Artist Marina Abramovi?)
If you want to name an artist who brought performance into the mainstream of art, it is probably Marina Abramovi? Since beginning his artistic career in Belgrade in the early 1970s, Abramovich has been using his body as a medium for 50 years, creating works of great tension and even self-torture, testing the spiritual and physical limits of himself and his audience. "I'm constantly pushing my limits to achieve metamorphosis," she says. Many of her ordeal works of art have been completed with her former partner and collaborator, Ulay, including whipping herself, cutting out the shape of a five-pointed star on her body, lying naked on cross-shaped ice, hiking along the Great Wall for 90 days in China, and letting herself be pointed at a gun filled with bullets or a tight crossbow.
Balkan Baroque,1997, video source: Youtube
In 2010, Abramovich's performance work "The Artist is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, credit: TAN
At the 1997 Venice Biennale, Abramovich won the Golden Lion for Balkan Baroque. This work is her response to the conflict in her hometown of the former Yugoslavia, where she squatted in a mountain of cow bones for 4 consecutive days, wiping the blood stains on her bones. In 2010, Abramovich rose to fame with "The Artist is Present." It was a live performance of her large retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she sat quietly in the museum for the entire three-month period, face-to-face with each viewer, which attracted 850,000 visitors and broke all previous visits to the museum.
The Life is a mixed reality performance by Abramovich that debuted in 2019 at the Serpentine Museum. Her first major solo exhibition in the UK was scheduled to open in September at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which will feature her historical works and latest commissions, but has been postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic. She said she hopes her opera "7 Deaths of Maria Callas" will still premiere this fall.
MariaCallas - CallasinConcert-TheHologramTour-Carmen,Act1:"L'amourestunoiseaurebelle"
As European countries and the United States enter lockdown, Art News conducted an exclusive interview with Marina Abramovich, a performance artist who talks about her life and art during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Q
As an artist, has the pandemic affected your lifestyle?
Marina Abramovich:
The pandemic has not disrupted my life at all. I would have been like a modern nomad, traveling from one place to another; my body was the only place I was associated with. In January of this year, I left new York, where I live, to go to India for a withdrawal practice, as in previous years. Then I went to London, to Munich to prepare my opera, and then to Austria. I hope to be back in New York next week. In every work environment, I work alone most of the time. So for me, the current situation hasn't really changed the way I live, the only thing that has changed is the communication between people, and due to the current social distancing policy, everything depends on media technology.
Your partner is in New York and you're in Austria, how do you see this remote relationship?
Marina Abramovich: I have a wonderful relationship right now and I am very happy. For two months we were also looking for ways to deal with a long-distance relationship, and he would read it to me every night before bedtime. We read a lot of different things: now we're looking at Yukio Mishima's The Star, a novel he wrote in the 1960s. It's a great way to fall asleep.
Yukio Mishima's collection of short stories "The Star"
Has the pandemic had an impact on the nature of your creations, or in a way, did you feel like you were "escaping" into your work?
The pandemic has not directly affected my work. The fact that when the events that happen every day are instantaneous that change the way artists create or think, it's dangerous for them. When the Balkan Wars broke out in Yugoslavia, I created the Balkan Baroque (1997), scrubbing the bones of the cattle for a long time, but it took me a long time to respond to the situation at that time. Even then, I didn't want the work to be too directly related to the war in Yugoslavia. I want it to transcend the feeling of war, and the images left behind by the work can be used at any time, any place, as long as someone is killing: it doesn't matter if the war takes place in Syria or any corner of the world.
It's the same with this pandemic: if we're quick to create work on this subject, it's like you're repeating the daily news in a loop, and I don't think art should be. Art should be disturbing, it should be questioned, it should predict the future. During World War II, when everyone was depicting the devastation caused by the war, Matisse painted flowers, which was a wonderful response, after all, the news was so desperate and cookie-cutter. It's more of a question of how to elevate the human spirit.
Artist Marina Abramovi?at the Bayeris State Opera
In 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, you are both a director and a lead actor, why is Callas so important to you?
One day when I was 14 years old, my grandmother and I were listening to breakfast on the radio in the kitchen, and a burst of singing came out of the radio, which was the first time I heard Maria Callas sing. I remember what I felt, like an electric current passing through my body, and I stood up and listened to it—the song was so fascinating and moving. I couldn't even understand her lyrics, but her voice and the energy contained in it hit me. Later I learned it was Maria Callas, and I don't even remember what she sang. After that, I longed to know everything about her, and then I realized that we had so much in common. First of all, her appearance, and second of all, her mother—and my mother and I didn't have a good relationship either. We are all Sagittarius. The most important thing is that her body contains extreme fragility and extreme strength at the same time. This has been reflected many times in her life. After Onassis's death, she had nothing to remember, he was the love of her life, and she did die for love in the end.
I was in a similar situation with my ex-husband. When my ex-husband left me, I didn't want to live any longer: I had no appetite, I had insomnia all night, I didn't want to do anything — it was all over. It was work that saved me. I re-immersed myself in my work and created Artist Presence during that period. It was my redemption, but Callas didn't have that energy and ended up heartbroken.
So I chose opera, an art form that is so classic and even outdated. In every opera, there are passages in which women die, and they all die of love. So I thought, why don't we put all the deaths together, piece together 7 dead Maria Callas, and create a whole new opera from it? Normal opera duration is usually 4 hours, but death is much shorter, so my play is only 1 hour and 20 minutes. We have just finished this opera and hope that the premiere will take place in September this year, if all goes well. In the crazy moment of the epidemic, I managed to complete a work of art.
In 2018, artist Maurizio Cattelan curated the exhibition "The Artist Here" that appropriated Abramović's famous works as the main visual
In recent years, performance performances have begun to enter museums in meaningful ways, but suddenly, mass gatherings or close encounters have begun to be considered unhealthy behaviors. Do you think it will still take some time for performance to regain its place?
I consider myself closely related to the process of performance entering mainstream art, because I have been doing performance art for 50 years and have never given up during this period. Talking about performance art is like talking about my own children. I don't think the virus will always exist, the vaccine will be produced, and the show will return to normal. At the same time, I think augmented reality might be a solution because you can capture the energy of the performer and release it in your living room without anyone disturbing you.
Is the art market once dominant, and is it now undergoing a huge turning point?
Thankfully, the art market is finally no longer the dominant one. We really need to get back to normal, back to creativity, back to purity; as the economic situation collapses, there will be no more commodities. But interestingly, performance art disappears at the high point of the economy and returns when the economy is down, like a phoenix nirvana. Performance doesn't require a lot of money, and performance art is cheap, the good thing is that it's a living art form that transcends time. Good work creates very strong emotional connections that can actually change people's perceptions and perceptions.
Abramović and Ulay's Relation in Time, 1976
Your exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts has been postponed to next year due to the pandemic, will you adjust the exhibition based on the current situation? Will the emphasis on different works change?
One of the things is to add to my tribute to Ulay, who passed away at the beginning of the outbreak and we haven't even been able to say goodbye to him with dignity. So the exhibition adds several major works created in our 12-year collaboration as a tribute. I don't really like dealing with pandemic-related topics – I don't really have any thoughts or inspirations. Viruses are not a sexy object of work. The exhibition is called "After Life," which is already a sort of prediction of the future.
Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in 2005
This is also reminiscent of the concept of heritage and is a subject of frequent debate in the performance world. Unlike some artists, you document your work with photographs and videos, and in The Guggenheim Museum's Seven Easy Pieces in 2005, you pioneered a way to revisit your work through reenactment.
The concept of heritage is extremely important to me. My mother was very passionate about documentaries, so at a very early age I tried to document everything I did, every letter I received, every piece of paper, every exhibition. Now I've digitized all these records. In retrospect, for me, the first thing is to push performance into mainstream art, and then to invent the method of reenactment, so that past works can be performed again on the basis of following certain rules.
I have also been teaching for 25 years, teaching in different countries around the world. I created the "Abramovich's Law" for young artists to teach them how to create continuous works of art, which I call "cleaning the house." After Artists Are Present, I also created the "Abramovich Rule" for the public, allowing them to focus on long periods of performance by creating specific connections. So we now have a Marina Abramović Institute for Performance Art, including representative performance art, the Abramovich Law, and so on, to support the public and young artists in creating works and protecting performance art and the "legacy" left by artists.
Abramović and Ulay's Rest Energy, 1980
But some works are so extreme that they can't be replayed. Do you reflect on some of the actions and works that put yourself in danger?
The dangers in my work are all about my own risks, because it's my own body and I can do anything with it. But I will not allow any young artist to perform a performance that exposes himself to danger. I have a lot of work to be reenacted: there have been two or three recent re-enactments of House with Ocean View that require 12 consecutive days of not eating and remaining silent in public. It was a very profound spiritual experience, but it didn't really involve any danger.
How is your experience with performances and spiritual exercises different overall? Is this experience healing or negative?
At the same time, it contains destructive and negative elements at the same time as healing; of course, behavioral performance is also spiritual. First of all, if I had a very fond idea, I wouldn't practice it because I wasn't interested in it—I only focused on things that were disturbing or extremely difficult, and things that gave me a sense of panic halfway. I am fascinated by the process itself and the changes it brings: at first it is hell, and finally you have some kind of spiritual guidance and revelation. People often wonder how I feel after a difficult performance and what I'll do, and I always tell them I just want an ice cream.
The Lovers, The Great Wall Walk, 1988
If you were to write an autobiography now after Ulay's death, how would you describe him in your autobiography?
Marina Abramovich: It's another difficult relationship between Ulay and me. For jealousy, betrayal, and other stupid and universal reasons, I lost the love I once had. When we finally reached an agreement and strolled around the Great Wall, what we ended up with was a breakup and a goodbye, rather than going to marriage as planned. We hadn't spoken to each other for 7 years, and after that we started talking again because we had common work.
There was a time when he sued me over the profit sharing of the work, and I don't want to explain it anymore because there are already a lot of records about it. Later I traveled to India to participate in Ayurvedic practice, where I met Ulay and his wife. It's unbelievable that we've been reunited in the most unlikely places to meet. We stayed there for a month, getting up at 5 o'clock every morning and meditating. After that we forgave each other and became friends again. I will not revise my autobiography because everything I wrote is true, and I am glad that we were finally able to forgive each other before he passed away.
When was the happiest phase of your life?
It was from 1979 to 1980, when I was living in the desert of central Australia with local Aboriginal people from two different tribes. The environment is very harsh, the temperature is 55 degrees Celsius, and every day life is full of flies and suffering, but that was the time when I was most closely associated with myself.
House with Ocean View, 2002
What comforts you when faced with a difficult situation?
I don't think it's a dilemma, it may be my problem. I wake up every morning and feel full of happiness. I think we should spend every day as if it were the only day in our lives. I'm interested in the theme of how life will eventually pass, and I think about death every day. This has nothing to do with the current pandemic, it's just that the death itself is fascinating. Life is short, we should try to eliminate boring things, live to the fullest, and regard every day as the last day of life.
If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be? Is there anything in your life that you regret?
I never regret it. My life has not been easy, even difficult, but I love it because I have learned different gains from each dilemma. My only regret is that I didn't have the talent to sing. I love singing and genuinely envy people who can express themselves through their voices.
(Article from TANC)