Blog, Featured, Gleb Sidorkin, Theory - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 11:48 - 0 Comments

Emerging performance artist James Franco introduces 40-year veteran Marina Abramovic at NYU

By Gleb Sidorkin

The word “veteran” in the headline above is meant in the literal, military sense. No, Marina Ambramovic didn’t fight like her parents did when they became heroes of the Serbian resistance- she was born after the Great War, in 1946. But her performance career has left as many scars on her body as a stint in the woods with her father’s guerilla unit would have. In one of the last videos Marina Abramovic showed in her talk at NYU on Tuesday, before ending the evening’s performance with a delectable quote about the power of sexual energy, we see her running a razor blade across her belly, re-tracing a five-pointed star carved there, on a much younger stomach, in a 1975 performance about her Communist heritage. The star also corresponds to the red star on her birth certificate, which in turn matches the swastika on the certificate of her long-term collaborator Ulay. Their romance and long series of (often nude) performances both ended in 1988 in a dramatic moment caught on video, at the midpoint of the Great Wall of China, after both had walked across half of its length. In the past thirty years, Abramovic has been burned, suffocated, drugged senseless, had her clothes cut off by spectators, had loaded guns and drawn bows pointed at her, been hung from the ceiling with snakes, and mutilated herself, each time forging an electric emotional bridge with her audience and her collaborators.

Abramovic pushes the limits of the human body in a way that combines athleticism, sexuality, and powerful emotional connections with the audience. “Sexual energy,” she said in closing, “is the only energy, and we can decide how to shape it.” This observation has been at the core of her work from the beginning, and connects her with one of my favorite performance pieces: Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle. In this series of sculptural set pieces featuring the body of the artist himself, the biological tension of an embryo at the moment of sexual differentiation explodes into dramatic stagings of space, objects, and the body. Abramovic and Barney’s approach to performance as an athletic and mental feat of endurance also connects both of these artists with the interesting recent work of NYU Cinema Studies student James Franco, who kicked off the performative evening at Tisch by reciting a detailed summary of Abramovic’s work, seemingly from memory. Franco has recently made an interesting move from film acting to performance art while blurring the line between the two, and has presented his film Erased James Franco as well as his ongoing run as the fictional character Franco on the soap opera General Hospital (set to culminate in the Dietch Projects gallery in New York) as time-based pieces in which he probes the limits of his actor’s instrument.

Erased James Franco, a collaboration with Carter, also shares with Abramovic’s work an important element of repetition. One of Abramovic’s earliest pieces, Rhythm 10, involved listening to a recording of herself being cut with a knife and re-staging the same actions as she listened to the tape. In her 2005 show at the Guggenheim in New York, Seven Easy Pieces, Abramovic re-staged one of her old performances as well as those of five well-known artists, ending the series with a new performance of her own. In his introduction, Franco argued that these events at the Guggenheim represented a major development for performance art as a medium. Individual performances have always been seen as corresponding to a single artist, a single space and time, and some form of recording medium. Abramovic, Franco argued, has opened up a space for treating performances as sets of actions and relationships that can be taken up again by anybody, at any time. Carter’s re-staging of all of Franco’s past film roles in Erased James Franco may thus be an Abramovic-inspired engagement of the idea of re-performance. Repetition is related to ritual in the work of Abramovic, whose great-uncle became an Orthodox saint and who was raised by a religious grandmother. Her act of re-staging a work of performance art is structurally similar to the Orthodox Divine Liturgy and rituals of fasting, prayer, communion, and marriage. In traditional societies, these highly emotional, performative acts are re-staged with equal spiritual intensity by generations of individuals. Folk traditions, such as the hilariously lewd ones enacted in Abramovic’s brilliant video Balkan Erotic Epic, also fit into this category of repeated, meaningful human activity.

The themes that emerged from Tuesday’s detailed retrospective of Abramovic’s remarkable career were closeness, death, and the energy that arises in the moments when we allow ourselves to truly embrace death, the other, and ourselves. One action that is common to several of her performances is the pressing together of human bodies. Sometimes the effect is primal, as with an early work with Ulay in which they ran towards each other and smashed their naked bodies together repeatedly. Sometimes it is psychologically playful, as when the pair placed their nude bodies in the doorway of a museum, forcing visitors to squeeze past. (At the outset of the talk, Abramovic tantalizingly offered to re-stage this performance at the end of the evening as the audience exited; sadly, this didn’t happen.) These moments of physical communion with Ulay are recalled in Abramovic’s later work, as when she lies in an intimate embrace with a model of her own skeleton, or slaps a human skull against her bare torso in Balkan Erotic Epic. She seems to be pressing her body against death, trying to get close to death in the same primal, desperate way that humans attempt to bridge the distance between individuals through physical intimacy.

Her collaboration with Ulay can be seen as a long attempt to leap across the bottomless chasm that renders one utterly separated from all others. Whether they were staring at each other for hours on end, inhabiting empty landscapes, or simply smashing their naked bodies together, they were trying to break through, to make contact with the Other. The firm contact of body on body that existed in those moments of collision between Abramovic and Ulay in their first performance came into sharp relief, later in the lecture, against the dwindling physical connection made during their final moment of collaboration, as he holds her fingers in his hand. They disconnect, and look out over the barren landscape. From that moment on in her life and work, Abramovic turned her gaze away from Ulay, and re-focused it in on the viewer in a radical move towards engagement with the audience. And face to face with an audience, you are always alone. As she said during the lecture, “In the end, you are always alone.”

The MoMA retrospective of her career, which opens on March 14, will feature a new work by Abramovic, which is also a modified re-staging of an earlier piece. The Artist is Present, like the earlier The House with the Ocean View, will require the artist to remain on display in the gallery, maintaining prolonged visual contact with the museum audience. This time, however, she will not be enclosed and elevated, but out in the open gallery space, face to face with the audience, for hours and hours on end. Yikes! Each new Abramovic piece seems to be more a more frightening prospect for the performer than the one before. Is Marina Abramovic trying to spill enough blood on the museum floor to equal the sacrifice of her parents and grandparents who lived through the darkest years of the Balkan 20th century? Or is she trying to create a body of grueling performances in order to dare future generations to take them up again? Either way, her passion for performance combined with her drive to prove herself capable of taking on any physical or spiritual challenge for the sake of art make her a living legend for a new generation of performance artists.