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| Marina Abramovic: performing Joseph Beuys’ How to explain pictures to a dead hare; 1965 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on November 13, 2005 photo Kathryn Carr; © and courtesy the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York |
Abramovic has always used written directions as ‘manuscripts’ for her own performances. Seven easy pieces problematized this notion, as five of the pieces were renditions of performances by other artists, using their own directions and documentation of the work. In the example of Bruce Nauman’s Body pressure, 1974, she used a large sheet of thick glass on which to press her body. In the original, sheets of paper were placed in the gallery with a set of instructions for the viewer to carry out. Abramovic recorded the original directions and played them while she carried out the actions. While becoming a profound and moving performance on the relationship between self and other, and how desire functions as the locus of communion between the two, the piece could have functioned more effectively. I felt the need to carry out the actions myself, though this was frustrated by the fact that Abramovic had made the piece into a solo performance work, in contrast to the original.
In her performance of Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, 1972, the architectdesigned round stage, had been transformed into a platform with high sides and a small staircase for the audience to ascend. The platform accentuated the formal characteristics of the Guggenheim Museum; from the top of the museum’s rotunda, the stage looked like a cross-section of a shell, or an egg with the sperm’s tail protruding. This piece centred on the connective capacity of desire and how our fantasies of the other are driven and fuelled by the imagination. Abramovic talked of her fantasies about the audience above while masturbating. Initially, her voice was near inaudible until the speaker that was situated on the stage was replaced. In obvious contrast to the original, semen was not produced, but rather the seed became the intimacy, the power and vulnerability of the relationship between the visible and the invisible.
In VALIE EXPORT’S ACTION PANTS: genital panic, 1969, the stage contained two wooden chairs. Abramovic wore a black leather biker jacket and black jeans with the crotch section cut out. In her hands she held an M16 rifle. She sat on one chair with her right leg turned out and her left foot on the slat of the other chair. She pointed the rifle at the space in the empty chair, holding the invisible presence implicated by the chair to ransom. Abramovic embodied in this piece both power and fragility; the image was made all the more potent and complex by the fact that it was performed on Veterans Day.
The next night Abramovic performed Gina Pane’s piece The conditioning, first of three phases in self-portrait(s), 1973. Abramovic lay face to the ceiling, about ten inches over fifteen burning candles, only getting off her roughly welded steel rectangular frame to replenish the candles. She wore a grey flame-resistant boiler suit. Abramovic was in visible discomfort while renewing the candles, but while lying on the frame, a profound serenity was visible on her face. The image was intensely moving; we as an audience became implicated in the action; it was if we bore some of her pain and responsibility for that pain. It appeared as though the heat or light was holding Abramovic aloft; or that she was levitating above the candles, even with the immediate solidity and weightiness of the steel frame. The frame became a coffin-like object containing the life that bore Abramovic’s body. While getting back onto the frame the third time a small section of her hair caught fire and was quickly extinguished by herself.
For Joseph Beuys’ How to explain pictures to a dead hare, 1965, the stage contained three blackboards on easels and four different-sized blackboards on the stage floor. Abramovic climbed onto the stage and changed her black boots, which she wore for all the performances, for a pair of old brown boots. While the other performances were renditions of others frameworks and parameters, this piece had a much looser structure, and you could see Abramovic playing with and developing the relationships between the objects in the moment; this felt like it was as refreshing for her as it was for the audience. The piece was characterised by a certain humour; at one stage, Abramovic put the hare’s ears into her mouth and moved the hare’s legs as she crawled around the stage.
The performances provided a multifaceted view of Abramovic’s practice. The performances became studies, not just in the canon of performance history, but also into the Guggenheim as both a site and context. Through the performances, whilst continuing her investigation into self and other, Abramovic subtly but successfully interrogated the museum as establishment, addressing the complex and ongoing relationship between performance and fine art.
Will Pollard is an artist and writer based in Belfast.
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