Marina Abramović @ MoMA

[recommended reading: the full article in the current, March 8, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. Abstract below.]

Profiles
Walking Through Walls
Marina Abramović’s performance art.
by Judith Thurman

ABSTRACT: PROFILE of performance artist Marina Abramović.

Last August, Abramović invited the writer to observe a five-day retreat that she held at her home in the Hudson Valley. The retreat was an intensive workshop in hygiene and movement that Abramović calls “Cleaning the House.” The participants were thirty-two of the thirty-nine mostly young men and women whom she had chosen to participate in a full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present.” They will be reënacting five of the approximately ninety pieces she has created since 1969, including three that were originally performed with the German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), her former lover and collaborator. Abramović’s career, now in its fifth decade of self-reinvention, falls into three periods: before, with, and after Ulay. Abramović and Ulay made art symbiotically for twelve nomadic years, from 1976 to 1988. “It is very important to understand how much Marina invests in her artistic career, it being her life,” Ulay wrote. Describes their last performance together, in which they walked toward each other along thousands of miles of the Great Wall of China. After three months, they met in the middle and said goodbye. “The Artist Is Present” will be the longest durational work ever mounted in a museum. Members of the audience may participate by sitting in an empty chair directly opposite Abramović’s. She is hoping for an “emotional connection with anyone who wants to look at me for however long.” Describes an Abramović performance in 1974 in which the audience intervened to save her life after she lost consciousness inside a burning star. Tells about Abramović’s childhood in Yugoslavia. Her parents held high positions in Marshal Tito’s government. Mentions two recent books: “When Marina Abramović Dies” (M.I.T.; $27.95) by James Westcott and “Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramović and Ulay, Together and Apart”; (McPherson; $27) by Thomas McEvilley. Describes the effect that the self-immolation of the Vietnamese Monk Thich Quang Duc had on Abramović and other performance artists. Most of Abramović’s peers among the pioneers of what might be called “ordealism,” to distinguish it from tamer or more cerebral forms of performance art, have long since retired from their harrowing vocation, and some died young. Abramović has been a prominent target for the purists. Even Ulay recently remarked, “I don’t believe in these performance ‘revivals.’” Vito Acconci told the writer, “Marina now seems to want to make performance teachable and repeatable, but then I don’t understand what separates it from theatre.” (In keeping with his principles, however, he lets things go. He gave Abramović permission to reperform a version of “Seedbed,” his masturbation epic, as part of a show at the Guggenheim five years ago.) Writer attends Abramović’s sixty-third birthday dinner. Other guests included David Blaine, Laurie Anderson, and Antony Hegarty.