Conversations with Marina Abramovic

Informal discussion with the performance artist for GSD students, led by Sanford Kwinter.



Jeffrey Brown talks to performance artist Marina Abramovic, who was the subject of a highly popular retrospective last year at New York's Museum of Modern Art.



The Marriage Proposal

Amir Baradaran, Act I: Bodies and Wedding, On Marina Abramovic's The artist is present.



From the artist website: "Amir Baradaran (b. 1977) is a New York-based media and performance artist. Born in Tehran and raised in Montreal, Amir Baradaran’s experience in academia and activism led him to pursue his artistic practice. Working in a variety of mediums, Baradaran engages in the realm of speculative, participatory public experiences through the exploration of notions of technology, authorship and identity."

In this performance, he makes her laugh!

Looper

We were talking about this movie for a little bit today.  I just thought I'd post the trailer.

Kate Gilmore

A link to Kate Gilmore's work. Check it out.

Orlan and Narcissism

Narcissism is important.

Clown Torture: Bruce Nauman

Clown Torture

Nauman Studio Performances

Studio Performances

Bridging the gap - Accounci review

Accounci once said, "if I specialize in a medium, I would be fixing a ground for myself, a ground I would have to be digging myself out of, constantly, as one medium was substituted for another - so, then instead of turning toward 'ground' I would shift my attention and turn to 'instrument,' I would focus on my self as the instrument that acted on whatever ground was available. "

He has always seen art as an instrument connecting the artists and the audiences. In his infamous piece Undertone and Seedbed, where he utilize master-bate to create a situation of reciprocal interchange between the artist and audiences.

I found the piece above quite shocking and disturbing. It is called "Prying". When I watch it, the feeling of "prying" just never go away.

This piece is a recent work of him. He is still dedicated to building the connection between the people inside the art to people outside the art. The architecture is a examplary combination of private circumstances and public circumstances.

The Extremes of Art

I was fascinated with reading about Nauman's issues of identity and the idea of human extremes. Nauman clearly wanted to get a reaction out of his audience; most likely a reaction of incredible discomfort and emotional pain. "Clown Torture" is seemingly barbaric and cruel in its nature- it's random and confusing but also painful to watch. We don't know why the clown is screaming, "No, no, no" and "I'm sorry, I'm sorry", but we're captivated anyway because we feel something from such sorrow and helplessness. It's like a bad car crash that we just can't look away from, and I think that kind of ideology is exactly what Nauman was going for in his work. In Nauman's "Slow Angle Walk", it's both frustrating and slightly unnerving to watch a man struggle to walk around a studio. Nauman used his audience to make his work seem intense and provocative. By arousing his audience's emotions through awkward and uncomfortable settings, his art becomes something much bigger than simply what it appears on screen. He's evoking a message in each piece of his art, a message that can be interpreted differently by anyone who watches his work.

This video, titled "Natural Beauty", by Dutch artists Lernert and Sander, is an experiment in make-up. What they did was apply 365 layers of make-up on a supermodel. The end result is pretty horrific. This video can be interpreted in various ways- it can be interpreted as a message on the dangers of how many chemicals we put on our face in a year, or it can be a message on society's twisted views of what is beautiful and what is not. However you choose to interpret it doesn't matter so long as you interpret something and so long as you feel something from watching it. This video reminded me of Nauman's work because I felt very uncomfortable while watching a woman placed under such an "extreme" circumstance, as the subjects of Nauman's films are, as well. I couldn't exactly figure out why it was making me squirm, but I think it might have been imagining myself in that woman's position and having to sit through all of those layers of make-up smothered all over my face. It's definitely a provocative piece, and it's certainly intended to make viewers feel uncomfortable, otherwise I don't think the video would have any meaning, and viewers would really gain nothing from watching it. Sometimes, the only way to truly get your point across is to make your audience extremely uncomfortable, which is what I believe Nauman tried getting across in his videos on identity and behavior. Overall, though we don't typically view the process of applying make-up as an extreme behavior, I think this video does an excellent job of portraying the little things that we go through, every day, to make ourselves look better, and how those little things eventually add up into something extreme and undesirable.

Media and Performance

After watching videos and listening interviews of several artists who are significant to this movement, I understand that Performance is a combination of all art manifestations. Performance could include video, sound, canvas, dance, or acting among others. However, Performance is always different to any other art expression. It’s different because it is related to time, the moment when it is performed, the ambient who surrounds the action, and the people who interact with the artist. According to Marina Abromovic, Performance is about living the present, and also writing the future. To me, it is kind of breaking rules, the mold, and the unexpected far from the traditional way of thinking. Performance is about being spontaneous.

Sherin Neshat, an Iranian activist, has experimented with film, sound and video. Her performances and work are full of emotions and beauty. “The work of Neshat addresses the social, political and psychological dimensions of women's experience in contemporary Islamic societies.” Below it is her powerful film called “Turbulent”, where two Muslim singers – male and female- are presented in different screens to the audience. Remark of the gender division in the Iranian culture. In the presentation of the films, one screen is in front of the other one, so the viewer is forced to turn his head from one screen to the other one becoming part of the performance at some point.



The second piece its a photograph entitled “I am its secret” from Neshat’s collection of photographs "Women of Allah”.

Keenan's response to Chapter 1

According to Allan Kaprow, “Pollock’s near destruction of this tradition [painting] may well be a return to the point where art was more actively involved in ritual, magic , life.” Performance art seems to represent an attempt to get back to the source of expression—the human body—by circumventing the traditions set up by theatre, sculpture, painting, and other conventional mediums. Vito Acconci said, “If Minimalism was so great, what could I do? ... I had to reveal the source.” Acconci’s vision of minimalism in performance art was to eliminate all but the human process.

 In many of the works displayed in this chapter, this human process took the form of a ritual. Much like a shaman might perform a ritual to commune with the spirit world, Joan Jonas performed rituals in her piece, Funnel, which were “based on her interest of the native Americans.” She wore long blue robes and carried a magician’s funnel hat. She imagined herself as “an electronic sorceress, conjuring the images.”

 In addition to Jonas’s Funnel, Carolee Schneemann’s Eye Body, “recreate[s] mythical goddess imagery”; Gina Pane’s Le corps pressenti and Pier Marton’s Performance for Video both feature the artist physically harming his or herself (slashing her toes, and beating himself with a chair, respectively), which could be seen a sort of sacrifice to the art; and Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture features a clown being punished while repeating, “No, no, no” and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” These pieces all bring ritualistic qualities into the performance. By focusing the performance on the visceral human process, and by rejecting the built-up conventions of traditional art, these pieces function as a throwback to rituals of old as the original performance art.

 While many of the performance pieces in this chapter emulate rituals, they also utilize new technology. “Sound wizard” Billy Kluver used projection and computer generated soundscapes in his collaborations with other artists; Robert Whitman’s Prune Flat featured performers interacting the filmed images of themselves projected onto screens behind them. In a magical sleight of hand, the present performer interacts with his or her past self. Here, the minimalist human process meets illusory, and seemingly magical, new technology.


Can these examples of performance art be considered rituals, or do they resemble rituals only superficially? Jonas may see herself as “conjuring images”, but isn’t she aware that it’s all an illusion for the audience? Does the use of illusory technology contribute to the determination of whether these performances are rituals or just imitations? And finally, do these pieces fail to get to the heart of the minimalistic human process by merely imitating rituals themselves?

Performance Art and Capturing Reality

On page 48 of Michael Rush’s New Media in Late 20^th Century Art, Rush says “The view that even ordinary movements could be considered art owed something to choreographer Meredith Monk.”  After watching numerous Hitchcock films for one of my film classes, I’ve started to wonder when cinema decided to attempt to mimic normal human behavior and cast away the exaggerated acting style that can be found in many of the films from the 40’s and 50’s.  After reading this line I started to wonder if this shift in filmmaking technique was due to the influence of performance art. 

When I began to research performance art, I found that it is considered “the antithesis to theater.”  Because early film was heavily influenced by theater, where body movements and speech have to be exaggerated in order to successfully communicate to a large live audience, it seems that performance art played a large part in showing that video art does not have to be bound by the rules of the stage.  I have posted an example of performance art that was contained within the Academy Award winning film American Beauty.  This clip not only shows the influence that performance art had on cinema, but I believe it also embodies the quote by Rush that even ordinary movements can be considered art.

The "Viewer's Responsibility"

In the excerpt we read on intermedia, what struck me the most - and what seemed most relevant to performance art - was the statement that "art assumes its being only in the interpretive act" (70). Performance art can be considered part of "intermedia" because it often involves types of movement or dance, some video aspect, or other artistic elements. The artist "performing" for us becomes the art, and all of their tools are things we would normally settle for calling art (video, painting, sculpture, dance etc.).

Something the author of this piece said was that "intermedia only exists or comes into being as such through the interaction between objective elements and the subjectivity of the viewer" (70). This, and seeing some of her other work on the blog,  made me think of Marina Abramovic's latest installation "The Artist is Present." In this she sits in the middle of a plain room, on a plain chair at a plan table. A participant sits across from her and she simply looks at them for a certain amount of time.

Clip demonstrating how the piece works

This kind of art demonstrates how important the attitude is that the viewer brings to the experience. Objectively, Abramovic is simply sitting there and looking at you. There's no other explicit meaning besides that. But people can't help but feel something when they're put into a situation where there's nothing to do but look back at someone, silently. Various kinds of people would feel various types of reactions from this experience. Partially, I think it's in our nature to find meaning in anything so when we're faced with art like this our minds start working to construct something out of it - something that is inevitably tied intimately to us and our personalities and experiences. The essay excerpt explained that the "viewer has no choice but to construct meanings on his or her own out of the interactions in consciousness between different elements; there are no given meanings... the viewer must assume responsibility for those meanings, and he or she is aware of having to assume such responsibility" (70). I don't know if every viewer is aware of this responsibility they take on, but I definitely feel like it's there - we construct the meanings for ourselves and have to face what meanings we create, and what they could mean to us - because Abramovic is simply sitting there, while we subconsciously volunteer to do the heavy lifting.

Sound in Performance

Rush describes the element of play in detail, saying that "play in art signifies performative enactment through movement." He also goes on to say that "Movement is the key to play."
I agree that movement has to do a lot with the concept of play in intermedia art. In fact, the reason video is so well-used is because it is one of the best ways to capture movement. Most performance pieces are based heavily on movement, and thus, video becomes a natural pairing with performance. This can be seen in many of the performance pieces on this blog. They rely heavily on movement and some of them are impossible without it. The piece "Walking in an Exaggerated Manner" is a piece based solely on the person's strange movement around a square. There is nothing to the piece without the movement. There is no single shot or moment that summarizes the whole performance, and therefore, the video format is necessary.
However, I also think sound has a big role to play in performance art. Sometimes, in performance art, it is not the movement that creates the art, but the sound. It is like imagining an orchestra with no sound. The passion of the players can be seen in the motion and their touch, but half the beauty is in the sound. This can be seen in the video "I am not a girl who misses much". Yes, the girl's movements are very exaggerated and the blurred quality of the video gives a lot of the feelings of the video; however, the sound of the girl saying she doesn't miss much gives deeper meaning and emotion to the video. I almost think her voice and the sounds are what makes the video so dramatic.
Another performance video that relies heavily on sound is Bruce Nauman's Violin tuned D.E.A.D. In the whole video there is barely any movement at all. In fact, we cannot even see the player. However, the sound the violin makes is the whole performance. There would be no meaning to this piece without the sound of the untuned violin. The emotions we feel from this piece is from how the violin is played, not how the person is standing or moving. Therefore, I think sound (even sound that is not present) is an important part of the performance.