Marina Abramović is a Serbian performance artist. Her work explores therelationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, andthe possibilities of the mind.
Active for over four decades, Abramović hasbeen described as the "grandmother of performance art."
She pioneered anew notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusingon "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body."
Marina Abramović
The Artist Is Present
The Artist Is Present: March – May 2010
Abramović performing The Artist Is Present, Museum of Modern Art, March 2010
From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Abramović's work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA's history, curated by Klaus Biesenbach.
During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed The Artist Is Present, a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. Ulay made a surprise appearance at the opening night of the show.
Abramović ＆ Ouray
Transcendence
"Sit silently with the artist for a duration of your choosing"—so the instructions read on a small plaque in the second-floor atrium at The Museum of Modern Art.
Behind the plaque, a queue of visitors forms, eager to enter a large square space—demarcated only by tape on the floor—to sit down at a wooden table across from a dark-haired woman in a navy-blue dress that conceals every part of her body save her face and her hands.
Rhythm 10, 1973
In her first performance in Edinburgh in 1973, Abramović explored elements of ritual and gesture. Making use of twenty knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the Russian game, in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of one's hand.
Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had set up, and record the operation. After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging past and present.
She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body – the pain and the sounds of the stabbing; the double sounds from the history and the replication. With this piece, Abramović began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. "Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do."
Rhythm 5, 1974
In this performance, Abramović sought to re-evoke the energy of extreme bodily pain, using a large petroleum-drenched star, which the artist lit on fire at the start of the performance. Standing outside the star, Abramović cut her nails, toenails, and hair. When finished with each, she threw the clippings into the flames, creating a burst of light each time. Burning the communist five-pointed star represented a physical and mental purification, while also addressing the political traditions of her past. In the final act of purification, Abramović leapt across the flames, propelling herself into the center of the large star. Due to the light and smoke given off by the fire, the observing audience did not realize that, once inside the star, the artist had lost consciousness from lack of oxygen. Some members of the audience realized what had occurred only when the flames came very near to her body and she remained inert. A doctor and several members of the audience intervened and extricated her from the star.
Cleaning the Mirror, 1995
Cleaning the Mirror consisted of five monitors playing footage in which Abramović scrubs a grimy human skeleton in her lap. She vigorously brushes the different parts of the skeleton with soapy water. Each monitor is dedicated to one part of the skeleton: the head, the pelvis, the ribs, the hands, and the feet. Each video is filmed with its own sound, creating an overlap. As the skeleton becomes cleaner, Abramović becomes covered in the grayish dirt that was once covering the skeleton. This three-hour performance is filled with metaphors of the Tibetan death rites that prepare disciples to become one with their own mortality. The piece consists of a three-piece series. Cleaning the Mirror #1 was performed at the Museum of Modern Art, consisting of three hours. Cleaning the Mirror #2 consists of 90 minutes performed at Oxford University. Cleaning the Mirror #3 was performed at Pitt Rivers Museum for five hours.
Spirit Cooking, 1996
Abramović worked with Jacob Samuel to produce a cookbook of "aphrodisiac recipes" called Spirit Cooking in 1996. These "recipes" were meant to be "evocative instructions for actions or for thoughts." For example, one of the recipes calls for "13,000 grams of jealousy," while another says to "mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk." The work was inspired by the popular belief that ghosts feed off intangible things like light, sound, and emotions.
In 1997, Abramović created a multimedia Spirit Cooking installation. This was originally installed in the Zerynthia Associazione per l'Arte Contemporanea in Rome, Italy and included white gallery walls with "enigmatically violent recipe instructions" painted in pig's blood. According to Alexxa Gotthardt, the work is "a comment on humanity's reliance on ritual to organize and legitimize our lives and contain our bodies."
Early Art works
Potential
《潜 能》
Immeasurable
《无量之物》
Joy does not teach us anything, but pain, suffering, and obstacles can transform us, make us better and stronger, and at the same time make us realize the importance of living in the present moment.
- Marina Abramovic
欢乐并不能教会我们什么，然而，痛楚、苦难和障碍却能转化我们，使我们变得更好、更强大，同时让我们认识到生活于当下时刻的至关重要。
——玛丽娜·阿布拉莫维奇
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