Keeping Performance Alive: The Radical Archival Practice of Marina Abramovic

MoMA Portrait

 

Performance artist Marina Abramovic

Performance artist Marina Abramovic is a radical. She approaches her artwork with a seriousness and commitment that has entranced audiences all over the globe. She is the creator of arguably the most compelling pieces of performance in performance art history. Her recent exhibition at the MoMA in New York in 2011 drew almost a million viewers, the most ever for a live performance. Yet, Abramovic is concerned that after she is gone, the history of her performances will go with her. In a radical new approach to the preservation of performative works of art, Abramovic has developed a method that forces us to rethink the boundaries of the archive and the way we experience art.

This has been of central importance for Abramovic during the most recent phase of her career. Performance art, also know as conceptual art, attempts to create knowledge in the form of connections made manifest in the audience through performing. It is an art form that challenges the art object as the site for resonance and attempts to deliver that resonance directly to the audience with as little intermediary as possible. However, it is this relationship between artist and audience that is the most difficult to grasp. How does one archive a relationship between performer and audience? Can there be any useful documentation of the emotional resonance of a performance? Is a photograph or textual description enough to make a “record” of the performance event?

Ephemeral work, like that produced in performative works of art, resist materiality and thus resist a place in the archive. Dominant epistemologies connect that which is worth knowing as that which can be transcribed, encoded and made material. Dwight Conquergood describes this stance as “a view from above” practice of inquiry one in which knowledge is “anchored in paradigm and secured in print” (146). Information, based in texts and founded on science, has been the undisputed source of authoritative knowledge since the enlightenment.

Conquergood‘s view from above epistemology grounds itself in positivist notions of science and reason as a means to disqualify other ways of knowing that are based in experience and engagement. Foucault coined the term “subjective knowledges” to describe those ways of knowing that have been discredited, discarded and disqualified from more official and authoritative forms of knowledge that emerge from what Conquergood describes as “textocentrism”. Textocentrism identifies only what is visible as valuable and useful for discourse due to its accessibility and its explicitness. This is why Foucault’s subjective knowledges are “located low down on the hierarchy,” and represent “particular, local, regional knowledge” (Foucault 82). These subjective knowledges disseminate meaning through covert gesture, improvisation, and intonation and are deeply embodied experiences. It is their rejection of explicit articulation that accounts for their low position on the totem pole of epistemology. To preserve their legacy, conceptual artists must explore alternative structures of archival practice that can embrace subjective knowledges in order to pass their history to the next generation of performers, scholars, and audiences.

Easy

Abramovic How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare

To do this Abramovic set out to create an example of how archiving performance should be done. In her 2005 work entitled “Seven Easy Pieces” performed at the Guggenheim Gallery in New York, Abramovic re-enacted five famous works of conceptual art from the 1960s and 70s originally authored by her fellow practitioners. Pieces asks what does it take to keep the performance alive? The goal wasn’t to simply remake the performances but rather recreate them by the providing the audience a way to re-feel these classic historical works of art. Over the course of seven days Abramovic revived these famous performances with her own artistic inflections. Through this process she makes ephemeral performances available again for the viewing public.

Abramovics attempt in Pieces approaches the role of the archivist and curator in an alternative way by establishing a new set of archival/preservation techniques. These techniques represent the emergence of the Abramovic Method, which proposes a radical solution to the problem of ephemeral archivization by establishing three rules 1) duration, being exposed to the work for a significant amount of time, and 2) direct experience, interacting with the work as either an active participant or active voyeur 3) the recreation of historical works in new contexts as a place of reengagement. The recreation of the performance allows the audience to invest a two directional relationship with the performer and the artwork rather than a one directional relationship with an object.

Method

 

The Abramovic Method

 

Pieces works to create new contexts for these performances while keeping the engagement in tact. In the case of Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed”, which had Acconci masturbating under a set of prop stairs for 6 hours a day, Abramovics female interpretation takes on a different connotation, as she has no seed to spill. Trapped beneath a wooden stage in the center of the Guggenheim atrium, Abramovic invited audience members to walk above her and listen to the sounds of her self-pleasure. She pleaded with them for their participation in order to help her reach climax. While some may dismiss her performance as parody, especially considering her femaleness in what most would consider a male performance, exact reproduction was never the goal.

 

Video 

 

Slideshow

 

These ideas are further explored in her 2010 work “The Artist is Present”. In Artist, Abramovic showcased five live re-performances of her most famous works as well as one new durational work that spanned a period of three months. Building off what she already established in Pieces, Abramovic enlists other performers to recreate her historical works. The result is a collection that is part-archival part-interpretation. But this preservation through reperformance did not impress everyone. Art Critic Holland Cotter from the New York Times suggests that the recreations in Artist are mere tributes to older forms of work that distinctly sap the political, emotional and dangerous aspects, leaving it feeling hollow and flat. (Cotter). The most egregious example of this, he claims, is the revival of “Imponderabilia”, a 1977 work that had Abramovic and then collaborator Ulay Laysiepen stand naked in the entrance of the gallery, forcing patrons to pass through their nude bodies in order to gain entrance to the museum. In the MoMA recreation, two performers, trained by Abramovic and again one male and one female, stand in a side doorway giving the public the option to enter through the nude bodies or use an unobstructed entrance. Giving the viewing public the choice to use either doorway, diminishes the original intensity of the piece.

Imponderabiliacombined

 

Imponderabilia Then and Now

But the practice of archivization is not just about preservation of the past but rather it is about bestowing legitimacy to certain forms of knowledge. In the case of performance art, something is lost when documented through inert media. “Pictures of nude bodies doing dangerous things raise no such obstacles in a museum space, but performance art itself is real in all dimensions” (Danto). And therein lies the rub, the improvisational element to live performance, where quite literally anything can happen is absent from the documentation, and with it the palpability of anticipation is extinguished. The Abramovic Method seeks to produce a new form of knowledge making. One that is relational and subjective rather than authoritative.

“Performance challenges categorization, which was originally its point,” says Whiney Museum curator Chrissie Iles, “But museums are about archiving, categorizing, and indexing.” It’s not always an easy fit, but “maybe what’s interesting is the way in which the past is reframed in the present.” That reframing seems to be at the heart of Abramovic’s current phase in her career and doesn’t look like it will be letting up anytime soon. The artist recently purchased a 20,000 square foot building in the small upstate town of Hudson, New York where she hopes to create an international institute for performance art and other time based work. Dubbed the Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI), the space wills serve as a studio, workshop and an archive of performance art.

The preservation of performative arts still presents challenge the institution of the archive. It is clear that material traces of performance will not go away, nor should they. Material preservation is still immensely important for the documenting of history, however in the case of performative arts it cannot be the only way. The Abramovic Method represents an attempt to approach the archival practice in a radically different way. Abramovic challenges us to think about how we experience works of art and how to extend the our experiences to others beyond the enactment of the original event. Her method forces us to think about authenticity, direct experience and the ethics of refeeling works of art that are based on such visceral events. The Marina Abramovic Institute is a grand experiment in this radical form of preservation and may force performers to rethink extending the life of their own ephemeral works, making the act of archiving a performance in itself.

Institute1Institute2 Institute3

 The Marina Abramovic Institute

Afterword:

While not directly related to this project, Here are some examples of alternative archiving attempts of Abramovics work:

Marina Abramovic Institute

The Artist is present Video Game

Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry

 

Works Cited:

Conquergood, Lorne D. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” The Drama Review 46.2 (2002): 145-56. Project Muse. Project Muse, Summer 2002. Web. 16 Dec. 2012.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. N.p.: Vintage, 1980. Print.