Abstract
This chapter discusses recent strategies to mediatize performance artist Marina Abramović and the narratives created around her work. At the center stands her live performance at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, which attracted almost one million visitors. While Abramović herself tried to explain this hype by scientifically proving the psycho-neurological impact of her performance, I argue that the hype originated in a scarcely graspable narrative around the performance spreads over time and through different media, which follows a popular pattern in the mediatization of female artists: the implicit consideration of their artistic practice as a compensation for an unanswered needs to be loved. The chapter analyzes paradigmatic projections of a romantic need onto female artists mainly in film, arguing that Abramović instrumentalizes the narrative and makes it her image strategy.
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Notes
- 1.
The photographs that blogger Katie Notopoulos collected for Marina Abramović Made Me Cry were all shot by Marco Anelli, who has been a regular photographer of Abramović’s work since the 1990s. See http://marinaAbramovicmademecry.tumblr.com/ (accessed December 8, 2015).
- 2.
While the depicted reactions certainly formed the public image of the performance, it can also be speculated that they conditioned the reactions of the visitors; see Mechtild Widrich , “Ge-Schichtete Präsenz und zeitgenössische Performance. Marina Abramovićs The Artist Is Present,” in Uta Daur, ed., Authentizität und Wiederholung. Künstlerische und kulturelle Manifestationen eines Paradoxes (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), 147–66.
- 3.
As part of her retrospective show in Moscow (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011), Marina Abramović together with neuro-scientist Suzanne Dikker and media artist Matthias Oostrik visualized the brain waves of the participants in the setting of Abramović’s sitting performance. The experiment, entitled Measuring the Magic of the Mutual Gaze, was announced to be a “Neuroscience Experiment,” but no results have so far been published. See http://www.suzannedikker.net/art-science-education/? (accessed July 16, 2016).
- 4.
Widrich, Authentizität, 148.
- 5.
Roger Odin , De la fiction (Brussels: De Boeck and Larcier), 10–11.
- 6.
Such a detachment from any personal dimension can be observed in almost all of Abramović’s performance documentation . See for example the video compilation Collected Works. Marina Abramović (1996), DVD, produced by A MonteVideo/Time Based Art/A&U Production (NL), or the comprehensive documentation, Amy Gotzler, ed., Marina Abramović. The House with the Ocean View (Milan: Charta, 2003).
- 7.
There are many rumors about Abramović bringing other artists who perform or depict her work to trial. In some cases—as with the French filmmaker Pierre Coulibeuf—the trial and verdict became public; see http://itsartlaw.com/2011/03/13/Abramović-victory/ (accessed December 8, 2015). In various public talks, Abramović emphasized the importance of keeping control over the presence of her work in the media: see, for example, the recording of an informal conversation at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIL7stvnvBs (accessed December 8, 2015).
- 8.
The photographic and verbal documentation of Rhythm 10 can be found, for example, in the MoMA exhibition catalogue: Klaus Biesenbach, ed., Marina Abramović. The Artist Is Present (New York : Museum of Modern Art , 2010). The video of Rhythm 10 is included in the Collected Works DVD, cited above. The photographs, the verbal description, and the video have been presented in various exhibitions, such as Marina Abramović . Objects Performance Video Sound (1995), Museum of Modern Art Oxford, curated by Chrissie Iles.
- 9.
“I turn on the first tape recorder. I take the first knife and stab in between the fingers of my left hand as fast as possible. Every time I cut myself I change the knife. When I’ve used all of the knives (all of the rhythms) I rewind the tape recorder. I listen to the recording of the first part of the performance. I concentrate.”; quoted from http://arteperformativa.tumblr.com/post/36811495090/rhythm-10-1973-performance-60-min-museo-darte (accessed December 17, 2015).
- 10.
Of course, Burden’s video is not mere documentation but an artistic project in its own right. However, also in the case of Abramović, it would be wrong to categorize her documentation as secondary material. Abramović strictly directs the mediatization of her performances, up to the point of restaging a performance for the camera to achieve a documentation that matches her aesthetic ambitions; see Marcel Bleuler, “Deutungsvorschrift? Die filmische Vermittlung bei Marina Abramović und Pierre Huyghe,” in Eva Ehninger and Magdaleny Nieslony, eds., Theorie 2 : Potenzial und Potenzierung künstlerischer Theorie (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), 239–62.
- 11.
As Abramović states herself, these artists strongly influenced her artistic practice at its beginning; see Amelia Jones and Marina Abramović , “The Artist as Archaeologist,” in Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, eds., Perform, Repeat, Record. Live Art in History (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 543–65.
- 12.
Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1998), 91.
- 13.
Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 22.
- 14.
Quoted from the catalogue published on the occasion of the MoMA exhibition in 2010; Biesenbach, The Artist is Present, 92.
- 15.
Peggy Phelan , Unmarked. The Politics of Performance (London and New York : Routledge, 1993); and Peggy Phelan , Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London and New York : Routledge, 1997).
- 16.
Phelan , Unmarked, 6.
- 17.
Ibid., 3.
- 18.
Ibid., 6.
- 19.
Ibid., 163.
- 20.
Ibid., 146.
- 21.
Jones, Body Art, 24.
- 22.
Quoted from the film Marina Abramović . The Artist Is Present.
- 23.
Private photographs are included in the following exhibition catalogues on Abramović: Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Chrissie Iles, eds., Marina Abramović (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 1996); Toni Stoos, ed., Marina Abramović : Artist Body (Milan: Charta, 1998); and Germano Celant, ed., Marina Abramović : Public Body: Installations and Objects 1965–2001 (Milan: Charta, 2001).
- 24.
Quoted from the 86th episode (season 6) of the TV-series Sex and the City (USA, 1998–2004), in which Abramović’s performance The House with the Ocean View (2002) was re-enacted.
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Bleuler, M. (2018). In Bed with Marina Abramović: Mediatizing Women’s Art as Personal Drama. In: Esner, R., Kisters, S. (eds) The Mediatization of the Artist. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66230-5_9
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