A Gun To Her Head And An Arrow To Her Heart

Marina Abramović is coming back Down Under. A retrospective exhibition of her work, Private Archaeology, makes up part of the Dark Mofo festival calendar at David Walsh’s Museum Of New Art in Hobart (Abramović was in conversation with Walsh on Sunday); while in Sydney she trains budding young performance artists at Pier 2/3 in Walsh Bay, thanks to Kaldor Public Art Projects. 

There was another Abramović exhibition scheduled too, for the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2016, but that retrospective was canned earlier this month due to trouble with trustees. In a statement Abramović said: “I’m so sorry. They say that it is complicated. One reason was there were two exhibitions in Australia. It was too much to make a third one. The trustees they didn’t want any more.” 

"Engaging with Abramović’s work will challenge your expectations of contemporary art.”

This year is not the first time we’ve had the legendary woman wandering our country: in 1979, Abramovic attended the third Biennale Of Sydney; and in 1980, Abramović arrived to study Indigenous culture in Central Australia. Then in 1981 at the Art Gallery Of New South Wales, Abramović produced the first performance from a collection titled Nightsea Crossing, Gold Found By The Artists, a work that involved sitting across the table in silence from her then partner, Uwe Laysiepen, aka Ulay, for seven hours at time. Arranged on the black table were 250gm of gold nuggets which they’d found in the desert, an Indigneous boomerang covered in 24-carat gold leaf, and a live diamond-back python. She’s described as one of the first performance artists to be recognised by formal arts institutions, performing major solo shows across Europe and the United States for more than 25 years. 

Emma Pike, Curator at Kaldor Public Arts Projects, explains what makes Abramović such a seminal artist: “With a four-decade-long career, Marina Abramović is one of the world’s most prolific artists. She emerged in the ‘70s when performance art was on the fringe of the art world, and is now one of the best-known artists working today. She continues to push the boundaries of contemporary art despite her status and acceptance into the mainstream art world, continually challenging the role of artist and audience. Engaging with Abramović’s work will challenge your expectations of contemporary art.”

In 1974 in a work titled Rhythm 5, Abramović set a five-pointed star on fire and leaped through the flames, only to lose consciousness. She later commented that she was angry with her physical limits, “I was very angry because I understood there is a physical limit: when you lose consciousness you can’t be present; you can’t perform.”

This preoccupation with physical limits, with the possibility of extreme bodily pain, and with the body, as both medium and subject, was on show again later that year in Rhythm 0. Seventy-two objects were set on a table and Abramović advised the audience that they could do whatever they wanted to her for six hours. The items on the table included ropes, grapes, wine, a piece of bread, scissors, nails and a pistol with a single bullet. As time passed, the audience became more wild: they cut her neck and drank her blood; a man put a gun to her head, before the gallery removed both the man and the gun. 

"After exactly six hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”

On the experience Abramović has said, “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly six hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”

In 1975, for Lips Of Thomas, Abramović ate a kilo of honey, then drank a litre of red wine, used a razor blade to cut a star into her stomach, whipped herself and then lay on a cross made of ice. She did this in a gallery in Austria, and then again in 2005 at the Guggenheim in New York.

In Amsterdam in 1976 Abramović met Ulay, a German performance artist with whom she formed both a professional and a romantic relationship. Rest Energy was produced in Dublin in 1980, a work that charted Ulay and Abramović’s heartbeats as they held opposites sides of a drawn bow and arrow aimed at Abramović’s heart. 

To end their relationship, they produced The Great Wall Walk in 1988: they walked the Great Wall Of China together — one starting at each end, meeting in the middle for one last moment before they parted ways. Then in 2010 at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York, Abramović performed The Artist Is Present for an accumulated 716 hours, a work that involved sitting across from members of the audience and looking into their eyes for a minute’s silence. Ulay attended — and there is footage of both of their eyes welling up as they stare at each other for the first time in more than 20 years. 

In 1997, Balkan Baroque involved Abramović scrubbing a pile of cow bones on which she was sitting for six hours at a time over four days, as a commentary on the war in Yugoslavia. The work was performed in a basement at the Venice Biennale. 

In London last year her work 512 Hours was performed in the Serpentine Gallery, London. The work was named for the amount of time Abramović was to spend in the gallery. Having left their phone, camera and watch cloaked at the door, audience members, 160-at-a-time, were taken by the hand and urged to spend time ‘being present’, staring at bare walls, taking in the space around them, getting lost in their own thoughts, and creating “a pure emotional connection”. They were permitted to stay as long as they liked. “Everything is there, in possibility. We need the public, we need me, and we need chemistry,” she said.

Her piece Work/Relation, first produced by Abramović and Ulay in 1978, involved three groups of people moving stones across the room in three different ways, a commentary on teamwork. It was used last year for a World Cup-themed Adidas commercial with the tagline “all in or nothing”. And of course Abramović was back in the news last month after claiming she was “used” by Jay-Z in 2013, in a collaboration centred around his song Picasso Baby. The collaboration is based upon The Artist Is Present, except this time around Jay-Z performs his song for six hours, and was agreed to in return for a donation to Abramović’s Institute, that Abramović said she had never received. The Institute then released a statement to clarify that the donation had been received, but Abramović had not been notified about the receipt of payment. 

“Everything is there, in possibility. We need the public, we need me, and we need chemistry.”

In a statement about Marina Abramović: In Residence Abramović wrote about her relationship the public changing: first, she was a performer, then she engaged directly in a one-to-one experience in The Artist Is Present, then with 512 Hours, the public became the performers. Pike explains,” I see Abramović’s relationship with the audience shifting to become something clearer, more equal and more pure… The Project is not a performance; it’s more of a relationship between each person in the space.”

In Sydney, visitors will place all their belongings in a locker before entering the space. “I will be like a conductor in the exhibition space,” wrote Abramović, “but it will be the public who will take the physical and emotional journey. We constantly like to be entertained, to get things from outside. We never take time to get in touch with ourselves… our inner self. My function in this new kind of performance situation is to show you, through the Abramović Method, what you can do for yourself.”

Pike expects that more than 30,000 visitors will attend Pier 2/3. What’s her hot tip for making the most of the residency? "I would suggest coming to the project on a weekday if you can, arriving when we open the doors to the public at 12pm, to avoid the queues.”