Photo by Joel Chester Fildes, courtesy the artist

Marina Abramović, "The Drill" (2009). Performance view, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 2009

Photo by Joel Chester Fildes, courtesy the artist

Kira O'Reilly, "Stair Falling" (2009). Performance view, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 2009

October 2009 Reviews

Iran Inside Out

PLOT: This World and Nearer Ones

Frank Haines

Daughters of the Revolution

Parrworld

Mona Hatoum

Rita Ackermann

Joseph Mallord William Turner Marina Abramovic Egon Schiele MoMA, a Few Shades Darker Colin Chinnery on the Future of ShContemporary Live from Italy, It’s Artissima Love Hurts Let Them Eat Art

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Grandmothers live to nurture their offspring so they will thrive, and Marina Abramović, the self-proclaimed "grandmother of performance art," is no exception. She has pioneered efforts to promote and preserve that most ephemeral of the visual arts, setting up her own foundation for the purpose and encouraging art institutions to establish departments to collect, curate, and conserve these works. In this spirit of grandmotherly devotion, last July 3, she produced a performance art extravaganza, "Marina Abramović Presents...," as one of the opening acts of the Manchester International Arts Festival, in collaboration with its artistic adviser, the globe-trotting curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. The pair took over the city’s small but illustrious Whitworth Art Gallery, stripping it bare of its Turners and Constables to transform it into a laboratory for live art. In its various rooms, including a stairwell and basement, 14 artists, many of them Abramović’s former students, engaged in individual performances, each four hours in duration, for the 17 days until the festival’s close. 

The audience’s participation was critical. Having been frustrated by attendees who chat about dinner plans and check their BlackBerrys while she challenges the limits of body and mind, Abramović decided to school audiences in how to view and understand durational art. So in Manchester, after checking personal possessions and cell phones in the lobby and donning lab coats, we audience members were asked to follow Abramović through The Drill, her hourlong "course," and then to remain in the museum for the rest of the four-hour show.

Michael Jackson had died earlier that week, and the 63-year-old Abramović described his death and the self-destructive lives of other artists as "body drama," which she sees as the antithesis of the body art she teaches. "It’s difficult to raise the spirit, but very easy to bring it down," she said. "Performance [art] is a tool to elevate your spirit." She counseled us to focus, during these performances, on the artists’ movements, however minute, and on such details as the beads of sweat on their faces, the rhythm of their breathing, even the room’s changing atmosphere. Ultimately, we would be the ones to endow these works with significance. Live art, she said "is a human exchange." It is not about being a spectator. She then took us through a series of exercises conceived to quiet our monkey minds and make us more present and responsive. Her exercises could have been designed by a rōshi: drink a cup of water with complete attention; engage in a group scream; gaze at the face of a fellow participant; walk slowly according to her measured commands. Speaking for myself, the tasks did succeed in putting me in a more receptive zone.

And being in this zone is essential for viewing performance art, because no art can seem as ridiculous, especially when described after the fact. To appreciate it, you have to come to it as a believer, not a critic. This is art about which you can honestly say, "You had to be there," but let me single out three artists for special praise: Eunhye Hwang, who mesmerized participants through a series of exercises she performed with three small tape recorders playing white noise; Yingmei Duan, who with eyes shut and body bare portrayed shame, pleasure, longing, oppression, and host of other feelings in rapid succession, all while challenging viewers’ comfort; and Kira O’Reilly, whose naked, painfully protracted acrobatics brought the art of Egon Schiele to life, though who knows if that was her intent. Then again, as Grandma Abramović says, it is the viewer who gives art its meaning. 

"Marina Abramović Presents..." originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2009 Table of Contents.