Marina Abramovic at Performa05
by Nathaniel Stern
More than a tad frazzled on my return, I realise that the saturated NY life is something I'm no longer accustomed to. In the city I used to claim as my own, I jumped from gallery to gallery, hot-spot to hot-spot, playing with, and being played with, by art, catching as much as I could of Performa 05, 'The First Biennial of New Visual Art Performance, New York City'.
New York was and is an important backdrop to many histories of body and performance art - Fluxus, video, avant-garde theatre, contemporary choreography and dance amongsth others. The city's run of hosting such work since The Dripper, has been featured in founding Director and Curator of Performa and this festival RoseLee Goldberg's performance art histories, as well as Rebecca Schneider's Explicit Body in Performance.
Goldberg's organisation itself, founded in Spring 2004, commissions new work ranging from multimedia and radio to proscenium-based performance and academic writing. The organisation also presents lectures and discussions at educational and academic events, and was basically conceived as a starting point for the NYC Biennial.
The impressive list of 80+ participating artists included Marina Abramovic, John Kessler, Jesper Just, Christian Marclay, Jim O'Rourke, Berni Searle, DJ Spooky and Yoko Ono, who performed over 50 pieces across more than 25 venues in 19 days. Little bits, including 'We are all Together: Media(ted) Performance', curated by Rhizome's Marisa Olson, and including major new media art stars - such as MTAA - will continue to trickle out into the new year.
One of the highlights of the festival was Marina Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces, an ironic reference to Richard Feynman's historic book on quantum mechanics. Over the first six nights of her Guggenheim series, Marina reenacted what she deemed to be some of the most important, historical works of - mostly US-based - performance art, culminating in a new piece of her own on the seventh. She was 'interpreting [these works] as one would a musical score, and documenting their realisation.' The overall thrust of this exercise was purportedly the creation of a bridge to the much studied but mostly unseen works of the 70s.
First, Abramovic played Bruce Nauman's Body Pressure (1974), originally exhibited as a stack of instructions that asked potential participants to press their bodies against the wall in a gallery space, in varying ways. As prescribed, Abramovic spent time pressing, and leaving her own smells, markings and hair on the wall. On night two she tackled Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1972), where he masturbated under a wooden floor on top of which the audience walked, calling out to them at and prior to his climax.
Night three saw her perform VALIE EXPORT's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969). Instead of wading through a movie theatre with crotchless pants and inviting audience members to touch 'the real thing', Abramovic sat on a stage with her legs spread and a gun in hand. Night four was Gina Pane's The Conditioning, first of three phases in 'Self-Portrait(s)' (1973), where she sat above a bed of candles, cutting herself, while filming and projecting responses from the audience behind her.
Night five saw Abramovic performing Joseph Beuys's How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) - 'head covered in honey and gold leaf, Beuys cradled a dead rabbit, showing it pictures on the wall and whispering to it. He wore an iron sole on his right foot and a felt sole on his left.' On night six, Abramovic performed her own Lips of Thomas (1975), the famed gallery piece where she eats a kilogram of honey, drinks a liter of red wine, carves a star in her stomach, whips herself until she 'no longer feels pain', then lays down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above causes her to bleed more profusely.
Each piece lasted exactly seven hours and from night two onwards, full documentation of the previous night was screened at the back of the space. So, by the seventh night, six screens were filled with replays of each of the aforementioned works, while Abramovic performed her new piece Entering the Other Side (2005). This piece was described simply as 'the artist here and now', ostensibly entering to, from or between some other side (?). Abramovic was perched atop a 15+ foot voluminous volcano dress, stuck in a tiny chair for seven hours. In this piece especially, I often found myself a bit lost: the more I tried to place myself in relation to the artist, the museum, the Upper West Side, the canonisation, the less I felt present.
The six reenactments each played more like a précis. They were mostly not done as the originals, or as the promised compositions, but in 30 minute intervals of the entire piece summarized and placd on a loop - so that we pretty much 'get the whole thing' quickly, and can then head out for a drink. The discomfort of my watching Abramovic, of watching others watch, of the self-conscious and 're-making history-making' seemed to detract from the pieces' original concerns with body, politic, provocation and space. Whilst ephemerality has become a mostly acceptable (sometimes sought after) norm in performance, net.art, the digital, non-archive prints, decomposable bio art, etc, Abramovic is turning the historic pieces that helped this to happen into obtainable objects - a 7-DVD box set, available as collector's editions.
DJ Spooky jams a homage to Nam June Paik's Concerto for TV Cello, MTAA updates Sam Hsieh's one year performance to re-contextualize in the present art scene, while countless others at the festival re-mix and re-frame through generative or personal selection processes, while Abramovic is making an archive, starring herself. Although a remarkable addition to a genre that is, by its very nature, lost, it runs the risk of too much presence, mediating and accreditation by putting the works on plinths.
In the end, these blockbuster works were re-performed by a paramount presence, at NY's most famous museum, and opened the door for a newer generation to access the rest of the festival. Their archived existence also makes them a bit more real for the same audience. For all my talk, I'm thrilled to have been mesmerized by this amazing woman, and these breathtaking pieces, for a few nights. I look forward to the next Biennial.
Nathaniel Stern is a New York-born, Johannesburg-based artist and teacher. He completed New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and has won two Brett Kebble Art Awards
