It seems that most of the things I discover on the internet start off from Tumblr. Last year, I discovered Marina Abramović, a performance artist from Belgrave, Yugoslavia. Performance art combines visual and dramatic arts, and uses the human body and performance as an art piece. Abramović describes herself as the grandmother of performance art. She is known to push the boundaries of her own body, having endured pain, humiliation, danger, exhaustion, all for the quest to find emotional and spiritual transformation. Her work explores the relationship between the performer and the audience, and the limits of the human mind.
Let's get to it:
Abramović uses a razor blade to cut the shape of a star into her stomach in front of the
audience. She then cries and blots her cut with a towel while listening to a Russian
folk song. After that, she kneels on a block of ice and starts whipping herself. Then she eats a spoonful of honey and drinks a glass red wine. She repeats this sequence of events in various order until midnight. Remember, this was all performed in front of an audience.
This one is called Breathing In/Breathing Out. Abramović and her partner, Ulay (both in performance art and relationship-wise) connected their mouths together and started inhaling and exhaling. Seventeen minutes later, they fell unconscious after inhaling too much carbon dioxide.
Abramović lived 12 days here, with no food, only water.
Best known for this work entitled Rhythm 0, Abramović stands in the room, with 72 objects lined up on the table. These objects range from tools that give her pleasure, such as a rose, a feather, honey, to those that could potentially harm her, like a whip, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. She had to passively stand there for 6 hours as people manipulated her body, clothes, and used the objects against her. “What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they can
kill you. I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck
rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and
another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly
6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the
audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”
The entrance to one of her exhibitions; two performers stand completely nude in a doorway. So people have to choose either to squeeze inside facing the naked man, or facing the naked woman.
This is the mother of all breakups. After years of being together and collaborating, Abramović and Ulay decide to end their relationship. Both started at either end of the Great Wall of China. “That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi Desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye." And to think, kids these days just text 'we r over'.
This 2010 piece is called The Artist Is Present, performed in MoMa. For a total of 700 hours, Abramović sits in silence in front of random strangers for a few minutes as they stare at each other. She closes her eyes after the guest leaves, then opens them only when another guest has sat down. Many people cried from sitting across from her. There's even a blog dedicated to the tears of the museum guests. After years of being apart, Ulay showed up and sat in front of her. You can see their reunion here (you can skip to 1:15 to see him).
The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you.
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