Art & the Body - Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, Thursday June 3, 2010, MOMA - Marina Abramović with audience member

Gina Pane The Conditioning, first of three phrases in Self-Portrait(s) Galerie Stadler, Paris January 11, 1973 Original duration: approximately 30 minute

Marina Abramovic's Performance of Gina Pane's The Conditioning, first of three phases in Self-Portrait(s) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York November 12, 2005 Duration: 7 hours

Marina Abramovic, Breathing in/ Breathing out with Ulay, 1977, Photograph

Abramović’s art approaches the topic of art and the body as a personal investigation of physical limits and mental potentials. Her early influences include non-western cultures such a Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, and traditional Australian Aboriginal customs searching for processes that push the body to the physical extremes in order to eliminate fear of death, pain and physical limitations. Also through these cultures she has learnt of a deeper form of energy present in the body, allowing herself to fast, endure pain or undertake intense hours of performance.

In using the medium of performance, she believes “the process has always been more important than the result, the performance more important than the object.” Since 1969 Abramović has created extensive performance artworks involving her body and the audience, encompassing the body and soul and the consciousness surrounding it. She finds direct connections of energy throughout the body, its surroundings, the earth and the cosmos. Abramović often starts a performance before the audience enters the space, and ends it after they are gone to control the presence and durability of the act. In some of her works, she engages the audience to complete the work, inviting them to participate, such as in the most recent collection of performances at MOMA entitled “The Artist is Present.” Here she sat in the gallery space at a table across from an empty chair, in which audience members were invited to sit for however long they desired. In one of her first performances, she called on the audience for manipulation of her body using 72 tools placed in front of her.

Abramović finds the process needed to create performances extremely important, as with the sense of live-ness that inherent during the performance. In contrast the documentation and medium used to capture the live performance produces an ‘expired’ copy, that can never imitate the live aspect and cannot be true to the art form. In her more recent works, Abramović focuses on the mental and physical conditioning of the artist and audience. Her work is a fascinating and enthralling example of an artist using the body as the subject, object and medium.

The three above works can be seen as a loose summary of style of artworks, the first being very focused on the simple sustainability of the body, the second as the endurance of the mind, and the third, the captivation of the audience. In Breathing in/ Breathing out with Ulay, the performers share the one breath until no longer possible - i.e they pass out. In this performance Ulay and Marina lasted 17 minutes. This piece really focuses on the physicality of the body and its limitations. In Abramovic's performance of Gina Pane's "The Conditioning" the core element is withstanding the pain mentally, much more so than a physical limitation. And finally, the most recent performance involved the artist engaging with the audience, sharing the energy and space between them.

This is also a great performance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pno1gCrbeVk