Marina Abramovic, “The Artist is Present”

What have you learned about features of performance art based on Abramovic’s work? Name a few key features according to her examples. Include an image to illustrate. Consider her quote “When you perform it is a knife and your blood, when you act it is a fake knife and ketchup.”

Performance art strives to invoke the most emotion from the viewers, typically by including the audience in the art piece itself. It’s meant to reveal human nature through curiosity, a lot of Marina’s work I feel is rooted in the question: how far will someone take it when they feel the freedom of not having to perform a certain way? Marina sets the stage for the audience to interact, she controls the stakes/risk of the performance by the provision of certain materials but ultimately leaves it up to the audience to see how far they are willing to commit to the performance. Will they pass through the nude artists and squish against their bodies? Will they touch the nude artists inappropriately? Will they harm her or nurture her?

She also provides the insight that “Artist have to be warrior” when it comes to any art, but particularly performance art. It takes everything from an artist to perform in front of an audience, because it is real, “it is a knife and your blood”, it takes courage and training to prepare the body and mind for a performance. Especially to the extent that Marina went to, and how involved the interaction between her and the audience was, as she described the “most important is what state of mind you have to be doing what you’re doing”.

Discuss the ways performance art resists many museum and commercial artworld conventions. How does Abramovic solve/negotiate some of these challenges, and do you find these compromises add to, or undermine the ideas at play in her work?

Performance art is free of the standard assumptions and structures that shape majority of static art within museum and commercial artworld conventions. This allows the artist the freedom to manipulate not only the setting around them but include the audience in the art piece in a way that paintings and videos never could. It can’t be hung in a gallery, but it can be more intensely experienced compared physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Performance art is tricky in the sense that it can’t be monetized as easily as say, a painting. There’s not really a physical “thing” you can take home with you to prove the experience you witnessed/felt. Marina overcame this in her MoMA exhibition by choosing a few select photos of her previous performance art and creating limited prints. Personally, I believe her performance art is incredibly powerful and is really good at invoking emotion, curiosity and reflection, and that she created a very strong name and association for herself before trying to monetize her work through art prints is what made it so successful. She wrote in her manifesto “An artist should not be an idol” but I think she made herself one through her charismatic qualities and that in turn fed back into her striking success.