Marina Abramović_ exhaustive research

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“My good idea was to take over the body, in this case my own body. The body can offer you everything. It is both a microcosm and a macrocosm.” Marina Abramović.

This research into Marina Abramović's work and persona is almost like a reflection. Because of her variety of work and the among of creations she did over the last decades, I selected moments of interviews and articles that inform me about her work. What I researched wasn't necessarily directly guided to my project (extend)+ because I believe that this artist has the ability to say and make the audience reflect on many levels within one person or one piece of art. It was interesting, however, to research her art history to understand the idea of suffering or undergoing that she inflicted on herself and in a certain manner to others. When she allows herself to violate, she welcomes suffering and reflects it on others; the audience is now witness and unable to act. Her work, to me, is the epitome of how I hoped to make the audience feel at the beginning of my project. Now that some of my work has been shot, I realise that my work tends more to emphasise with than striking the audience. The discomfort that I translate in my work after studying performances, cinematography (and others) is more subtle. The fact that the dancer is already putting their body in service to my work is a responsibility for me not to make them feel uncomfortable or hurt them in any way. However, her work is imparted by the idea of travelling to be people and confronting people to themselves, as individuals, as individuals part of this society and as a collective society, this is something that I aim to show ( at my scale) in this project.

Her love for collaborating and welcoming other creative into her work or her project is also inspiring and exemplary as well for this project.

A pioneer of body art, Marina Abramović became known in the 1970s for radical actions exploring and pushing the physical and mental limits of the human body.

From 1973, the date of the first experiments on her own body, often exposed, she pushed to extremes the relationship she developed with the public, sometimes invited to intervene against her. In 1975, she began a collaborative collaboration with the Dutch artist Ulay. Their actions question the question of the double and the otherness between feminine and masculine. From the 1990s, Marina Abramović performed alone. Adopting a more theatrical form, these mix his family heritage with the contemporary history and folklore of Serbia. The fundamental data of the human condition – time, presence, the face-to-face interaction of beings – are today the themes of performances involving the public in ritualized acts.

Named by some like "The high priestess of immaterial art," Marina Abramovic, has continued to push her body to extreme limits, going so far as to put her life in danger. It is in the body of another, Maria Callas, an immense artist whose excess and mortal passions match her own, that she reappears these days. On the stage of the Palais Garnier, the performer brings together arias from the notable roles of the Greek-American soprano in a hybrid show, at the crossroads of lyrical theater, performance and video art, entitled "7 Deaths of Maria Callas ".

Marina Abramović was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, into a family of severe and dogmatic apparatchiks. Her parents, heroes of the communist revolution, were partisan leaders during the Belgrade offensive in 1944. Marina Abramović developed her vocation as an artist in this context of boundless commitment.

Violence is a motif at the heart of her performances and is part of her desire to control physical pain or fear in order to free herself from it. In 1973, the artist signed Rythm 10, his first performance which consisted of passing a knife through his fingers at full speed. The following year, in Naples, she delivered her body to the public so that they could do whatever they wanted with props provided on a tray, ranging from lipstick to a loaded gun. She allows herself to be manipulated and humiliated for hours on end in order to explore the confines of human nature and her own limits.

MA: "I was ready to die for Art. It was a very heavy experience. And after six hours, even though I was still alive, I came back to the hotel, I looked in the mirror and I saw white hairs growing on my head. I knew at that moment that yes; if the public is given the opportunity to kill you it can happen"

When asked by Louisa Back - How did this experiment evolve in your case? Marina Abramović respondded:

Initially, what interested me was to glimpse the physical limits. Then I started looking for psychological limits. To this were added elements of spirituality drawn from my nomadic travels in different countries, from the 70s and 80s. Meetings with other peoples, other cultures, with their rituals, made me take awareness that it is essential to learn to use our extrasensory perceptions, telepathy, all these capacities that our technologies obliterate, and which therefore remain unexploited. This makes us invalids. Finally, I realized that when I work with the public, I no longer need anything. Nothing other than a direct transmission of energy between him and me. That's all. It took me fifty‐five years to arrive at this certainty

Eminently political, Marina Abramović’s art often links the intimate to the collective. In 1968, she and other young artists drew up a list of demands. Dictator Tito accepts five. Among them is the creation of a cultural center whose management is entrusted to the art historian Dunja Blazevic.

"It was so important for me to not be afraid of anyone, to be sincere and not to compromise with myself. And throughout my career as an artist I have never compromised".

The artistic and personal destinies of Marina Abramović form one as the artist has made the intertwining of the two her trademark. This is evidenced by her collaboration/romantic relationship with the artist Frank Une Laysiepen, nicknamed Ulay, with whom she performed from 1976 to 1988. We owe them, in particular, the performances Breathing In/Breathing Out , where they kissed to the point of suffocation , but also Rest Energy which makes them pose opposite each other, she holding a bow, he the arrow that could pierce his heart if they ever flinch; but above all their breakup, a real emotional event symbolically performed in 1988 via 70 days of walking on the Great Wall of China, where each of them went to one end of the wall.

In 2010, the performer delivered The Artist is Present, a superhuman work that pushes the limits of her art but also of her metabolism. Eight hours a day, sitting opposite visitors, Marina Abramovic looked them eye to eye, one after the other, and did nothing else. In total, the performance lasts 736 hours and 30 minutes. She was then 64 years old and prepared for a year to change her metabolism, including learning to drink at night so as not to urinate during the day. This performance at MoMA in New York attracted 750,000 people (the institution's attendance record) for three months.

MA: "The intellect and spirit can really lead you in the wrong direction while the body cannot. You have to know how to listen to it, you have to follow the body’s intuition. The best guide is your body".

Word of Marina Abramović on the exhibition at the Royal Academy:

By the time we were supposed to open the exhibition in 2020, everything was ready, including the catalogue. But a year later, we chose to make a complete turnaround, literally 360 degrees. From now on, it is no longer a retrospective but rather works from different periods which dialogue with each other: by turning to the past, we look towards the future, and there is nothing historical about that. The first room is entitled Public Participation, and we can see two works that are separated by more than thirty years: Rhythm 0, when I was almost killed by the public with a loaded pistol, in Milan, in 1974, and The Artist Is Present, when in 2010, as part of my exhibition at MoMA, I sat facing the public every day for almost three months.

Even though countless things happened between these two works, both reflect the same idea, that of giving the audience permission to participate in the work. In either of these works, she tests her physical and psychological limits, and at the same time, she redefines what it means to “deliver an artistic performance”. MA : "One of my old teachers said that it is very important to have a good idea. If you're great, you might get two, and in that case you'll have to be very careful. As far as I'm concerned, I have a good idea. And it is to take over the body. In this case, my own body. The body can offer you everything. It is both a microcosm and a macrocosm. But we don't know much: scientists say that we only use 20% of our brain's potential. It is therefore a vast area of experimentation, which never ends".

source:

- Lequeux, Emmanuelle, « Marina Abramovic, le gourou de la performance », lemonde.fr, 10/01/2014, 5 p.

- Atlas, Charles, « Marina Abramovic : the artist is present », Artforum, janvier 2012, p. [82]-83, 2 p.

- Biesenbach, Klaus ; Museum of modern art (New York , N.Y.). Marina Abramovic : the artist is present : [exhibition, New York, Museum of Modern Art, March 14 - May 31, 2010]. New York : Museum of Modern Art, 2010

- Marina Abramovic: A Visual Biography Copertina rigida with Katya Tylevich (Collaboratore)

- exhibition - stedelijk currently showing https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/marina-abramovic-en

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