Went to an event at the Guggenheim with Cindy last night, after spending much of the afternoon together hitting 2 of the many art fair shows in town — The Art Show (a little stodgy, that one) and Scope, which was crowded and fun. The Guggenheim was hosting a film screening and party for Marina Abramovic’s 60th birthday. The film was a documentary about her performances a year or 2 ago of seven classic performance art pieces. It’s a somewhat radical idea in that arena to resurrect a “performance” as one would a play, a work of choreography or a piece of music. Up until recently those performance art pieces tended to survive solely via documentation — photos or videos, mostly — and were never physically “revived” even by their creators. They were thought of as relics of their era, only relevant in the context of a particular place and time and therefore distinct from other types of performance. They were also thought of as intimately linked to their creators — as if only I could sing my songs and no one else was ever allowed to. It sounds weird when you put it that way, but in the art world it was just accepted that that’s the way it would be. Even Beckett’s estate, notoriously finicky, allows performances and even limited interpretation — but very limited — every stage direction must be adhered to, or the lawyers come out as they have quite a few times. Between Abramovic and RoseLee Goldberg’s Performa festival this ingrained attitude has been challenged. The most well known pieces she revived were Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed” in which he masturbates under the floor (while talking) and a Beuys piece in which he mimics giving instruction to a dead hare.
This kind of performance is different from what I do, though there are overlaps. More and more, as time goes by, I acknowledge the audience when I perform; I either speak to them or gesture to them. In general the performance is offered to them, given — and desirous of their approval, at least to some extent. Here much of that is not even considered. That’s not necessarily meant as a criticism, but it does seem to be a fact. In this genre of performance the direction is inward — it is as if the audience were anthropologists watching a scarification or a puberty ritual in the outback or in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. There is no tacit acknowledgement of the audience by the performer — except at the end, when Marina would finish and there would be applause and she would smile and once she even bowed. But those moments seemed to be exceptions.
Most of the time it is a private personal ritual that is being enacted. A personal rite of passage — which might be why some are loath to view them as performances — that smacks of “show” and, God forbid, entertainment. These are rituals in which it may be important to have witnesses, and maybe that is exactly the right word for the audience relationship in this case. The audience is not expected to interact. In some cases the audience heckled her — but she didn’t react. The ritual must be completed as prescribed for the magic to take effect. Reportedly one crazed audience member rushed the “stage” during one piece (Marina was posed like Patty Hearst as Tanya, only in this case her leather trousers below the machine gun she cradled were completely crotchless.) The guy was stopped before he could reach her. During another piece where she was completely naked and incising a five-pointed star into her belly someone called the fire department reporting a woman mutilating herself. The firemen came and when one saw her (she was lying on a bed of ice at that point) he declared she was “totally hot” and went to get the other guys so they could see, too. They came back the next day again, but it was another piece and she had clothes on.
Anyway. Most of the time there is no visible obvious emotional expression by the performer in this genre: everything is stoic, and ritually done with a straight face. I sensed intense emotion inside, but it is kept under wraps, tightly held, which in some ways makes it even more powerful. The “mutilation” piece included a recording of a song about a Slavic people, lyrics wailing how “no-one understands us and we are doomed to endless wars”. Marina is from Montenegro, bordering on Serbia, so one can feel the anguish of recent history — history still playing itself out. Wounded communal pride and suffering penetrating into even little villages and deeply ingrained among friends and relatives. The piece seemed to be expressing a need to do penance but pissed off about it, too. Penance needs a witness to be effective, even if that witness is only God, so that age-old religious impulse sure seems to have some weird link to this performance style — people are constantly mutilating themselves in these pieces, nailing themselves to cars or grotesquely stretching and distorting their bodies and features. Heal us, heal me, they seem to say. Or, Christ-like, let me atone for all the shit in the world.
Sometimes these pieces verge close to David Blaine’s stunts or those of Houdini and others popular entertainers, but usually this work maintains a crucial distance from those stunts and it stays closer to the endurance feats of shamans than those of vaudeville magicians. With the latter, there may, in some cases, be a trick, a sleight of hand, some clever skill that deceives the viewer — but here what you see is absolutely real.
In an age where the common religious rituals are irrelevant, forgotten or discounted these are maybe attempts at some cathartic replacements. We as spectators and audience members benefit, too — it may seem that we’re not “included”, but merely having witnessed the event, we are. Many of these pieces seem to come from Middle Europe, where religion, wars, waves of nasty regimes and outsider status from the rest of Europe combined with hard economic circumstances to make one’s body the most available and likely art material. Chinese contemporary art a decade or more ago was similar.
There are elements of ritual in pop and contemporary theater performances — sometimes obviously, as in De La Guarda, Meridith Monk, Pina Bausch and other folks — but also in pop music too. Sonic Youth and Boredoms, The Stooges, Cat Power, of course they are all enacting cathartic rituals for our benefit, but even more traditional shows contain some element, often invisible, of a cathartic ritual enacted for the joint benefit of viewer and viewed.
