She walks onto the stage dramatically. Dressed in black, hair tied back, the artist with high cheek bones and a stately presence stands at the centre of the stage. The audience is blindfolded and Marina Abramovic begins to tell a story…the year is 1974, she says, and a 23-year-old girl is facing a table full of objects; objects that can cause both pleasure and pain. There is also a note on the table which absolves you of any responsibility and the blame is all on the table…slowly dramatically the performance artist shows how beginning with instruments of pleasure, instruments of pain are inflicted on the girl…enigmatically the story ends with the heroine looking into the mirror and finding a gray hair….the audience removes the blindfold...
A powerful performance comes with Abramovic’s explanation of what a performance really is, “…my explanation for performance is very simple. Performance is a mental and physical construction that the performer makes in a specific time in a space in front of an audience and then energy dialogue happens. The audience and the performer make the piece together. ..It’s all about being there in the real time, and you can’t rehearse performance, because you can’t do many of these types of things twice –– ever… you know, all human beings are always afraid of very simple things. We’re afraid of suffering, we’re afraid of pain, we’re afraid of mortality. So what I'm doing –– I’m staging these kinds of fears in front of the audience. I’m using your energy, and with this energy I can go and push my body as far as I can. And then I liberate myself from these fears. And I'm your mirror…”
The artist takes you through many interesting facets of her life like when she broke up with the man she loved, they both did not cry, shout or call and say it was over, instead they walked the full length of the wall of China and met at the centre to part ways.
Abramovic’s piece de resistance however is a show she did in MoMa where she sat still all day, six to ten hours (10-15 years ago). The audience was welcome to sit in the chair opposite her. It was a one-to-one performance and even as they looked at each other, much seems to have happened that has not been articulated or lends itself to articulation. Abramovic shows pictures of the many who sat before her…they all have tears trickling down their cheek…
What happened? Abramovic says, “They are observed by the other people, they’re photographed, they’re filmed by the camera, they’re observed by me and they have nowhere to escape except in themselves. And that makes a difference. There was so much pain and loneliness, there’s so much incredible things when you look in somebody else’s eyes, because in the gaze with that total stranger, that you never even say one word ––everything happened. And I understood when I stood up from that chair after three months, I am not the same anymore. And I understood that I have a very strong mission, that I have to communicate this experience to everybody. And this is how, for me, was born the idea to have an institute of immaterial performing arts. Because thinking about immateriality, performance is time-based art. It’s not like a painting. You have the painting on the wall, the next day it’s there. Performance, if you are missing it, you only have the memory, or the story of somebody else telling you, but you actually missed. So you have to be there. And in my point, if you talk about immaterial art, music is the highest –– absolutely highest art of all, because it's the most immaterial.”
Abramovic says she is going to set up an institute to communicate along these lines and she outlines many activities, one among them being counting rice grains… “How to count rice for six hours? It’s incredibly important. You know, you go through this whole range of being bored, being angry, being completely frustrated, not finishing the amount of rice you’re counting. And then this unbelievable amount of peace you get when satisfying work is finished –– or counting sand in the desert,” says Abramovic. “And then also to include the failure. I think failure is important because if you go, if you experiment, you can fail. If you don't go into that area and you don't fail, you are actually repeating yourself over and over again. And I think that human beings right now need a change, and the only change to be made is a personal level change. You have to make the change on yourself. Because the only way to change consciousness and to change the world around us, is to start with yourself. It's so easy to criticize how it's different, the things in the world and they're not right, and the governments are corrupted and there's hunger in the world and there's wars –– the killing. But what we do on the personal level –– what is our contribution to this whole thing?”
The key words that define human thought, for Abramovic are trust, vulnerability and the need for human connections.
sudhamahi@gmail.com
Web link: https://www.ted.com/talks/marina_abramovic_an_art_made_of_trust_vulnerability_and_connection
