social level. The Kleinian 'transitional object' or 'teddy bear' theory of art suggests that the love of an art object serves as a transitional point between narcissistic self-love and the love of other people. Both models, however, indicate the threat of psychosis. A disturbing gap or discrepancy exists between the artist's 'full and correct' view of reality (AbramoviC's spiritualism), and the insufficient view of reality presented in the socially acceptable symbolic matrix of routine conventions. The disturbance caused by this dilemma can result in an emotional desire to fill in the sense of absence by merging with 'others' in society or a big 'Other'. In the Freudian model, the artist operates by filling this absence with an 'id'based intensity. The Kleinian model would promote a detached cognitive acceptance of the disequilibrium by rendering absence as a strong presence. It would be my observation that Abramovi tends towards the Freudian rather than the Kleinian schema,10 seeking a significant 'Other' in the form of God. This
Nightsea Crossing, 1982, performance (12 days without talking or food, each 7 hours motionless), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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9 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Dover Press, London, 1994, pp 14-18. 10 Abramovi uses the phrase 'transitional object', but with a meaning that seems to have very little relation to Klein, as they are transitional to a spiritual world or dimension.

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Waiting Room (detail), 1994, iron & mineral. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, Kew York.

11 See Slavoj ik,

Culture, MIT Press, 1992, p 79.

Looking Alary: An introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular

might also explain her penchant for encounters with non-western civilisations. She seems to view the Aborigines and Tibetans, for example, as knowing servants of a God in nature. These 'others of the Other' lend her the continued strength to fill the void with her id-driven body. What a Freudian and Lacanian theory might also elucidate is the effect on the audience of her replacement of a symbolic body, the painting or sculpture, with a real one. If the unconscious is structured like a language, then inter-subjective communication is dependent on symbols which can be exchanged. According to structural linguistics, these symbols are supposedly randomly selected, but Abramovie instead inserts her body, thereby wrecking language to reveal the surplus that is pleasure and death. Her body as art plays the role of a passive ground of exchange, leaving open the question of how, or if, that body is involved in transcending the exchanges of inter-subjective language (for Abramovi the dialogue seems to be between body, soul and God), perhaps conforming to the thesis that 'woman does not exist' in the phallic presence of language." Take, for example, the long silences that intrude into so many of her works, such as Rhythm Zero, 1973, and Night Sea Crossing, 1983. The performances may seem therefore to fit comfortably into the museum context, insofar as paintings and sculptures are also silent but signifying objects. But this is a deceptive formalist comparison. The significance of Abramovi's silence lies in its wilfulness. There is a superhuman (in the Nietzschean sense) unequivocally positive will of the soul at work, which seems randomly to ignore and create laws outside the domination of language. If this whimsical wilfulness and the long silences in the performances begin to annoy and become claustrophobic, it is no surprise. Beyond that annoyance, however, lies the 'gap'. Slowly, the two artists (Abramovi and her partner Ulay), in their somatic presence and silence, become more real than a painting or a word, more than can be located by language, thus reminding us of the uncomfortable fact that one's sense of reality is just a symptom of language.

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Black Dragon: Rose Quartz Pillows, 1994, rose quartz, public

monument in Tashikawa, Tokyo. Courtesy: Tashikawa Centre, Tokyo.

AbramoviC refuses, ignores, the codes. But then, again, she is not communicating with a shared symbolic language, but with language's lack, language's 'inbetweens'. The hole in language that she opens up tends to get covered over by its normally tight matrix of satisfying simulations. Sitting absolutely still for four or seven hours at a time allows sufficient duration for the audience to undergo this process of departure from the satisfactions of subjective symbolic reality. After an initial confusion, a strange and pleasant sensation develops, and many people have reported that, although they intended to stay for five minutes, they remained for hours. The triangle of two artists and an audience implies a symbolic exchange, but there are only bodies, no symbols or codes, no art on the walls, not a word spoken. There are only the 'in-betweens' of somatic knowledge and desire. This is the 'gap' which she renders so effectively, and through which is glimpsed the inchoate of the real. After reaching this gap, however, there are a number of paths which can be taken. The most worn leads to the mystification of these phenomena, transforming them into proof of a teleological belief. Narrower paths, requiring a different desire, a more dispassionate frame of mind, lead to a contemplation of th phenomena and a fuller understanding of the operations of desire. I should like to return to some of the challenges this work poses in its accommodation into the structures of the museum and art criticism. With the appearance of so elegant a Grande Dame of performance art, one is reminded of the importance of making sense of her work and the genre of performance. The challenge begins right away, with her arrival for an exhibition, in experiencing

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her personal presence, off-stage as well as on. It is difficult to distinguish, even now, what one experiences when chatting with an artist who 'lives' her art. The ambiguity of the frame of her appeal is beguiling, but also ethically quite treacherous. With the advent then, and the reemergence now, of conceptual and performance art, there is an increasing emphasis on the artist's personality and aura, a charisma in the face of which criticism and judgement run the risk of overindulgence. Abramovi probably has little control over this effect, she seems simply to emanate sobriety, seductiveness and elegant charm. For many, AbramoviC's overt spiritualism in itself counts as just such an embarrassing over-indulgence, most especially in the post-performance work in the exhibition. This work includes a variety of furniture-like objects with crystals positioned to contact the body on the power points of Chinese medicine. This may seem like a manifestation of New Age theology, raising issues of the limits, the point of collapse, where metaphysics finally undermines rather than reinforces art. For the museum, her work challenges its history of championing a modern art independent of metaphysical assumptions of (Christian) faith. Critics and artists alike have sought to pry apart truth from beauty such that they cquld at best be considered analogous to each other. Modernism, as it formed the institution of the museum, was increasingly dependent upon this autonomy as a selfjustification; and there remains a considerable disdain for art which is simply the tool of political or religious preoccupations. At the same time, such a separation was seen as a loss of transcendent unity by many artists, T.S. Eliot, Malevich, Rothko and Abramovi amongst them. The romantic and transcendent subjectivity promoted by artists like Abramovi can still, even in a postmodernist age, be characterised as historically produced and set in motion by the extreme conditions of an alienating society; and without AbramoviC's sense of humour and distance, her linking of the spiritual with desire would risk being seen as a symptom of hysteria. Nonetheless it has become increasingly evident that the significance of art today lies not so much in its form as in the way it engages with language and social codes to reveal the relations between desire and power. I would not argue that AbramoviC's work has no place in trying to make a difference in the world. In her return to object-bound work, however, I question whether her spiritualism does not short-circuit this process by pre-empting the formation of alternative meanings, meanings which can be generated just by comparing her performances with her objects and interactive sculptures. The use of her body in performance was effective because it resisted the rhetorical use of language. The objects, however, reintroduce the functions of language, framing the limits of her earlier end-game of art. In reclaiming the symbolic, for example, she transfers her 'ground' of meaning from her body to the body of the earth. The dialogue is restructured to include society, nature and spiritual co-existence. The body of the artist is now transformed into the body of the earth: crystals are the veins and arteries, the eyes and organs of a living planet, and other old humanist notions of. harmonising the human body with nature. Her private theology, synthesised from her travels and cultural background, now expounds concepts well known from the Renaissance, thus bringing her back into the orbit of European art. Modernist titters of derision, in this case, are silenced under the authority and beauty of a Sacred Flesh which now exists as a memory of her performances. By 1979, performance art had undergone a sea-change wherein the avant-garde aspirations of the 1960s were subsumed by a media oriented, highly polished and marketable version of the genre. Many of the performance artists in Holland, with whom Abramovi and Ulay were associated, chose at this point either to

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92 return to the studio and the object, or to travel abroad. Lowrien Wijers recounts that the motivation for travel included the need for an audience more formative and confirming of a spiritual art. Abramovi remarks that their desert trips offered extreme physical conditions necessary to the making of a religious saint, and filled them with spiritual energy through dose contact with nature and the religions of the peoples she visited. These trips were predicated on the notion that the western worldview and concept of nature was misconceived, deceptive, and in need of renewal through contact with the spirit of nature and those who know how to respect and serve it. In seeking the 'undeceived', Abramovi and Ulay invoked a charming if problematic concept of an 'other of the great Other', a search perhaps for a fanatasised racial other to fill the gap in our relationship with the Other as nature. In thus combining ecological and spiritual issues, the Aborigine and Tibetan are cast in the role of mentor for westerners duped by communist and capitalist materialisms. Abramovi continues to see the need to assimilate diverse cultural influences, remarking in 1990, " I think it is not possible [to reach up to a new spirituality without looking to eastern cultures]".12 Ulay, however, came to have doubts about the quality of their inter-cultural communication, and by 1988 remarks, "But lately I am a bit sad about the fact that I cannot function in what I am doing with those ethnic groups, there is no place for this [performance art], maybe no understanding for it". 1 3 Abramovi still attempts to speak through her body both with and for these groups, acting, again, as a 'bridge'. "The ground of her body', as a symbolic matrix, becomes fraught with problems, however. As she shifts towards idealised ecological concerns through the conception of the earth as a maternal body, she also invests western society with a phallic quality. In using the symbolic of language, the earth becomes legible as a mother, making it possible to evoke such functions as the Oedipal taboo. Such manipulations through compulsive rituals now seem to be an attempt to maintain and project certain primitivist myths.; Abramovi's has been a curiously unique practice, however, in which the permanent damage to the body, either hers, society's, or the earth's, is not ever made particularly evident as part of the work. The morality of her new work is nonetheless not comfortably reducible to the paradigms of her performances. How does the wilful scarring of her own body, for example, serve as metaphor for a scarring of the earth? Rather than succumb to the invitation to reach an idealised spiritual state, I prefer to consider what such a comparison might reveal about the operations of human desires, which Abramovi still, after all, seeks to redirect. 'Marina Abramovi' was at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 9 April-2 July, 1995, travelling to the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 29 July-9 September, 1995; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 19 September-1 December, 1995; the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 8 February-14 April, 1996; the Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, 30 November-2 February, 1997; and the Muse d'Art Contemporain, Lyon (date to be announced).

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12 Goy, op cit, p 54. 13 Chrissie Iles, 'Taking a line for a Walk', Performance, April-May 1988, p 15.