“I am going to make sure that after this lecture, every single person in this audience will know what performance means. I also promise, I will not bore you,” Marina Abramović said at the beginning of a talk on the history of performance art and her legacy, the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), on Tuesday evening at the Kochi Muziris Biennale.
“But first, I want to bring you all to the present. The here and now.”
Sitting atop a stage and dressed in flowing white silk pants and a long shirt, she directed her audience of nearly 500 to uncross their legs, close their eyes and breathe to 12 slow counts. Everyone readily complied. “Welcome to the present. And now we begin,” she smiled.
Over the course of the following two hours, the 79-year-old Yugoslavian artist, who made mainstream collectors and gallerists sit up and take notice of performance art, showed video clips of some of other well-known performance art pieces to emerge from Europe, North and South America and Australia in the 20th century, videos of disturbing performances by the likes of Chris Burden and Mike Parr, long durational pieces like the year-long works by Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh, and emotionally charged clips of dance legend Pina Bausch and Vito Acconci, credited for using his body and story-telling, flowed into contemporary performance works by Indonesian Melati Suryodarmo and the Turkish-German Nezakat Ekici.
Interspersed among these clips, Abramović also showed some clips of her renowned performances, including Rest Energy (1980) and The Lovers (1988), where she and her then partner Frank Uwe Laysiepen (or, simply, Ulay), whom she met in the mid-1970s and with whom she went on to make art for the next 12 years.
These works, Abramović said, show that performance is not theatre, because it is not rehearsed, nor is it like dance, because it is not choreographed. “It is the most immaterial art, and it is the most real,” she said.
The audience winced as they watched many of these clips.
Burden, an American artist, nailed himself to a car, like a modern-day god. Parr, an Australian performance artist, lit a string of firecrackers looped around his calves. In Rest Energy, we hear the heartbeats of Abramović and Ulay grow louder as they hold a bow and arrow; the arrow, held by Ulay, is pointed towards Marina’s chest, while she holds the string taut.
Art is meant to be disturbing, Abramović said. “Art has to do many things – it must predict the future, it must lift the human spirit, but it must also make a comment on what is happening in the world.”
In her 62 years of practice, the Serbian conceptual artist, who was born in communist Yugoslavia, has performed several disturbing pieces of work that not only pushed her limits of physical endurance, but also made her face fear and the possibility of death.
One of her very first works, titled Rhythm 10, was based on a drinking game played by peasants that involved spreading the fingers out on a wooden table and stabbing down a knife in the spaces between the fingers. Each time they missed or cut themselves, they would take another drink. The drunker they got, the more likely they were to stab themselves.
“Like Russian roulette, it is a game of bravery and foolishness and despair and darkness—the perfect Slavic game,” Abramović described in her 2016 autobiography, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir. In her version, she tape recorded herself as she stabbed between her fingers with increasing speed. Then, played the tape and began stabbing the space between her fingers again, this time to the rhythm of the first recording. Finally, she played the two recordings simultaneously, as her fingers oozed blood.
As the audience applauded wildly, she knew she had found her medium of art. She would soon stop painting altogether — though she was a trained painter — and focus all her artistic practice on performance.
“I had experienced absolute freedom—had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.”
Abramović constantly put her body on the line, sometimes even losing consciousness on stage. In a memorable 1974 performance in Naples titled Rhythm 0, she laid out 72 objects, from a rose to a gun, and invited the audience to do anything to her using any of these objects.
Someone stuck pins into her. Another slowly poured a glass of water over her head. A third cut her neck with a knife and sucked the blood — a scar that she still bears. One man loaded the pistol and placed it in her right hand, moving it towards her neck. He was stopped before he pressed the trigger.
Over time, Abramović ’s use of her body turned into a participatory exercise, where she invited viewers to join her in making the work.
In 2010, for three months, she sat on a chair every day for eight hours at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, inviting participants to sit in silence before her. To prepare for this gruelling performance, she gave up eating lunch and drank water only at night for a whole year ahead of the opening.
Her mental and physical training, she said at a media interaction earlier on Thursday, began during her visits to India starting from the late 1970s.
“When I started performing, the most important thing for me was to find the limits of my physical body. There are three things that humans are scared of: pain, suffering and their mortality. So what I was doing was taking my fears and staging them in front of the audience — to be a mirror to them, and show them that if I can do it, then you can do it yourself. Later, over time, I realised that it is not enough for me to do it. I have to teach you how to make that journey for yourself.”
In 2012, she started MAI to teach the Abramović Method, devised by the artist, which begins by depriving the body of food and technology for a period to help the artist connect with their own spirit.
Sufism and the teachings of Buddha have played an important role in shaping her emotional landscape.
To date, Abramović regularly visits Ayurveda centres and attends Vipassana sessions — indeed, she plans to go on a three-week retreat in Kerala immediately after the biennale.
“There is so much knowledge that India has to give to the world — on concentration, being present, being in the moment,” she said. “India is where I come to heal, and to keep my brain and blood pressure under control.”
