Cloud with Its Shadow

By Bryony WhiteDecember 7, 2016

Cloud with Its Shadow

Walk Through Walls by Marina Abramović

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ’S CAREER is built upon indomitable endurance feats. During her youth, she spent many years living under two tyrannies: that of Yugoslavia’s dictator, Marshal Tito, and that of her mother. Of course, since the word “endurance” is defined as a “continued existence in time,” it is perhaps paradoxical to label the medium of Abramović’s art as an art of endurance. Indeed, performance art is often defined by its ephemerality — its lack of continuance in time. Still, it seems undeniable that Abramović has, more than anyone else, ensured that “performance art” will endure as a cultural phenomenon. Abramović’s The Artist Is Present was a global phenomenon. Flocks of visitors headed to MoMA to queue and sit with Marina. Her works have been accessioned into the largest art collections across the world, and she has collaborated with Lady Gaga and Jay Z. Along the way, she has won countless awards, created an Adidas ad campaign, and founded an institute of performance, which she continues to run. Suffice it to say, despite performance art’s radical, anti-institutional history, even my grandmother knows who the grandmother of performance art is.

Whether die-hard performance art fans like it or not, Abramović has dragged performance into the mainstream. Historically, performance art has had a complicated, ambivalent relationship with both the mainstream and the rest of the art world, which Abramović tracks in her recent memoir, Walk Through Walls. But the book also testifies to larger struggles than those of a young, visionary performance artist in an object-oriented art world.

Endurance can also be defined as the ability to withstand extreme suffering. Toward the end of Walk Through Walls, Abramović describes her preparation for The Artist Is Present, which was similar to that implemented by NASA: she learned how to push her body beyond normal human limits. While that is impressive, it is the story of Abramović’s childhood that testifies to her true endurance; she is accustomed to protracted pain.

Abramović was trained to understand suffering as a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life: “I come from a dark place. Postwar Yugoslavia, the mid-1940s to the mid-’70s.” The artist’s privileged background should have shielded her from the darkest aspects of Tito’s communist regime: her parents were decorated war heroes, with her mother a major in the army and her father appointed to Marshal Tito’s elite guard. They were rewarded with a capacious house in the center of Belgrade. But the family was not a happy one. Abramović’s parents worked long hours, leaving her and her brother with the maids. There were many fights in the household, and Abramović’s mother exercised unrelenting control over her daughter for decades; Abramović had a 10 p.m. curfew late into her 20s.

Abramović describes nearly drowning her younger brother when she was trying to bathe him. She writes, “I was punished, of course. I was punished frequently, for the slightest infraction, and the punishments were almost always physical — hitting and slapping.” Her mother and aunt, she adds, “hit me till I was black and blue; I had bruises all over.” It is hard not to read these punishments into Abramović’s performance works: the violence ghosts the bodily scars of Thomas Lips, the loss of consciousness in Rhythm 5, and, most clearly, the sheer corporeal force of Relation in Space.

Her mother, Danica’s methods also extended beyond the physical; Abramović describes a “plakar,” a “deep, dark Serbo-Croatian cupboard,” where she was often imprisoned. From an early age, Abramović had a morbid fixation on the plakar. She initially finds it terrifying — yet it becomes a space to explore her imagination. It was filled “with ghosts, spiritual presences — luminous beings, shapeless and silent but not at all frightening. I would talk to them. […] They were simply part of my reality, my life.”

This is Abramović’s revelation in Plato’s cave. It is the moment where she discovers shadows projected onto a wall. Abramović describes how she “didn’t like toys,” and instead preferred to play with the “glowing beings in the plakar.” Slowly, the shadows of the plakar become her “reality,” a mechanism Abramović employs to escape the pain of the everyday. These visions from the plakar become the impetus for her work; the plakar is the shadow-world, more real than the cave of her parent’s suffering, where she begins to create art.

Indeed, Abramović’s path toward performance feels inevitable. When Abramović is 25, she takes a tin of brown shoe polish, which she describes as looking like “shit,” and proceeds to smear her entire room in the substance. She covers the walls, the windows, and the doors in an act of triumphant, performative rebellion. Marina got her way — her mother opened the door and never entered again. At another point, she watches her mother pour soup all over her father’s head; Abramović finds it both farcical and melancholy. She interprets the moment at a remove, as if she were witnessing a small, effective act of performance.

However, while Abramović’s childhood and her mother’s eristic punishments seem to set an important precedent for her life as a performance artist, Abramović didn’t begin with performance. When she was 14, she asked her father for a set of paints. Throughout her adolescence and into her early 20s, that was her primary medium. As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramović was consumed with painting clouds — not “realistic” clouds, but abstract representations. One day, she found herself lying on the grass, looking up at the “cloudless sky,” when she noticed 12 military jets flying overhead. She watched in awe as they left diaphanous contrails across the blue sky. It was a defining moment, when she suddenly realized, “Why paint?” Why limit herself to two dimensions when she could make art with anything she liked — “fire, water, the human body?”

In 1973, by which time Abramović had already left contrails across Yugoslavia’s art scene, she was visited by curator Richard Demarco, who invited her to perform at a festival in Scotland. Abramović and the SKC headed to Edinburgh, where she performed alongside Joseph Beuys. She continued to explore the limits of her body, escaping the confines of everything that she has known under the dictatorial rule of her mother and Tito’s Yugoslavia. In 1975, Abramović was invited to a gallery in Amsterdam named “de Appel” and asked to create a performance for a Dutch TV show called Beeldspraak (Picture Speech). Arriving in Amsterdam, Abramović was met by de Appel’s curator, Wies Smals, and a young German artist, Ulay. The latter showed Abramović the city and helped her set up the work for Beeldspraak, entitled Thomas Lips (a work in which Abramović cuts a five-point star on her stomach with a razor blade). After the performance, Ulay tended to Abramović’s wounds. They went out to dinner and discovered that they not only had the same birthday, November 30, but had also both torn out their birthday page from their diaries. This “karmic sign” was to become the foundation for their 12-year union, from 1976 to 1988. They roamed the Australian desert, lived in a campervan, adopted a dog named Alba, and subsisted on little to nothing.

Finances are a theme throughout Walk Through Walls. For instance, in 1977, Abramović and Ulay exhibit their performance Imponderabilia. They are promised 750,000 lire (about $350), but are given a panoply of excuses for why they are yet to receive payment. Ulay is persistent, gets the money, and hides it in a toilet cistern for the duration of the performance. They were the only artists who were paid by the organizers. In the working relationship, Ulay supervised the financial side, and Abramović openly admits she had little to no idea about the financial vicissitudes of their partnership. When their romantic and working relationship drew to a close, Ulay gave Abramović 10,000 guilder (around $6,000), informing her that this was half of the money they had. One would presume that there was more than this after over a decade of producing and exhibiting work together across the globe, but Abramović doesn’t complain or question Ulay’s honesty.

Regardless of Ulay’s role as financial proprietor, Abramović was the better networker — and, it seems, was more dedicated to art. After months spent in the Australian Outback, Ulay and Abramović created a performance entitled Gold Found by the Artists for a gallery in Sydney. They planned to sit opposite one another, without moving or getting up, for 16 days straight, fasting throughout. After 10 days, Ulay stood up and left. They were both in critical medical condition, but, despite a doctor’s warning that the consequences of carrying on could be fatal, the performance was resumed the next day. But Ulay left the table once more. That night, Abramović wrote in her diary that she finds it easier to cope with pain. Looking back, she writes, “he thought that when he stood up in the middle of the performance, I would stand, too — and I didn’t. My thinking was simply that he had reached his limit, but I hadn’t reached mine […] the work came before everything else.”

Abramović reasons that it is her “partisan heritage” that informs her commitment. But it is hard not to read Abramović’s work as an unconscious enactment of upending patriarchal norms. It is difficult to resist reading Abramović’s endurance within the context of Ulay’s control of their finances; it is as if Abramović relies upon her dedication and superhuman endurance — her remarkable physical labor — to counterpoint the asymmetrical economic dynamic between the two artists.

Ulay was also in charge of the pair’s archive, which contained “hundreds of photographs and negatives, as well as hundreds of hours of videotape.” Abramović admits that she frequently regretted giving Ulay control, as he would often sell documents to people she didn’t particularly like, at bad prices. In the early 2000s, Ulay called Abramović to discuss the matter. He asked Abramović if she would be willing to buy the archive; he needed the money for his daughter. Abramović collaborated with her current gallerist in New York, Sean Kelly, and reclaimed her and Ulay’s work. This, too, reads like a delicious coup de théâtre that undermines the often-discussed patrilineality of archives. Abramović’s restored control over her own body of work is commensurate to the physical endurance she demonstrates in her performances.

The relationship between Abramović and Ulay remains acrimonious. After The Artist Is Present, Ulay took Abramović to court over the profits for the work they made together. As Abramović puts it, they “needed a judge to resolve decisions we couldn't agree upon over the last twenty-six years. So life not only goes on — it also gets very messy sometimes.”

Her contentious financial relationship with Ulay brings to light a broader issue in the art world. Abramović has long fought against an art industry where performance has little economic and legal value. Abramović always felt pressure to make work that sold, but “performance produced nothing marketable.” While the consequences of this have been hotly debated, Abramović, along with her gallerist Sean Kelly, established an effective working model to sell documentation and editions of her work, as well as creating “ephemeral” performance pieces as commissionable exhibitions.

But Abramović is not just interested in making performance art profitable, she’s also committed to establishing its “legacy.” Of Seven Easy Pieces, in which she enacts famous, “historical” works of performance art, she writes that one of her main motivations was the desire to preserve the ephemeral. Seven Easy Pieces becomes a multilayered ecosystem, with an anterior substratum of historical performance art pieces joining Abramović’s own body of work. And the performances, in turn, illustrate that reenactment; the reliving of performance art, transcribed anew on Abramović’s body, facilitates the preservation and simultaneous retransmission of performance art.

Abramović has reconfigured the place of performance in the art world, pushing the bodies, objects, and spaces it implicates, into a resistant arena. She has made a living with what she continues to argue has no real, material existence. She has endured great physical hardship. And she has carved the history of her work, and the actions of others, in scars and impressions across her body.

I am still conscious of everything that performance art surrenders when it enters the cave of a white-cube gallery. I am reminded of her critics, who see Abramović wedging performance into an economy of representation for which it was perhaps never intended; transforming performance into a commodity in the eyes of the object-hungry art market. But I am grateful to Abramović for destabilizing the notion that performance is ephemeral and, in the words of Peggy Phelan, doomed to “loss and disappearance.” Abramović has learned how to play the game, while also challenging and changing the rules, ensuring that performance exists as a series of exchanges, objects, and bodies in relation, which continue to speak into an unknown future. Thanks to Abramović’s contribution, the very form of her art will continue to endure.

¤


Bryony White is a writer and PhD candidate based in London. She is undertaking a doctoral project at King's College London exploring performance, contemporary art and the law.

LARB Contributor

Bryony White is a writer and PhD candidate based in London. She is undertaking a doctoral project at King’s College London exploring performance, contemporary art, and the law. She has written for The Atlantic, Times Literary Supplement, The Awl, and Apollo Magazine.

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