ART
When Marina Abramovic Dies
/ Alexandro Segade
05.12.10
When Marina Abramovic Dies is a biography of the Serbian-born artist written by her former assistant, James Westcott. The author’s first job for Abramovic was to painstakingly transcribe video tapes of The House With The Ocean View (2002), a performance in which Abramovic lived on-view in a gallery for twelve days. Westcott wrote down everything she did in those seventy-two hours of footage: sleeping, sitting, standing, drinking, urinating. Westcott’s biography performs another function for the artist, making a case for Abramovic’s contribution to the last four decades of art history by presenting her live art and life story in prose. The book suggests that in order to become sacred, one must tend to one’s own mythology: it is titled after Abramovic’s proposed final performance, her funeral, which requires three coffins be buried on three separate continents. And Antony and the Johnsons will sing. Writing with a former employee’s insight, Westcott appears an acolyte preemptively eulogizing his master.
Westcott took Abramovic’s boot camp-style “Cleaning the House” workshop in rural Andalusia, and was subjected to five days of fasting and total silence during which “reading, sex and cell phones were also forbidden.” The author engaged in exercises, standing naked and blindfolded in the hot sun while being photographed for the Abramovic archive, enduring forced staring contests with the other participants, “trying to live up to Abramovic’s example, after all.” In writing about Abramovic’s method of teaching her “transcendental strain” of performance art, the writer ponders the question, “Why were we doing this?” Tellingly, it is the one question Abramovic instructs her students not to ask. The answer for Westcott may be found in a passage in which the author describes Abramovic’s effect on the Dutch art circle that embraced her in the 1970’s: “Marina’s charisma beguiled almost everyone she met. She was also capable of absorbing enormous amounts of dedication...it was an exhilarating and blessed place to be, bathed in Marina’s aura.”
If Westcott has a tendency to inflate Abramovic’s “aura,” it is motivated by the subject herself. At the age of twenty-seven, Abramovic asked a prominent curator, “Am I still young and beautiful enough to become a famous artist?” The answer is still “yes”. Suddenly omnipresent in a media obsessed with the nude bodies on display in her MoMA retrospective, one may wonder when Abramovic’s long sought apotheosis occurred. According to Westcott, it was in 1997, when she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. However, the world did not have proof until Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in 2005, when Abramovic “re-performed” the greatest hits of performance art. By adapting iconic performances by Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Valie EXPORT, Bruce Naumann and Gina Pane (with permission; only Chris Burden vetoed a re-do of Transfixed), Abramovic transformed them into durational artworks, each lasting seven hours. With gold-leaf on her face, Abramovic is photographed also Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare, for posterity. Two Abramovic pieces, one old and one new, were also presented in the week-long program. Thus, the artist asserts a canon of performance art history that places her oeuvre, and her body, at its center.
Westcott took Abramovic’s boot camp-style “Cleaning the House” workshop in rural Andalusia, and was subjected to five days of fasting and total silence during which “reading, sex and cell phones were also forbidden.” The author engaged in exercises, standing naked and blindfolded in the hot sun while being photographed for the Abramovic archive, enduring forced staring contests with the other participants, “trying to live up to Abramovic’s example, after all.” In writing about Abramovic’s method of teaching her “transcendental strain” of performance art, the writer ponders the question, “Why were we doing this?” Tellingly, it is the one question Abramovic instructs her students not to ask. The answer for Westcott may be found in a passage in which the author describes Abramovic’s effect on the Dutch art circle that embraced her in the 1970’s: “Marina’s charisma beguiled almost everyone she met. She was also capable of absorbing enormous amounts of dedication...it was an exhilarating and blessed place to be, bathed in Marina’s aura.”
If Westcott has a tendency to inflate Abramovic’s “aura,” it is motivated by the subject herself. At the age of twenty-seven, Abramovic asked a prominent curator, “Am I still young and beautiful enough to become a famous artist?” The answer is still “yes”. Suddenly omnipresent in a media obsessed with the nude bodies on display in her MoMA retrospective, one may wonder when Abramovic’s long sought apotheosis occurred. According to Westcott, it was in 1997, when she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. However, the world did not have proof until Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in 2005, when Abramovic “re-performed” the greatest hits of performance art. By adapting iconic performances by Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Valie EXPORT, Bruce Naumann and Gina Pane (with permission; only Chris Burden vetoed a re-do of Transfixed), Abramovic transformed them into durational artworks, each lasting seven hours. With gold-leaf on her face, Abramovic is photographed also Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare, for posterity. Two Abramovic pieces, one old and one new, were also presented in the week-long program. Thus, the artist asserts a canon of performance art history that places her oeuvre, and her body, at its center.