Marina Abramović – Energy Dialogues
For Marina Abramović, art is not an end result; to say that a painting produced on canvas is all that art constitutes is a limiting and finite approach to dealing with an entity of unbounded possibility. Any apparent apex of what comes to be produced as the art is rather its aftermath, and, in that, it is not tangible. It is rather an abstraction, the unburdened spirituality of process, and a performance—never rehearsed or replicable twice over. Art is the moments that arise from an unbridled constellation of opportunity, and Abramović has conceived quite the pool of moments over the course of her existence as the world’s most prolific performance artist.
Now finished with its time at London’s Royal Academy, since displayed at Amsterdam’s prestigious Stedelijk Museum, her latest eponymous installation, ‘Marina Abramović,’ is a testament to the greatest of these feats. Idling a non-linear narrative odyssey across projectors and immersive objects, it serves as a most suitable initiation into the mind of the Yugoslavian-born auteur and her life's work, best encapsulated by her own distillation of it…
Marina Abramović, Dozing Consciousness, 1997, Performance for video, 7 minutes 23 seconds, Amsterdam © Marina Abramović. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives, Art Review / Broadsheet
Third Party Participation
Upon entry to the exhibition, the attendee is immediately assailed with clips from Abramović’s recent 'The Artist is Present' residency at the Museum of Modern Art (2010). Although a bold move to defy chronology in this regard, positioning this later piece as the collection’s opening salvo marks itself as a staunch declaration of the dedication that is inherent to her craft.
On the surface, the work itself appears quite minimalist in approach—a common theme across Abramović's living portfolio: Abramović as the object, propped at a table, remained still in the MoMA for three months, inviting visitors to come and face her during opening hours. In doing so, they become the subject of the piece, situated intermittently in rotation opposite her, equidistant in the vacant space. Yet, like a crude mirror, all they are invited to do is look within themselves; Abramović's expression is absolute and unwavering, a constant by which all are treated with equal dignity, and, by feeling seen, her presence provides the missing catalyst for their emotional denouement.
An array of such wildly varying reactions is what we see gridlocked on screen in the present collection, and all one can feel is that it is fascinating how a gaze, although a distal form of interaction, can be so revelatory. Abramović herself likens it to a meeting of immaterial energies in the physical plane—disparate corporeal entities entwined in an exchange beyond the presence of their being—inhabiting the interplay between the general public, individual, and artist, providing something that often gets swept away in the chores of our lives: visibility.
Introspection abounds, souls interlocked, it is a fine dichotomy that ‘The Artist is Present’ exquisitely strikes, making something so natural to the human condition (yet so rare in times of modernity) emerge in the artifice of Abramović’s setup and design. It is her motionlessness that primarily drives this profundity; to be still may seem effortless in theory, but really requires a restraint that none like her possess, and the control she has over her body is both grueling and evocative to behold in all its glory.
Discipline in the Face of Extremity
If the self-titled 'Marina Abramović' is to the art world what a greatest hits compilation is to music—the most abstract of all arts—then the subsequent reconstruction of perhaps her most infamous work, 'Rhythm 0 (1974)', is indeed rather fitting.
Etched in the grainy haze of old Super 8-style stills, interjections of Abramović's tortured struggles concoct a barbaric vision of the past. Once again, the artist mounts herself starkly at the forefront of the piece, calm while at her most physically distressed state, marking the material as definitively at odds with the stillness that characterized her preceding MoMA masterwork.
Adjacent, a table is laid with all manner of objects of which the disturbing matter of the ritual took its grisly hold; we are informed that, all those years ago, seemingly prosaic items became the perverse instruments for Abramović's decline, assuming the cruelty of their definition through the functions they were enlisted to perform.
Preserved fifty years on in exact layout and form, the inanimate Abramović is the sole missing element now (once the most integral item that the public at the time could act upon), and through whose presence and discrete instruction the piece’s unnerving power was both exacted and enabled.
Marina Abramović, The Spirit in Any Condition Does Not Burn, 2011, Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. Photo taken by Miles Comer at the Royal Academy (January, 2024).
The Body Politique
When confronted with art as inexplicably and undoubtedly divisive as Abramović’s, some might reduce her strand of critical realism to mere temporal artifact. The reality, however, is that while it has never been far removed from experimentation in Abramović’s immediate socio-political surroundings, its timelessness extends beyond, a facet to which her ‘Balkan Baroque (1997)’ definitely attests.
Marina Abramović, Balkan Baroque, 1997, Performance, 4 days 6 hours, XLVII Biennale, Venice © Marina Abramović. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives and Lisson Gallery. Photo taken by Miles Comer at the Royal Academy (January, 2024).
In a now viral interview with GQ Germany, on the topic of dining with Greta Gerwig and Kim Kardashian, she answered: “I really had a problem with Barbie… It’s not my culture. I come from Communism. I never liked to play with dolls. When I was younger, I was playing with invisible beings and shadows. I never liked objects, and that is why I became a performance artist.” Decidedly opting for entrancement in rhythms of the body over the whims of a paintbrush then, early on, Abramović understood that the flesh of the physique is neither a hindrance nor physical limitation—it annexes all our experience and selfhood, down to the hollow of bone. Her partisan heritage, in particular, is made canvas in ‘Balkan Baroque’: a grim four-day observance of bone-washing undertaken alone by Abramović, in memory of those lost amidst the interethnic culling of the Balkan wars. The endeavor is entirely personal, its resonance overt in the placement of her parents above—Yugoslavian denizens highly dedicated to the since-overturned Communist cause. Through animal marrow and carcass, engaging in song of her native folk tongue, Marina imposes its toll unto herself, mimicking the invocation of atrocity to treat each imagined life with the dignity that they deserve.
The exactitude of Abramović’s tableaux vivants is thus not situated in a vacuum, and it is the carefully sifted skeletal pile that sits in the Royal Academy in 2024 that reminds us of this. In fact, this is something the modern Marina has found herself entrenched in criticism for: most recently, seen imparting vague words of peace upon the crowds of Glastonbury, without any explicit allusion to the horrors perpetrated by regimes still and since.
Association: Its Totemic Power
Transcending self-focus—or rather, the aggrandizement of her own celebrity, to her detractors—Abramović has also garnered renown for her emphasis on the relational. The exhibition honors this shift, with Abramović unafraid to shed light on the fracture of her artistic and romantic oneness with Franke Uwe Laysiepen (best known by his professional moniker, Ulay).
He is the face that stands out above all in ‘The Artist is Present’, and, in a widely circulated clip, the only person able to induce an emotive reaction in Abramović. Moved to a single tear, she transgresses the discipline of her self-imposed rules for the first time ever, displacing the quietude of her performance to meet him in hand, out of a sort of instinctual obligation.
Their intimacy is well-documented along the walls of the exhibition, plastered in ecstasy of works old. It makes their tale hurt even more, which eventually finds itself set on the oft-trodden path of affairs and jilted lovers, and ultimately propelled to harsh extremes (their eventual downfall culminating at the brink of a 2500km long, 90-day performance pilgrimage along the Great Wall of China; ‘The Lovers, The Great Wall Walk’, 1988).
This journey, however, was not without its meditative purposes; Abramović began to interrogate the Wall’s fissures, coming to recognize its monolithic status as a vestige of both human invention and a greater Source. Thereon, unshackled from the symbiotic bonds of her former performance partnership, she seeks solace in earth-embalmed emblems for her art, instead ascribing intrinsic worth to the energies of natural things over a human counterpart.
In doing so, she unlocks a propensity to commune with something Other, deriving from it placidity and peace of mind. As a result, it seems that these resounding sentiments are what the artist personally wishes to bestow upon the exhibition’s attendees by interacting with some of her ‘Transitory Objects for Human Use (1980s)’, curating a transcendental experience from afar.
Marina Abramović, Four Crosses, 2019, Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. Photo taken by Miles Comer at the Royal Academy (January, 2024).
Living Legacy
Overall, a shared throughline of interpersonal connection links Abramović’s works. Throughout the exhibition, we see it all: person finding harmony as object, person outlasting pain as subject, person as subject communing with person as object, and person convening with actual objects, across the holistic spectrum of human brutality. The resonance of this theme evidently speaks to something within us on another frequency—her art, after all, showing no sign of ceasing its proliferation across Instagram Reels anytime soon—and it is within the installation’s final rooms that we observe the future of this craft. Actors assume her persona in strict accordance with the rigor of what came before. This is a new generation of performance artists, classically trained in the Abramović method, by the doctrine of her newly founded Institute.
Thus, born of Yugoslavian functionality, firmly rooting itself in her work foremost as simplicity, yet somehow unafraid to indulge in Western label luxury while fostering creative partnerships with Michele Lamy and ANOHNI, Marina Abramović is a highly complex character. Unequivocally, the exhibition bearing her very namesake paints a fittingly intricate portrait of the artist in residence. One, at that, which leaves the viewer indubitably imbued with the vitality of having partaken in the palpable exchange of her energy dialogues.
