Dubbed the “grandmother of performance art”, Marina Abramović is one of the most talked-about contemporary artists. With a career spanning over four decades, she is more than an artist: she is a covetable and recognisable pop cultural brand. But why, despite enjoying a mass popularity, is her contemporary work often treated with scepticism?
Abramović frequently makes the headlines. She plans to charge herself with one million volts of electricity at her Royal Academy show in 2020. At her funeral, she wants to have three Marinas (one real body and two fake ones) buried in Belgrade, Amsterdam and New York — of course, no one would know where the real body is buried. “What happened to the money Marina Abramović raised for the OMA-designed Performance Art facility in New York?” asked ArtNet. “Marina Abramović made some pretty racist statements in her memoir,” declared The Cut. “Marina Abramović has transformed herself into a macaron” – ArtNet again. In 2013, the Marina Abramović Retirement Fund of America was founded as a joke in an attempt to raise money to stop the performance artist before it’s too late. The tone of commentary on Abramović’s work and persona often seems amused, ironic, perplexed and — from time to time — outright annoyed. Yet, why does she instigate these sort of reactions? Why are we annoyed with Marina Abramović? Looking at the trajectory of the artist’s career might offer some clues.
Abramović was born in Yugoslavia in 1946, to parents who were partisans and war heroes and raised their children with a military-style strictness. “Abramović, the artist” emerged in the 1970s, her early work a shocking, at times graphic exploration of the limits of the body and possibilities of the mind, as well as the politics of oppressive ideologies. In Lips of Thomas (1975), the artist used a razor blade to cut a shape of a star on her stomach, lay on block of ice and then whipped herself repeatedly. In Rhythm 2 (1974), she took a stimulant which caused her muscles to convulse uncontrollably, and then a sedative which made her catatonic. In the iconic Rhythm O (1974), Abramović placed 72 objects on a table, permitting visitors to use them on her in any way they chose.
Fast-forward to the present day, to the serene mountains in Japan and Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, where Abramović’s Dream House has been one of the invariable highlights since 2000. Located in a renovated farmhouse in the mountains, the artwork is designed for visitors to stay overnight, sleeping in a cupboard-like wooden bed with a crystal pillow, wearing pyjamas designed by the artist and recording their dreams the next morning in a special book. Dream House is a perfect insight into Abramović’s contemporary work: it’s an immersive meditation on the nature of time in the ever-accelerating flow of culture, but it’s also a fairly palatable experience – an art performance crossed with a designer hotel stay, if you like (the rates are 6300 Japanese Yen, or around 50 Euros, per night). The stark contrast between Abramović’s early work and Dream House is not only an insight into the evolution of her practice, but also an illustration of how in the 21st century performance has transformed from something unruly, strange and violent into a sellable experience.
Today, Marina Abramović is not merely an artist, but a visual myth. Despite the ephemeral nature of performance art, the pictures of the artist mid-performance — in a white robe surrounded by a pile of cow bones; sat back to back, tied together by the ponytail with her collaborator and lover Ulay; in a black dress, snakes furled around her neck — have undoubtedly endured, and are arguably more famous than the performances that birthed them. But, by far the most prolific of these is the image that emerged during Abramović’s retrospective, The Artist is Present, at Museum of Modern Art, when the artist spent 736 hours and 30 minutes sitting still and silent — her hair in a black braid, sporting a red dress and impenetrable gaze — as spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.
“You know what is interesting, after 40 years of people thinking you are insane and you should be put in a mental hospital, you finally actually get all of this acknowledgement. It takes such a long time to take it seriously,” Abramović said in a documentary which was produced after the show. And there’s no doubt that Abramović is somewhat of a martyr for her medium. In the 1970-80s, decades crucial for Abramović’s career, performance couldn’t really be sold — and the artist almost single-handedly changed that, suffering through ridicule and scepticism for doing what today is considered genius.
For all she’s achieved for the genre, however, not all performance art sells as well as hers, and not all is remembered — even Vito Acconci’s renowned 1972 work Seedbed and Gina Pane’s 1973 piece The Conditioning, which Abramović re-performed at the Guggenheim in 2005, are not nearly as famous as Abramović’s own output. The truth is, what really sells today is an artist’s brand, replete with merch and events — something that Abramović has undoubtably mastered to the point of penetrating pop culture (think: the parody of her work in Sex and the City, and the recent news that she will be parodied by Cate Blanchett in Season 3 of Documentary Now!). It should be addressed that in the time it took Abramović to attain brand status by cultivating a whole new language of performance art, she inspired successive generations of artists to such an extreme that she now looks like a copy of herself among other copies. The raw energy and unsettling originality of her early work is rarely remembered nowadays when her style of performance art is de rigueur and her “brand” has supplanted the shock and vigour of the art that made her name.
In the end, if we’re annoyed with Marina Abramović, it because we’re probably annoyed with the contemporary art world. Ruled by a combination of hype and free market, the art world is a commodifying machine which gradually turns even the most radical statements into desirable objects (or otherwise discards them). In the art world, visibility is ruled by the logic of popularity, which means whoever is more famous gets to have a voice (which was evident during the conversation around Abramović’s racist description of Aboriginal Australians in her upcoming memoirs). Lest we forget: in the art world, everyone gets bored easily.
Over the last few decades, Abramović has embraced her celebrity status and the links to the world of fashion and pop culture. The grand figure of an artist as a celebrity is nothing new: the entire history of art in the second half of the 20th century is littered with artistic egomaniacs who embraced the market. The only difference is that they were usually men. Abramović is judged for things that Jeff Koons could get away with, most likely because of his gender and the power this still wields in the art world. As someone who manages to be simultaneously inside and outside of the establishment, Abramović is a controversial figure. But maybe, like a truly great performance artist should be, she is just a reflection of the current era?