Scenico Art Mag

Written by Nikolena Kalaitzaki, Art Historian/Art Curator

Rhythm 10; Ten Knives and a Dangerous Drinking Game of Russian and Yugoslav Peasants. Marina Abramovic passes the knives one by one, in a rapid rhythm, between the gap formed by the fingers of her left hand that remains open, fixed on stacks of white paper. Two tape recorders record the breaths and the sharp blows that are repeated monotonously. She must be careful! This rapid rhythm of the exchange of knives can injure her! The audience watches with bated breath. Marina continues her performance. Suddenly, just before the end, drops of scarlet blood water the white paper!

[1973: Museum of Modern Art in Rome, duration: 1 hour]

Rhrythm 5; A large wooden star lying on the floor, doused with oil, is on fire. It is Marina Abramovic who sets it on fire and spins around it, looking at the flames. With a pair of scissors she starts cutting the hair and nails of her hands and feet and throwing them into the flames. Then she jumps over the flames and lies down in the center of the star. The performance ends with her fainting, due to lack of oxygen, inside the burning star. The spectators run to save her. The burning star, according to Abramovic, symbolizes the burning of the communist regime. However, it also refers to the sacred ancient pentacle, to communion, sacrifice and purification.

[1974: Belgrade Student Cultural Center, performance duration: 1.5 hours]

Video: https://youtu.be/6z7hOOWQNZg?si=zgQJOBdDz4YgRDDs

In the performance Rhrythm 2, Abramović swallows two prescription pills in front of the audience: a pill for catatonic patients (during the first part of the performance) and a sedative for schizophrenics (in the second part). In the first part of the performance, Abramović, under the influence of the drug, exhibits intense and involuntary muscle contractions of her body and, although unable to control her trembling body, remains mentally clear. In the second part of the performance, Abramović swallows a sedative pill, which is prescribed to patients for the treatment of severe depression and aggression. Abramovic is now in a state of consciousness and unconsciousness, with her body completely inert.

[1974: Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb]

Video: https://youtu.be/2BKz8scSiTM?si=gAgFk6XrebXYG21N

Following is the legendary performance Rhrythm 0·, in which Abramovic, from a “subject” is transformed for the purposes of the performance into a “willless object” left to the whims of the audience who watch her performance at the Studio Morra gallery in Naples for six whole hours!

According to the performer’s instructions, the audience was “free” to use on her body, in any way they wished, a number of 72 objects of pleasure or pain such as: an axe, a knife, a lipstick, a mirror, a rose and a pistol with a bullet. The audience responded to Abramovic’s challenge, some with shyness and others with more boldness and courage/audacity by using the various objects. At the end of the performance, Abramovic was found standing before them, topless and with wet hair. Her clothes had been torn, pins had been inserted into her body, a knife had been drawn near her crotch, and someone had slashed her neck and sucked her blood! Someone else wrote on her body: “SONO LIBERO/I am free”.

There was a clear state of sexuality and violence on the part of the audience, which directly reflects this primitive instinct of domination and imposition of the strong on the weak. At the end of the performance, someone from the audience approached her, put the bullet in the gun, fixed it in her right hand, and aimed at her neck, touching the trigger. A commotion followed. The performance was over.

[1974: Studio Morra gallery, Naples]

Video:

Abramovic continues to test her mental and physical endurance with performances such as “Thomas Lips,” in which she carves a five-pointed star on her stomach with a razor and then whips herself and lies down on ice (1975, Krinzinger gallery, Innsbruck). In the famous “Art Must be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful,” she brushes her hair naked, so hard that it pulls out strands, constantly repeating the phrase: “Art must be beautiful. The artist must be beautiful” in a protest against the Yugoslav aesthetic perception that art must be beautiful. In “Light/Dark” with Ulay, they slap each other (1977, Internationale Kunstmesse, Cologne), or breathe in “Breathing in, Breathing out” together, in the same breath (1977, Student Cultural Center, Belgrade).

Since then, until today, the “grandmother of performance”, Marina Abramović, who founded, among others, the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a state-of-the-art cultural center in New York, where the Art of Performance is taught and dynamically developed, has presented a number of remarkable performances and artistic projects, all over the world, with the most notable being “The Artist is Present” (2010, MoMA, New York) and “The Abramovic Method/AS ONE” (2016, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece).

It is true that Marina Abramović is a controversial figure. Her Art is equally controversial, finding many fanatical supporters on the one hand, as well as fanatical opponents on the other. Especially in her “Rhythms”, we see the performer engaging in risky games of life and death, body, soul and mind, with herself literally “sacrificing” herself for them, or rather sacrificing herself for the “ideals” that their prefabricated conceptual framework advocates. Because, each of her “Rhythms” is not simply a random event distinguished for its boldness, originality, provocation, cruelty, violence and risk, but each of her “Rhythms” constitutes: a message, a protest and an ideal, a truth, a reaction, a resistance, a meaning and an exploration of the limits of the body, soul and mind, with the concepts of pain, trauma and the primal instinct of survival being reduced to the central regulators of “things”; to the connecting link that unites and universally stigmatizes people’s lives.