🔳 SIA Notes: Performance
A series of short notes inspired by words at the center of contemporary art discourse
These are some notes I took during a quick course at Sotheby’s Institute of Art which allowed me to reconnect with contemporary art history after an almost 20 year break.
My recent work has been so dependent on technology and rapid AV market developments that I felt I needed to turn back to Art History in order to reevaluate my outlook on what I do in an emerging field, and what I intend to build. In other words, it was meant to be a kind of therapy for what Matt Klein called an ‘anxiety-provoking perma-crisis and breakneck innovation’ that many of us experience in our day-to-day practice.Â
The notes I made across a two-month period helped me to focus my attention on phenomena that I found relevant or that were relatively unknown to me. It also turned out to be the best remedy to various forms of popular escapism, from pointless wellness rituals to traveling for no reason to places that don’t need me.
Before visiting Marina Abramovic’s retrospective that just opened in London I want to dedicate a while to thinking about her extraordinary practice, and bridge the 1974 performance, ‘Rhythm 0’, and ‘The Artist is Present’ (2010), which, when looked at as two opposite sides of the same coin, tell an unexpected story of a movement towards hope.Â
It begins in a dark place, where a 23 y.o. Marina proved, channeling the atrocities of war with which she was raised, that a human being in a close, unsupervised encounter is always a potential killer. Over thirty years later, in her seminal MoMA performance, Abramovic and curator Klaus Biesenbach, (who came up with the legendary title), achieved the ultimate goal, which was defining the simplest yet most essential artistic gesture of unselfishness and generosity. It's hard to imagine a more poignant manifestation of the strength that art can still have than what Abramovic achieved by offering her presence and attention to anyone who needed it. The viral video of Ulay sitting with her added an electrifying moment of magic to the performance, a moment when we saw a lifetime defined in a single shot. Two people holding hands encapsulated all the risk and love they used to share with each other - and with generations of their viewers.
One could think that Marina’s art is made of an almost military stamina and dedication to art as a mission (Father), combined with her spiritual, christological side (Grandmother) where she performs her art as an act of social sacrifice, becoming an embodied mirror for humanity, for what it is and what it could become. Not by accident, the medium she has chosen to inhabit and defend is, in her own words, a realm of nomads, displaced people who have no home or shelter. Their shattered history, both personal and political, has made them one with their artistic practice.