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Marina Abramovic: Performance Artist
By Jason Earls

Performance art is rather tricky to define. Mainly it is a form of art in which a person performs various actions in a certain environment (often using props, media, and other items), and these actions along with the artist constitute the entire work.

Marina Abramovic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1946 and is considered the "grandmother of performance art." She began giving performances in the early seventies and is still active in the avant-garde performance art scene today. The majority of her work explores extreme states of mental and physical activity with the purpose of delineating various boundaries, such as pain, and fear of death. Abramovic has won many awards for her work, such as the Golden Lion Award and the New York Dance and Performance Award. She presently resides in Holland.

Abramovic was raised in a strict environment by her mother and has said that much of the extreme behavior she exhibits in her performances - such as burning herself, cutting and whipping herself - originates from her rebellion against her mother´s repressive control over her during the first 29 years of her life.

Although she has given numerous performances covering a wide variety of work - her own as well as other artist´s - due to space limitations, we are going to describe only two of her earliest (and more extreme) pieces.

But perhaps we should first explain some of the intentions and motivations behind her work. Her main theme (to reiterate) is that through bodily pain and the resulting states of consciousness, she attempts to surpass the barriers of fear, death, and pain. Her reasoning is that if she can get beyond these barriers, which typically define and constrain Western thought and living, she can arrive at a plane or dimension beyond the one that most humans are trapped in. Or to say it another way, by pushing her body and mind to the limit, she is hoping to transcend the present dimension she feels encumbered by with the hope of arriving at a place free from fear, pain, and death, so they will no longer color every aspect of her consciousness.

One of her earliest performances was titled "Rhythm 10" first given in 1973, in which she used two tape recorders and twenty knives to play the game of stabbing between her outstretched fingers of one hand. First she would turn on one tape recorder and take a knife and begin stabbing as fast as possible between her fingers, recording the sounds. As soon as she cut herself, she would change knives and continue until she cut herself again, moving through all twenty knives in this fashion. Then she would turn off the recorder, rewind it and play it back, listening to every cut and sound and "mistake" she had made. Then she would press the record button on the second tape player and ...

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In "Rhythm 2" first performed in 1974, Abramovic tested different states of consciousness by taking psychiatric drugs not meant for her body. First she would ingest a pill normally given to catatonic patients, and because she was not sick, her body would go into ...

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Through these descriptions of her performances we can see why her art has been considered a combination of self-mutilation, asceticism, exploratory psychology, and sophisticated art. In fact, she has frequently taken her performances to such dangerous points that audience members have actually intervened to extract her from the danger before she was killed.

Inspired by Abramovic´s work, I thought of my own performance piece that I would like to try sometime. It is titled the "Abstract Cross" and runs thus:

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The purpose of this piece will be to show the world how much artists feel the general public does not appreciate what they do; and it will also symbolize the public´s aggression toward self-absorbed, narcissistic artists in our present society. (Note the reversal in my piece of the audience throwing paint and materials to create the work while I hang upside down not participating.) Another point of this piece is to represent the popular opinion that a lot of abstract art today could be produced just as effectively by non-artists if they only devoted a small amount of time and energy to it.

And that is my "Abstract Cross" which I hope to be performing somewhere soon.

(Cont.)

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Written by: Jason Earls
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