Marina Abramović / the movie

Performance

Can performance art be treated like performing art – something to be repeated and reinterpreted by anyone with adequate experience, skill, and conviction, like the script of a play or a musical score? Abramović believed so – that the extremely personal, expressive, and transformative acts of performance art could be liberated from their author. When Marina Abramović Dies: A Biography by James Westcott

When I went to see the Marina Abramović retrospective at MoMA I realized that many of the things she has done for art, I have done for sex. Breath play, objectification, cutting, flogging, slapping; there were elements of my sex life all around me, but in the expansive white walls of a museum rather than the cozy dim lights of my bedroom. I've been interested in the intersection between bdsm and art for a long time, but only recently has it occurred to me that I could experiment with this myself.

A while ago I went to a combination art and sex play party. I decided to do something for my Cracked Spines series. I wanted to use a quote from Jean Genet, so channeling Carolee Schneemann and a smidge of Matthew Barney I did a drawing with a Sharpie in my mouth while bound in a straight jacket.

When I saw the artifacts from Abramović's Rhythm 0 at the museum (the table of objects and a still photo) I was fascinated. When I saw it performed live during The Artist is Absent, I knew I had to try this myself.

I did a test run with a small party of friends in my home. There were 69 objects ranging from the benign (body paint, a cookie, ribbon, a pearl necklace), to the sexual (condoms, a glass dildo, a vibrator), to objects of pain (floggers, riding crop, a metal ruler). People stood and sat chatting with friends, drinking wine and nibbling snacks in front of the table with the sign taped to the wall above. There was no announcement made. At one point I stood on the white sheet on the floor next to the table and waited. Minutes went by as the room got a bit quiet and people waited for someone to make the first move. I stood completely silent, looking straight ahead, unmoving (unless someone moved me) and totally passive for a little over two (maybe two and a half) hours. I could have (and wanted to) go longer, but the party wanted me back. Through the whole process I had never felt more powerful, more confident and more in control in my life.

Funny huh?

I did it a second time at Dark Odyssey. This time there were a lot more people and more importantly people who didn't know me. This time I put no obvious bdsm toys or implements of pain. There were also no obvious sex toys. To my surprise and pleasure, the experience proved to be far more powerful and the participants much more creative than I expected. It was pleasurable, terrifying, arousing, nerve wracking, calming, painful, meditative, funny, dehumanizing and empowering.

When it was over I immediately burst into tears. As before, my only complaint about the experience was that it was ended too soon.

It was done in the dungeon which was not my first choice for a location. I wanted to do it outdoors in a more neutral environment. I didn't want it to be perceived as just another scene, but I realized later how much more interesting the experience became in that space and how the rules and etiquette of play changed. To use the lingo, I was basically giving anyone who came by and chose to participate consensual non-consent to do whatever they wanted to me. The idea of what "bdsm" could be was expanded for me the way the idea of what defined "art" had been expanded 50 years ago.

I had mixed feelings about copying her performance. I wasn't sure if it was "okay" to recreate someone's work in this way. But the more I do these things the more I want to experience what other artists did and learn from those experiences and interpret them in a way that makes sense to me.

I was invited, but unable to go, to a Halloween orgy. Faced with the problem of what kind of costume to wear when you're just going to end up naked anyway, I was going to go as Yoko Ono doing "Cut Piece":


YOKO ONO CUT PIECE
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Marina Abramović

I sat on the floor of MoMA, my butt sore from the previous nights caning and watched Marina Abramović for the final two and a half hours of her marathon performance in which she sat in a chair for the entire length of her retrospective The Artist is Present while the public was invited to sit silently across from her: 75 days, 736 hours and 30 minutes, and over 1,500 sitters. It was my second time there, the first time was about seeing the work in the show itself, the second time was about seeing her.

As the clock ticked closer and closer to 5:00, the excitement, tension, security guards and camera crews increased. Klaus Biesenbach (director of PS.1) the last sitter, rose from the chair when his time was up and kissed her on both cheeks. Marina dropped to her knees and then stood to a roar of applause and cheers from the crowd. The chairs were taken away and she did a little Mary Tyler Moore turn as the group of lab coat clad volunteers who had been recreating her work a floor above surrounded her. Surprisingly energetic and alert, she looked like someone had just presented her with a giant birthday cake with her name on it. It was beautiful.

Over the past couple of months, I'd gotten to know more of her work and found myself effected by it in a way I haven't experienced with a piece of art in a long time, meaning kind of turned on.

It really all came together when I saw The Artist is Absent in which Abramović's performances were recreated by people from NYC’s radical queer underground and BDSM / kinky communities. Seeing these works being performed in person was so much more powerful and seeing them performed by people of so many different genders, colors and sizes made it even more thought provoking and well... hot.

Some examples of her performances:

Rhythmn 0
Various objects (including perfume, a flower, a knife, a whip, a gun and a single bullet) are placed on a table with a sign saying:

There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
I am the object.
During this period I take full responsibility.


Breathing In / Breathing Out (Marina and Ulay pictured above):
We are kneeling face to face,
pressing our mouths together.

Our noses are blocked with filtertips.

Ulay
I am breathing in oxygen.
I am breathing out carbon dioxide.

Marina
I am breathing in oxygen.
I am breathing out carbon dioxide.

Ulay
I am breathing in oxygen.
I am breathing out carbon dioxide.


Light / Dark
We kneel face to face.
Our faces are lit by two strong lamps.
Alternately, we slap each other's faces until one of us stops.


Relation in Time
Two people sit back to back, tied together by their hair, unmoving (17 hours)

Of course, these are just a few examples of decades worth of work and not all of them have such blatant kinky connections. But most of her work does deal with pushing the limits of the mind and body in one way or another and as a kinkster, it was worth seeing a master at work.



The End