Marina Abramovic: When performance meets commerce

In Spring 2024 (March – July), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam exhibited a retrospective of the legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic. In videos, photos, objects and live performances an overview of Abramovic’s oeuvre from her early works until the present was shown. Abramovic was born in 1946 in Belgrade (Serbia, former Yugoslavia), under the Communist government led by Tito. She studied at Belgrade’s Academy of Fine Arts and started collaborating with the German artist Ulay (1943-2020), who was also her lover until they broke up in 1988. Abramovic is known from her ground-breaking performances, exploring the limits of her body and playing with the relationship between performer and audience. Active for 50 years, she considers herself as the ‘grandmother of performance art’ (Abramovic, 2016; Stiles et al., 2008). 

Witnesses of performances

On Wednesday, March 20, 2024, I visited the exhibition with 15 students who had taken part in my course ‘Performance: Ritual, Art and the Body’, part of the MA Culture Studies at Tilburg University. In this course, we explored and discussed some of Abramovic’s performances: Rhythm 0 (1974), Lips of Thomas (1975) and The Artist is Present (2010). The focus in the course was on the concepts of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ (Schechner, 2006). Abramovic’s works are a good example of the transformation of the subject-object relationship that takes place while watching the performance. In the performance, Abramovic uses her own body, pushing it to its limits, leading to disgust, revulsion, disengagement or even intervention by the audience. In Lips of Thomas, for example, she flagellates her back, while being fully naked, raising bloody welts. Afterwards, she lays down on a cross made of blocks of ice, while being heated by an electric radiator hanging from the ceiling. The heat triggers further bleeding. After about 30 minutes, some members of the audience can’t no longer bear this ‘torture’ and remove her from the ice cross (Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 11). Here, we witness the transformation, comparing this performance to a regular play like Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Instead of a work of art that exists independently of the artist and the audience, Abramovic creates an event that involves everyone present, transforming the audience (or at least some members of the audience) into co-subjects (Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 17).

For my students, the exhibition was surely an addition to the course. What we discussed in class was shown in the museum and they learned too about performances that we had not discussed in class. In class, we can’t participate in the performance as such, so we are limited to photos, short videos and reports. The disadvantage of studying only the remnants or witnesses of a performance is the lack of a physical, embodied experience and the long duration of the live performance. The same disadvantage occurred in the exhibition, and I wonder: did the photos, videos and material objects evoke something of the experience of the real performance? Or did Abramovic, in showing more or less static witnesses of her performances go against her own principles: “Performance is very temporary, it comes and goes”, she stated. Here, in the Stedelijk Museum, there were no performances, there were only signs.

Live performances

Next to the signs referring to the once live performances, there were some real live performances during the days of the exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum. Not performed by Abramovic herself, but by artists who were trained by her. One of the live performances was Imponderabilia, for the first time performed in 1977 in Bologna by Abramovic and Ulay. In this performance, two performers are standing naked in the entrance of the main exhibition room, facing each other. The public entering the room has to pass sideways through the small space between the performers. Each person passing has to choose which one to face: the male or the female performer. Some of my students chose to look for an alternative entrance, and the museum made one available to give people a choice not to take part in the performance. Others just passed the doorway, shy or with a big smile. Some students were shocked, hesitated, waited for a long time and eventually overcame their trepidation and went in at last, feeling proud that they had pushed their own limits.

Abramovic plays with rules and forces the visitors into behavior that would be considered inappropriate in other situations

It seems that it was the museum’s choice to offer an alternative entrance, probably to avoid nasty discussions in a time much more prudish than the 1970s. Abramovic plays with rules in this performance and forces the visitors into behavior that would be considered inappropriate in other situations. By providing an alternative entrance, the museum takes the sting out of the performance and turns it into something playful. I wonder why Abramovic allowed the museum to offer the alternative. The answer might be that she herself transformed: from the angry, uncompromising artist she once was into the mild grandmother of performance art who enjoys the recognition of her work in a prestigious retrospective exhibition. At the opening of the exhibition, Abramovic said: “I have worked all my life to make performance mainstream. Now we finally got there. Why should I still want to die?”

Commerce

In a review of the exhibition in the daily newspaper Het Parool (16 March 2024), Edo Dijksterhuis refers to the exhibition as a “smoothed-out retrospective” (in Dutch: gladgestreken retrospectief), lacking the intensity of the earlier performances. Abramovic now is a model, an approach with her own training center and even her own cosmetics. She is a product that can be commodified and she allows that this happens. And yet, I enjoyed visiting the exhibition with my students, recognizing many of the performances from studying them and reading about them. It brought me closer to her work. Even in a commercial setting, her work is still worth visiting.

References

Abramovic, M. (2016). Walk through walls: a memoir. Penguin.

Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The transformative power of performance: a new aesthetics. Routledge.

Schechner, R. (2006). Performance studies. An introduction (second ed.). Routledge.

Stiles, K., Biesenbach, K., & Iles, C. (2008). Marina Abramović. Phaidon.