Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
Marina Abramović. There are few living artists whose names conjure such a specific style of practice in one’s mind, or who have even, in popular culture, become so synonymous with a whole medium, as arguably Abramović has done with performance art. With her eponymous exhibition now open at the Royal Academy, the question of Abramović’s art historical and cultural impact is more relevant than ever.
The first retrospective of a female artist to occupy the Academy’s main galleries in its 255-year history, the exhibition has been seven years in the making and twice delayed from its originally planned opening in 2020. Abramović has shared how, through Covid and her brush with death earlier this year due to suffering a pulmonary embolism, the exhibition shifted from following the more conventional chronological structure of a retrospective to a thematic one. This shift also came with her plan to recruit over thirty younger performers to re-enact a selection of her past performances – the largest number of people to be performing in an exhibition ever at the Academy; Abramović herself has no definite plans to perform as she is still in recovery, although she has teased that she may stage some spontaneous performances later in the exhibition run.
The first two rooms display documentation of two of her most well-known works: The Artist Is Present (2010), where she spent 700 hours sitting and staring into strangers’ faces at MoMA and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were invited to use any of the selected 72 props on her in any way they wished (with the viewers’ actions becoming increasingly violent, to the point of visitors cutting her skin and holding a loaded gun to her head). These works have both become well-referenced performances in the history of the medium, their inclusion at the beginning is an instant reminder of Abramović’s prominence within recent art history, and of her celebrity – an array of famous faces took their turn to participate at MoMA.
The video element of Balkan Baroque (1997) is unusually personal for the artist, in which the footage of her storytelling and dancing to Balkan music is flanked by video of her parents. This piece is remembered more, however, for the accompanying live performance: her gruesome and futile attempt to clean a pile of bloodied bones at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Similarly, The Hero nearby is a rare moment of symbolism and emotional expression for Abramović: completed soon after her father’s death, the artist is depicted riding a white horse whilst a Serbian anthem plays.
A selection of Abramović’s earlier performances, some with her once partner-collaborator Ulay, are displayed through documentation in the largest room: here she and Ulay repeatedly scream into each other’s faces, and elsewhere she plays the Slavic knife game, attempting to stab a knife back and forth between her spread fingers at an increasing speed. There are constant reminders of how frequently Abramović has put herself in very real physical danger and through great psychological stress: collectively it represents an awe-inspiring commitment to – as Abramović describes – using her body as her tool. All these performances are presented through photographs, film and text; the textual descriptions, more rarely seen and often offering a more detailed description of events, are the most interesting but also feel the most overlooked – not least because they have been printed too small.
From this room on, despite the number of performers participating and the extent to which Abramović is associated with the medium, performance feels absent from the show. There is a room towards the end in which her twelve-day silent on-stage fast The House with The Ocean View will be restaged three times during the run, and three other works are being re-enacted elsewhere throughout. However, much of the remaining exhibition is given over to works in other media which are somewhat less impactful: there are sculptures, installations, works on paper and plenty of videos – recently Abramović herself seems to perform more for the camera than an audience. These works are vastly differing in style and not necessarily given much context so often feel tangential. Of course, the scale of, and commitment to, the selected works being re-performed is notable (I imagine The House with The Ocean View will be extraordinary to witness – performance dates can be found here), but they feel like add-ons to an exhibition which is focussing elsewhere. It is hard not to compare the re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton, on top of a large screen displaying footage of Abramovic’s first performance of it, to the original below, which makes you wonder why it was decided to show both together. In giving so much attention to works in other media, the question arises: does this exhibition convey the same courage and drama often found in Abramovic’s performances?
The potential problems in Abramović’s practice are also much more apparent now; her preference for testing the body’s physical and mental limits could easily conflict with the current attentiveness to how care is enacted in professional and public spaces. The participating performers were trained in Abramović’s technique for five days in the countryside with no food and no talking, which sounds like a potential bureaucratic and health and safety nightmare. Furthermore, her exploration of spirituality has led her to researching various cultures across the globe, such as during the 1980s when she lived in Australia studying the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal people and Tibetan Buddhism; the development of some of her sculptural objects, using certain metals and crystals, have been influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. There is no evidence to suggest that Abramović hasn’t done thorough and respectful research of these practices; however, given they are referenced sporadically and through a vague lens of ‘spirituality’, her engagement with them to support her performative art practice is verging on appropriative.
It is Abramović’s ongoing exploration of spirituality that has come to define her late career and will probably shape how her art's historical and cultural impact is understood. In one room the wall text explains how Abramović believes “people now visit galleries instead of churches; these sculptures embrace the museum’s role as a secular temple.” The idea of comparing a gallery to a religious space isn’t new (see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (1976)), however her discussion of her durational and demanding performance practice through the lens of spirituality lends her work an aura of sacredness and purpose. Yet, when this spiritual purpose is seen in the context of her huge popularity and celebrity, the seriousness with which she operates is vulnerable to being viewed ironically: without aligning herself to any specific religion, the spirituality Abramović espouses is suggestive of late-capitalist wellness practices – there are crystals to buy in the gift shop!
Abramović hasn’t turned the gallery into a church, she has facilitated the spectacularization of contemporary art. She has shared that one of her career-long ambitions has been to ‘put performance into mainstream art’ and it would be hard to deny that she has been successful in this: The Artist Is Present being a perfect example with thousands of viewers, and celebrities, queuing up to participate. The performance artwork has become yet another spectacle within our late-capitalist society of constant performance and distraction. Attending her performances carries great “social capital”: in the world of social media, to have been present with the artist, and then to share about it, has currency. In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), there is a scene in which a fashionable artsy audience gathers to watch a naked woman repeatedly run head-first into a stone wall, bloodying herself and screaming: it reads as an astute parody of Abramović’s practice and the way her performances have become cool entertainment for audiences in the know.
Whilst continuing to promote her understanding of spiritualism and mindfulness, Abramović has uniquely blended the roles of artist, celebrity, and religious leader; she has become just as well known for her persona as for her artwork. In reviewing the current exhibition, the art critic Adrian Searle has observed that Abramović’s life, with her ongoing career and personal struggles, is the ultimate ‘ongoing performance’: the longest durational work an artist could undertake. Post-surgery Abramović has been unable to fly, so instead travelled to the UK for the exhibition via boat on a seven-day trip, which sounds very similar to one of her time-consuming works.
To think critically about Abramović and how she has situated her practice is not to deny her art's historical or cultural impact. It is fairly evident that no other performance artist has had the same institutional and commercial success, and that her earlier works had a significant role in shaping the medium as it is understood now. Abramović appears very focused on trying to shape her legacy too: her choice to enlist younger performers to recreate her works is because, she says, ‘my work is for the young generation’. This exhibition is her latest exercise in legacy-building, and yet, more recent performance practice has shifted away from the durational, non-narrative and body-based work Abramović has explored throughout her whole career; artists now readily engage with storytelling and pretence, and don’t feel obliged to put themselves through hardship. Even Abramović herself has acknowledged that her view of other performative media – theatre, film, etc. – has shifted since the 1970s to a more positive one. She has produced an opera that she will be performing in London in November. Abramović’s ability to adapt to change through her career - from her separation from Ulay to her increased public profile - is clearly evident and will likely lead her to continue challenging herself and producing demanding work: her recent severe illness appears to have spurred the latest evolution. The future of performance art, and how it’s history will be viewed, is forever uncertain, but Abramović’s position within it as a key player is, for now, ironclad.
Marina Abramović is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 1st January 2024
