Marina Abramović (, ; born November 30, 1946) is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Active for over four decades, she has been described by the Evening Standard as "perhaps the single most important figure in performance art", while Aesthetica noted her work has "reshaped the very language of contemporary performance art".
Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of artistic identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.
Early life Abramović was born in Belgrade, PR Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia, on November 30, 1946. In an interview, Abramović described her family as having been "Red bourgeoisie". Her great-uncle was Varnava, Serbian Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church.Stated on "The Eye of the Beholder", Season 5, Episode 9 of Finding Your Roots, April 2, 2019. Both of her Montenegrin-born parents, Danica Rosić and Vojin Abramović, were Yugoslav Partisans during World War II. After the war, Abramović's parents were given positions in the postwar Yugoslavian government.
Abramović was raised by her grandparents until she was six years old. Her grandmother was deeply religious and Abramović "spent [her] childhood in a church following [her] grandmother's rituals—candles in the morning, the priest coming for different occasions". When she was six, her brother was born, and she began living with her parents while also taking piano, French, and English lessons. Although she did not take art lessons, she took an early interest in art and enjoyed painting as a child.
Life in Abramović's parental home under her mother's strict supervision was difficult. When Abramović was a child, her mother beat her for "supposedly showing off". In an interview published in 1998, Abramović described how her "mother took complete military-style control of me and my brother. I was not allowed to leave the house after 10 o'clock at night until I was 29 years old. ... [A]ll the performances in Yugoslavia I did before 10 o'clock in the evening because I had to be home then. It's completely insane, but all of my cutting myself, whipping myself, burning myself, almost losing my life in 'The Firestar'—everything was done before 10 in the evening."Quoted in Thomas McEvilley, "Stages of Energy: Performance Art Ground Zero?" in Abramović, Artist Body, [Charta, 1998]. In an interview published in 2013, Abramović said, "My mother and father had a terrible marriage." Describing an incident when her father smashed 12 champagne glasses and left the house, she said, "It was the most horrible moment of my childhood."
Education and teaching career
She was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965 to 1970. She completed her post-graduate studies in the art class of Krsto Hegedušić at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, SR Croatia, in 1972. She then returned to SR Serbia and, from 1973 to 1975, taught at the Academy of Fine Arts at Novi Sad while launching her first solo performances.
In 1976, following her marriage to Neša Paripović (between 1970 and 1976), Abramović went to Amsterdam to perform a piece, and then decided to move there permanently. From 1990 to 1995, Abramović was a visiting professor at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 1992 to 1996 she also served as a visiting professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and from 1997 to 2004 she was a professor for performance-art at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig.
Art career
Rhythm 10, 1973 In her first performance in Edinburgh in 1973, Abramović explored elements of ritual and gesture. Making use of ten knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the Knife game, in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of one's hand, the title of the piece getting its name from the number of knives used. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of ten she had set up, and record the operation. After cutting herself ten times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body – the pain and the sounds of the stabbing; the double sounds from the history and the replication. With this piece, Abramović began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. "Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do."Kaplan, 9
Rhythm 5, 1974 In this performance, Abramović sought to re-evoke the energy of extreme bodily pain, using a large petroleum-drenched pentagram, which the artist lit on fire at the start of the performance. Standing outside the pentagram, Abramović cut her nails, toenails, and hair. When finished with each, she threw the clippings into the flames, creating a burst of light each time. Burning the pentagram represented a physical and mental purification, while also addressing the political traditions of her past. In the final act of purification, Abramović leapt across the flames into the center of the large pentagram. At first, due to the light and smoke given off by the fire, the observing audience did not realize that the artist had lost consciousness from lack of oxygen inside the star. However, when the flames came very near to her body and she still remained inert, a doctor and others intervened and extricated her from the star. Abramović later commented upon this experience: "I was very angry because I understood there is a physical limit. When you lose consciousness you can't be present, you can't perform."Daneri, 29
Rhythm 2, 1974 Prompted by her loss of consciousness during Rhythm 5, Abramović devised the two-part Rhythm 2 to incorporate a state of unconsciousness in a performance. She performed the work at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, in 1974. In Part I, which had a duration of 50 minutes, she ingested a medication she describes as "given to patients who suffer from catatonia, to force them to change the positions of their bodies". The medication caused her muscles to contract violently, and she lost complete control over her body while remaining aware of what was going on. After a ten-minute break, she took a second medication "given to schizophrenic patients with violent behaviour disorders to calm them down". The performance ended after five hours when the medication wore off.
Rhythm 4, 1974 Rhythm 4 was performed at the Galleria Diagramma in Milan. In this piece, Abramović knelt alone and naked in a room with a high-power industrial fan. She approached the fan slowly, attempting to breathe in as much air as possible to push the limits of her lungs. Soon after she lost consciousness. Abramović's previous experience in Rhythm 5, when the audience interfered in the performance, led to her devising specific plans so that her loss of consciousness would not interrupt the performance before it was complete. Before the beginning of her performance, Abramović asked the cameraman to focus only on her face, disregarding the fan. This was so the audience would be oblivious to her unconscious state, and therefore be unlikely to interfere. After several minutes of Abramović's unconsciousness, the cameraman refused to continue and sent for help.
Rhythm 0, 1974
To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging and best-known performances, which took place in Naples, Italy. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force that would act on her. Abramović placed on a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use in any way that they chose; a sign informed them that they held no responsibility for any of their actions. Some of the objects could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, olive oil, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed audience members to manipulate her body and actions without consequences. This tested how vulnerable and aggressive human subjects could be when actions have no social consequences. At first the audience did not do much and was extremely passive. However, as the realization began to set in that there was no limit to their actions, the piece became brutal. By the end of the performance, her body was stripped, attacked, and devalued into an image that Abramović described as the "Madonna, mother, and whore". As Abramović described it later: "What I learned was that ... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you. ... I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation."
In her works, Abramović defines her identity in contradiction to that of spectators; however, more importantly, by blurring the roles of each party, the identity and nature of humans individually and collectively also become less clear. By doing so, the individual experience morphs into a collective one and truths are revealed. Abramović's art also represents the objectification of the female body, as she remains passive and allows spectators to do as they please to her; the audience pushes the limits of what might be considered acceptable. By presenting her body as an object, she explores the limits of danger and exhaustion a human can endure.
Works with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen)
In 1976, after moving to Amsterdam, Abramović met the West German performance artist Uwe Laysiepen, who went by the single name Ulay. They began living and performing together that year. When Abramović and Ulay began their collaboration, the main concepts they explored were the ego and artistic identity. They created "relation works" characterized by constant movement, change, process and "art vital". This was the beginning of a decade of influential collaborative work. Each performer was interested in the traditions of their cultural heritage and the individual's desire for ritual. Consequently, they decided to form a collective being called "The Other", and spoke of themselves as parts of a "two-headed body".Quoted in Green, 37 They dressed and behaved like twins and created a relationship of complete trust. As they defined this phantom identity, their individual identities became less defined. In an analysis of phantom artistic identities, Charles Green has noted that this allowed a deeper understanding of the artist as performer, since it revealed a way of "having the artistic self made available for self-scrutiny".Green, 41