Marina Abramovic wants to ‘break through walls’ with her work and in doing so does not shy away from extreme actions and does not indulge in beautification. Her name is familiar even to those not acquainted with the arts, having anchored performance in the consciousness of society and bringing it into the light of public attention.
(...) Continue readingMarina Abramović sees art and life as performance
Marina Abramović was born on 30 November 1946 in Belgrade. War and the church coined the family: Her parents fought as partisans in the Second World War, while her great uncle Varnava Rosić was patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church until his death. Marina Abramović herself studied painting from 1965 to 1970 in her hometown of Belgrade and published drawings, texts and various conceptual works from 1968. At the beginning of the 1970s, she attracted attention with her early performances and taught at the art academy in Novi Sad, and in 1975, took part in a staging by the controversial Austrian action artist Hermann Nitsch. For Abramović, performance increasingly crystallised as her real artistic vocation, the practice of which led her to the extreme limits of her physical and psychological endurance in the years that followed: For her first performance, Rhythm 10, she stabbed herself with knives between the fingers of her left hand, accepting inevitable injuries – indeed, whenever she unintentionally stabbed a finger, she changed knives. It was a type of Russian Roulette, the artist said later, a serious and necessary act that involved courage, recklessness and exasperation.
Marina Abramović and Ulay: A fragile bond of art and love
Marina Abramović enjoyed a deep loving and working relationship with the German artist Ulay. Together, they staged numerous performances in which bodily pain was often the focal point, which the artists inflicted on each other. For their performance Relation in Space at the Venice Biennale in 1976, they collided their naked bodies with emotional force, and a year later, at the Art Fair in Cologne, they sat opposite each other slapping the other’s face for the performance Light/Dark – using the body as a musical instrument for 20 minutes long. Despite the intensity of the twelve-year relationship, it came to an end when Ulay got his interpreter pregnant – ironically, the pair separated on the day of their planned wedding following the performance The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk. For this performance, the couple walked a distance of 2500 km towards each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China. A heated dispute over the rights of their collaborative art followed which was ultimately decided in Ulay’s favour – Abramović was forced to pay her former partner compensation, and it was not until 2017 that a reconciliation took place.
In the space of performance, it is art alone that reigns
Marina Abramović overcame this crisis into which the separation from Ulay had plunged her with new actions: In 1997, once more at the Venice Biennale, she scrubbed beef bones. The performance, titled Balkan Baroque, lasted four days and both fascinated and disturbed her audience with its acrid stench. The artist’s efforts were rewarded with the Golden Lion award. Abramović sees herself as a visitor in the field of her performance which she explores but does not govern – anything can happen once one has entered this zone, and she herself has to bow to the prevailing dynamics there. Sometimes, Marina Abramović’s art takes on a life of its own, as seen in 2010 during her MoMA performance The Artist is Present when the visit by the pop singer Lady Gaga caused a rush of people who were not interested in Abramović’s work at all, but only wanted to see their idol.
Marina Abramovic - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz: