AC

Editorial Interrogations, Abramovic two views

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Marina Abramović, “Seven Easy Pieces”-Play it Again, AND THIS TIME MAKE SURE (IT’S DOCUMENTED And the Cameras are Running.

 

By Holly Crawford 

 

Marina Abramović has done many collaborative performances since the late seventies, many  with fellow artist Ulay, but in a series called “Seven Easy Pieces,” that were at the Guggenheim, from November 9 through November 15 between the hours of 5 p.m. to midnight,  she chose to  perform in a different way.   Previously, for example, she and Ulay physically tied themselves together.  In this series, where the title alludes to a musical composition on a theme with variations, she has tied herself to the previous performances, historical documents, by other artists. The press release states,

 “In Seven Easy Pieces Abramović reenacts seminal performance works by her peers dating from the 1960s and ’70s, interpreting them as one would a musical score and documenting their realization. The project is premised on the fact that little documentation exists for most performance works from this critical early period; one often has to rely upon testimonies from witnesses or photography that shows only portions of any given piece. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibility of redoing and preserving such important performative work for generations to come.”

 

 This raises many questions. But, why should it raise questions?  Plays are re-staged. Music is played and replayed.  Films are remade.  We have our favorite renditions, but this  does not raise any questions. The songs, films or plays existed before they were remade. But, it seems to me that the press release is arguing that these pieces were in danger of being lost and they have now been saved. That they now exist for all to see  –“documenting their realization.” Who and what did she document? 

     Over seven different nights at the Guggenheim in the rotunda on a white round stage she performed seven differnt pieces.   Only on the last two nights did she perform work that she solely created.  She performed works, or at least that is what she and the Guggenheim argue, by Bruce Neuman, Vito Acconci, Joseph Bueys, Gina Pane, and Valie Explort.  At the very least she had tied herself to these artists.  This is very similar to an appropriation artist whose material is well-known artists’ or cultural icons’. Why appropriate a well known image? Well because it makes the work important by association. It is all less risky artistically.   Is it is a collaboration? No. They had nothing to do with it. There names are attached. I doubt if they were consulted.  Then on the sixth evening she re-staged her performance from 1975—“Lips of Thomas,” and on the last night she premiered a new piece.  

       All the performances were either an appropriation, interpretation or a re-enactment.  Did the documentation of her performance make hers the definitive pieces because they were exhaustively documented? Possibly.   But Acconci did document his Seedbed, 1972.  He recorded his action before the floor and she above the floor.  His seed is also split in the act of masturbation, hers is not. This makes the performances very different. Hers is shown at the Guggenheim and his at the Museum of Sex.  She did not save his performance. She changed it. Neither did she save Beuys’.  She looked like she was savagely gnawing on the rabbit. He was whispering to a dead rabbit about dead art. He was raising the question of what is art.    Does a re-interpretation really save something?  Could they be saved? No, but it seems that Abramović’s renditions were well positioned to last historically.  They played at the Guggenheim.

                   I do not know whether any other performance artists have appropriated other performance artists work before, or at least, in such a public way.   This might have been a first.  Some might argue that it is a  loose collaborative act because there was  an art historical relationship.  Is a relationship, even if it is a historical partnership a collaboration of sorts? How do we even read this performance if it is just a documentation of  historical material? What was wrong with the other performances?  Is it that they just wanted to introduce them to a larger audience in New York at a major museum?  The problem: the context is completely different. To be fair, I only saw her re-enactments on the line of   small video screens that were playing in the background behind the round stage. I was there for her re-staging of her 1975 performance, “Lips of Thomas.”

          I witnessed two complete cycles of this performance. It was seamlessly repeated, I assume over the seven hours. Or at least, that is what happened in the two hours I attended.   In one sense, this particular performance was similar to anyone repetitive daily ritual—of eating, working, and lying down.  Sounds simple, could be almost boring. Or our various rituals can be warm and comforting. Hers were not!  The audience is turned into witnesses who could not intervene!  This stage in the rotunda of the Guggenheim was a far different time and place than this first performance. In 1975, when Ambramovic first performed this piece, Eastern Europe was dominated by the Soviet Union. It would remain so until 1990.  Ambramovic is a Bulgarian artist, who used the artistic media of performance to make politicize the pain and sorrow of the daily existence of  the people living  in the Soviet bloc. If anyone could take their eyes off her performance to notice the Russian exhibition, that was curated by the Office of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. As far as the can see are religious icons and Russian aristocrats circling up the spiral at the Guggenheim. Was this re-staging of this performance a collaboration between the curators and her? The background seems like a perfect backdrop. Lucky coincidence unlikely.   There was an interaction, a collaboration between  Abramović’s choice of material to re-enact and the Guggenheim.  The juxtaposition of this reenactment of her political performance within this current exhibition context was probably not made clear, if it was mentioned at all, to the Russian government. And it  made this performance more than a mere art historical exercise.

--- November 2005

Comments emailed--December, 2005

 

SHALOM

 

Holly Crawford 

 

I was reading your critical text, concerning Abramovic '7 easy performances'

in Guggenheim, this year. I have enjoyed reading it.

 

However, somewhere in your text, you wrote, that as far as you know, nobody"re-produced" a performance of someone else.

Well, I did precisely that, however not as a re-doing, or replicating a

music, but as a debate, as a certain critical conversation with the

person(s) whom I decided to converse with.

 

For instance, my Comparative-Performance ( so I call my (performance) work)concerning Joseph Beuys, "How to explain pictures to a dead hare" 26TH NOVEMBER 1965. First, I have corrected/rewrote the title, i.e., 'How to explain a deadGerman artist about hare hunting', it took place in Amsterdam on the 22nd of May 1997.

Basically, I was sitting on a chair holding in my arms a Hare ( a bronze

casted stuffed dead hare) talking to it in Hebrew, explaining as it were, to

Joseph Beuys, or if you like, to the public about YaKNeHaZ.

 

If you would like it, I will be more then happy to send you my new book.

A journey into PARDES. There you can find some information concerning the

above mentioned 'Comparative-Performance'.

 

Sincerely yours

Joseph Semah

Amsterdam

 

 

 Joseph,

 

 Thank you for your email and letting me know about you much early use of

 Buey's.  As you could probably tell, I did not like the implication the she was

 doing a defintive piece.

 

 I would like to post your email. Would you like to expand it a little?

 

 Thank you for your comments and getting in touch with me.

 

Holly

 

 

Shalom

Holly

 

Thank you for your reaction.

Well, I will try to expand a bit on my 'How to explain a dead German artist

about hare hunting'

 

.....22nd May 1997, Amsterdam;

On top of a dresser at the entrance of a room two copper plates have been

positioned, which jam in a Jewish fringed prayer garment: TALLIT, .A wine

glass and a plate of corten steel in the form of a T have been placed on the

top plate. On this plateau rests a 1930s chair coming from Germany. I took

place in the chair and reads out in Hebrew, with a bronze hare on my lap,

the passage YaKNeHaZ from treaties Pesachim (Talmud Bavely), with the text

transmitted to me through a walkman. In a corner of the room 36 framed

Letters to Albrecht Durer have been set up in line against the wall.

In this Comperative Performance the hare (of Beuys) has undergone a material

transformation. Cast in bronze the animal has given the status of the work

of art which has by definition become embedded in Christian tradition.

 

(YaKNeHaZ) Talmud Bavly: writing from the tractate Pesachim in which

prescriptions are given for the celebration of Pesach, when this coincides

with the Sabbath.

The blessing distinguishes "between holy and holy" as opposed to "between

holy and profane."

The order of this Kiddush-Havdalah is indicated by the acrostic YaKNeHaZ ‹

Yayin (wine), Kiddush (sanctification) Ner (candle), Havdalah (Blessing over

fire) Zeman (season).

 

 

Marina Ambramovic, “Seven Easy Pieces,” 2005

 

By Lillian Fellmann 

 

In the press release one can read about Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces (2005) performed at the Guggenheim that she is “interpreting them as one would a musical score and documenting their realization.” The former is a delicate analogy.  It might be applicable to the five pieces of 60ies performing artists that Abramovic re-staged. They are new pieces, in no way helpful to document the original.

 

The same text further explains: “the project is premised on the fact that little documentation exists for most performance works from this critical early period.” That is truly a problem; and is obviously a shortcoming that repeats itself with regard to contemporary conversational art practices (the latest performance hybrid, if you want), while both more clear-cut performative art and – on the other end of the spectrum of events on stage – public panels and art lectures consciously decide for or against documentation or recording these days. On the other, having learned from the failure of the precursors, it also isn’t uncommon that one art collective supports or organizes an archive for the activities of another one, sometimes even across continents. AC:Collaborative chose to become active in the documentation of the diverse phases of dialogical production in contemporary art and dialogical practice itself.

 

Archiving is a problem, not at last because it involves third parties, trust and control issues. Nonetheless repeating a piece doesn’t resolve anything. The press release reads on: “One often has to rely upon testimonies from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given piece. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibility of redoing and preserving such performative work.”

In other words Abramovic is performing “Lips of Thomas” in order for it to be recorded properly for the generations to come? Then why bother about an audience and the costs for a museum set-up? Maybe the other six pieces were actually at the core of the whole idea, although they fit even less into the made claim of an archiving endeavor, but are full reinterpretations and work with different set-ups and parameters.

 

What is documented and was is preserved?

Archiving a piece by restaging it 30 years later is as pleasurable and intriguing act but has nothing to do with preservation. Nothing that we see that night preserves the 1975 piece, yes, it does remind us of it but not in a different way than any written or pictorial description would. Even more, the Guggenheim-performance wipes out its own physicality and opens up the void of comparison which has no place but is pure oscillation – what did I know about it before what do I know/see now, how has Marina changed, what is thinking now, how does the audience differ, why can’t I see signs of appall on people’s faces, is she tired already, does she think about the scars that will heal slower now  than when she was younger, does she have breast implants, her breasts look (I was thinking that. There was something about them) bigger than on the old images, where is Ulay now? In a way there is no “Lips of Thomas 2005” performance piece, it is also not a point of departure to remember the “Lips of Thomas” of 1975 (for those who have seen it), we can’t depart and go there because we are stuck in this presence that is neither now nor then; it is a shadow, a song that lingers in a hallway long after its first sound. In other words, what I see is a timeless memory of a past one.

I feel like looking at an art history book. Nothing that happens on that rotunda touches me directly but through an attempt to understand what the world like in 1975. The dripping blood seems outdated. Abramovic is little more alive than the Russian tsarist paintings in the galleria behind her dwindling their way up to those other stars. Was that her aim, to appear as an archival page of history? As a memory, and to make  a memorial of herself? Many people came just to see her, be in the same room for a while.

Taste some glorious art world past. If this piece was an attempt to archive then I don’t understand its object? If it is the archiving of the piece from 1975 than I think that’s a delusion. That piece was not displayed on November 14 2005.

Those who didn’t see her performance tonight will not find her 1975 original piece enriched through documentation but another piece, the 2005 one, which they again will have to accept as partial because they will again have to ask themselves what was the world like at that time, and depend on other people’s stories and documentations. I wish the many cameras at the Guggenheim were portraying the audience too. They after all mark a non-condensed, true part of the piece’s context. The audience is always timely.

 

What if we think of Abramovic, her physical body, as the archive that we have the chance to revisit? It then wouldn’t matter what she is doing on that stage as long as she is spending time with us in the way she always did as an artist. That night I certainly feel that she carries knowledge that I don’t have. She went somewhere where I couldn’ty follow, but I was invited to watch. She was very alone their on that stage, and so were we the audience. Distanced by a time-lapse of 30 years.

 

Archiving is a timely theme. What the camera hasn’t captured can’t be made up for later. Restaging isn’t archiving, and re-interpreting even less. Repetition and appropriation are part of a discourse; they don’t solve the problem of perish and partiality.