Marina Abramovic Repeats: Pain,
Art, and Theater
By Marla Carlson
The Lips of Thomas
(Seven Easy Pieces)
By Marina Abramovic
Guggenheim Museum
(closed)
I was about fifteen minutes late for the start
of Marina Abramovic's November 15, 2005, appearance at the Guggenheim
Museum, a re-performance of her 1975 body-art action, The Lips of
Thomas. She was using a razor blade to cut the first line of a
five-pointed star drawn on her stomach. The place was packed. Abramovic,
naked, was installed on a round platform in the middle of the rotunda.
Spectators filled the floor in front of her and lined the first few
spirals of the museum's ramp, with a scattering higher up. Although
one could safely assume that those on the floor had come to see Abramovic,
at least some of the others must have been caught on their descent from
the museum's concurrent Russia! exhibit.
When the first cut was complete, Abramovic blotted
it with a white cloth. Slipping her feet into boots that waited nearby,
putting on a military cap, and picking up a heavy wooden staff, she
stood and cried, her belly heaving, tears streaming down her cheeks
as she, and we, listened to a Russian folk song. She lay down on blocks
of ice arranged in the shape of a cross, her body shaking; then knelt
on the floor and whipped herself; finally sat at the table and slowly
ate a spoonful of honey and took a sip of red wine.
Abramovic repeated these actions, varying the
sequence, until midnight. A metronome ticked away. She seemed to be
pacing herself. In 1975, she had performed the actions in the sequence
described in the program: she ate a kilo of honey, drank a liter of
red wine, broke the wine glass with her right hand, cut the star on
her stomach, whipped herself until she no longer felt pain, and then
lay down on the ice. Thirty years ago, the spectators (in a gallery,
not a museum) ended the piece by removing the ice after 30 minutes.
Some of them were surely familiar with Abramovic's earlier Rhythm series,
from which she required rescue more than once, and with other actions
she had performed that same year: Art Must Be Beautiful. Artist
Must be Beautiful (in which she brushed her hair simultaneously
with a metal brush and metal comb until her face and hair were damaged);
Role Exchange (she exchanged places for four hours with an
Amsterdam prostitute); Freeing the Voice (she lay on the floor
with her head tilted back and screamed for three hours, stopping when
she lost her voice); Freeing the Memory (she free-associated
until no more words came to her); and Freeing the Body (she
wrapped her head in a black scarf and moved to a drumbeat for eight
hours, stopping when she collapsed).
Given the explicit feminist orientation of Artist
Must Be Beautiful and Role Exchange, and the theme of
a painful liberation from constraints and social conditioning in the
other three actions, in 1975 one might have reasonably read The
Lips of Thomas as a ritual escape from a repressive culture. The
Christian references in the flagellation and the cross of ice are obvious,
and some spectators might recognize the honey and wine as elements of
Orthodox ritual. The star reads as a symbol of Yugoslavia's Communist
regime. Abramovic uses her body to manifest sources of conflict and
suffering, and spectators invest these cultural traces with unpredictable
personal significance. Many are no doubt oblivious to the symbolism
and register only the piece's ritualistic aura.
The event was a test of endurance for spectators
as well as for the artist. Each person had to decide when to leave,
whether to stay through the boredom and the pain of standing for hours
or sitting, unsupported, on the floor. Aside from the half-hour I spent
(with some guilty feelings) in the museum café, I stayed with Abramovic
until midnight. Placing real physical pain within an aesthetic framework
throws the spectator's ethical relation to the spectacle into question.
My own engagement with painful performance is born of a desire to understand
what happens when we watch such spectacles and why we do so. Yet I remain
disturbed by my interest and reluctant to look: I cannot ask another
person to injure herself in order to observe my own response. I can
ask someone to play Ophelia for me or to dance Giselle, but how can
I ask her to slice her skin, even if I know that she is a "cutter"?
This was certainly no "command" performance undertaken for me, but Abramovic
solicits her audience's emotional engagement by offering up her pain.
I talked to other people who felt, as I did, that we owed it to her
to stay. In fact, she has defined the exchange of energy with her audience
as her primary interest since the late 1990s, and for long intervals
between actions, she simply gazed out at us. Aside from this sense of
responsibility, I also wanted to see what would change for me, and for
her, over the course of seven hours.
When the time was up and the guards began trying
to empty the museum, the still sizable audience applauded for perhaps
ten minutes. As the night went on, each variety of action took on a
different valence: the wine and honey seemed to nurture and soothe her,
the flagellation to purge, in contrast to the purely passive ordeal
of lying on the ice. Abramovic eventually stopped jerking around on
the ice and crying out as she lay down on it. By 8:00, however, she
continued to shiver as she sat at the table after lying on the ice,
her body trying hard to warm up. After whipping herself, to which she
continued to react vocally, she looked intent, energized, powerful.
The flagellation seemed to me like an athletic event. Perhaps because
I knew The Lips of Thomas so well as a piece of body-art history,
I watched the cutting action unmoved. But the space became very quiet
at those points, no movement, little whispering. On the third cut, someone
called out, "you don't have to do it again." Obviously others were more
disturbed by it than I, and many turned away from the flagellation.
I had a strong desire to read Abramovic's affect
throughout, but her reaction to the ordeals seemed largely physical.
Her face remained impassive as she cut her stomach, in sharp contrast
to her weeping during the "Young Communist" segment, which was not part
of the 1975 action. In addition to wearing the cap and boots this time,
which evoked her Eastern Bloc upbringing, she sometimes opened out the
cloth with which she blotted the cuts on her stomach and tied it to
the staff, waving it as a flag. These accessories and the music suggested
an association between her tears and the pain of memory, clearly marking
Abramovic's cross-over from the visual art world into a performance
genre more closely allied with theater. The entire week-long event at
the Guggenheim smacked of theater, a fact that met with distaste from
some fans of conceptual art.
During the week, Abramovic also re-performed
Bruce Naumann's Body Pressure (1974), Vito Acconci's Seedbed
(1972), VALIE EXPORT's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969),
Gina Pane's The Conditioning (1973), and Joseph Beuys's How
to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). The museum provided
a program with the name of each night's piece, the originating artist,
its performance location and date, the original duration of each event,
and a statement by the originating artist. In a letter to the New
York Times, the performance artist and sculptor Tom Marioni objected
that Abramovic thus became an actress, not an artist. Clearly this distinction
remains important to Marioni and to Chris Burden, who would not cooperate
with the project. To me, the more interesting point is that Abramovic
herself has been pointedly blurring this line for fifteen years. In
the mid-1990s, she told Beatrix Ruf and Hans-Peter von Däniken: "In
the seventies, the theater was the enemy of performance artists. It
was considered a fake, a staged experience. In the nineties now, my
attitude has changed completely.… The audience who now come to the theater
to see my work see both a stage-play and a performance."
Abramovic first re-performed The Lips of
Thomas in European and American theatres and opera houses in 1993
as part of a work called Biography, which used a recorded autobiographical
narrative to contextualize the brief re-enactment of many of her early
art actions. The elements of The Lips of Thomas that she chose
to include, the star-cutting and the flagellation, referred not only
to her personal history but also to an opposition between God and the
state upon which she focused in telling that history: Her mother was
an atheist and partisan, her father a communist, and both parents participated
in Yugoslavia's Communist Revolution. Interestingly enough, her maternal
grandfather was a Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, making her childhood
a mixture of military discipline at home and religious life with her
grandmother. By re-inscribing these symbols with the details of her
personal biography, Biography made them both concrete and mutable.
The Guggenheim version replaced the narrative with costume, props, and
the song "Slavic Souls," sung in Russian with a xeroxed translation
available at the entrance desk. The actions thus hovered between theatre
and anti-theatrical body art. There was no question of the artist losing
control. And like the proscenium stage configuration that separated
Abramovic from her audience when she performed Biography, security
precautions at the museum eliminated the ready access to the performer's
body that was part of her gallery settings in the 1970s. There was no
possibility for spectators to end the action by "rescuing" her and no
danger of provoking that sort of intervention.
More than anything else, Abramovic's re-performed
body art actions served this time as icons for spectators familiar with
her work. Seven Easy Pieces, dedicated to Susan Sontag and
curated by Nancy Spector and Jennifer Blessing, provided a most unusual
opportunity to encounter this kind of work in the flesh. For all its
visceral impact, body art is always mediated, if not by recordings and
reports then at least by the framework within which it is performed.
Consider the title of this piece, the meaning
of which is hardly self-evident. Because I have never come across an
explanation or even a discussion, I initially put the title together
with the sacrificial imagery and thought of "Doubting Thomas," who finds
proof of the resurrection in touching the lips of Christ's wound. I
then added in Abramovic's stated desire to produce gaps in her audience's
understanding: She told Hans Ulrich Obrist that her performances, like
the sculptural objects that she creates, are designed to create for
the spectators "some kind of mental gap so that they can't explain it
rationally. They will look for tricks, and when they can't find the
trick . . . their knowledge . . . will have to collapse . . ." and "they
will have a completely different way of seeing things." I can't say
that the performance caused my knowledge to collapse, but Abramovic's
aim makes sense of her title. The Lips of Thomas positions
her body and its sensations, pain most particularly, at the center of
a mystified circle, available for perception but defying rational comprehension.
Yet I suspect that she had in mind a different Thomas; that is, St.
Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica addresses the question
of whether God should be praised with the lips. After noting all the
scriptural arguments for and against verbal devotions, Aquinas answers
that we praise God with our lips to arouse our own devotion and that
of other people, but that "it profits one nothing to praise with the
lips if one praise not with the heart." Read in this context, Abramovic's
wordless Lips of Thomas pulls her heart back and forth between
her family's incompatible Christian and Communist devotional practices.
I don't know how far other members of Abramovic's
audience at the Guggenheim went to interpret her title, or how much
they knew about her life and work. But certainly everyone was aware
that she was re-performing art actions that had originally been performed
some 30 years ago in a different context. To be a member of the audience
for conceptual art typically entails "consuming" the concepts behind
the events, and a significant part of the ultimate "audience" for such
events never witnesses them. Many, in fact, never even see photos or
videos. Word of mouth has an important impact, for both the consumers
and the performers. Abramovic, for example, told Janet Kaplan that she
heard as a young artist in Yugoslavia that Chris Burden was arrested
after being crucified on a Volkswagen that was driven around Los Angeles.
In fact, Burden's Trans-fixed (1972) was much less dramatic:
after a doctor affixed Burden to the car with nails, a few friends pushed
it out of the garage, took the picture, and pushed it back in. Yet the
story that Abramovic heard in Yugoslavia influenced the challenges that
she set herself during the mid-1970s and sparked her desire to re-perform
the performances of other artists--a desire finally fulfilled at the
Guggenheim in 2005. Knowing all this, one cannot help wondering what
stories and desires Seven Easy Pieces will eventually spawn.