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Today Marina Abramović is known as “the grandmother of performance art,” due to her role as a pioneer of the use of performance art as a visual arts medium. Abramović began her career in performance in 1973, when she was already in her late twenties. Before that, as a student of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramović explored her interest in the body through paintings influenced by the abstract forms of Picasso (image 1). However, Abramović quickly found herself frustrated by the limits of expression in painting, and upon her exposure to the performance art medium while at school in Zagreb, her works became increasingly immaterial.

Abramović cites Marcel Duchamp and Dada (image 2), as well as the Fluxus movement, as being immensely influential on her work. In the 1960s George Maciunas started Fluxus, also directly influenced by Duchamp’s ready-mades, and Dada performances. Fluxus called for  a living art outside the traditional gallery setting.

Fluxus and Dada both advocated art of experience, in which the embrace of chance, and an emphasis on audience interaction was crucial towards ridding the world of the “dead” art found in galleries and institutions.

 

“I have arrived at the conclusion that…the performance has no meaning without the public because, as Duchamp said it is the public that completes the work of art. In the case of performance, I would say that public and performer are not only complimentary but almost inseparable.”

-Abramović on the influence of Duchamp in her emphasis on audience interaction.

Yoko Ono is one such Fluxus artist who was working in New York in the 1970s, and whose emphasis on the role of the audience, and challenge of passive viewership, is paralleled in Abramović’s Rhythms series of 1973-74. In particular, Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) (image 3) and Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974) (image 4) emphasize a shared interest in the use of their own bodies as victims to chance to enforce active instead of passive viewership.

Since Abramović began her performance career forty years ago, she has become one of the most influential performance artists in history for her use of her own body as both the subject and the medium in performances which test her physical end mental endurance, while also emphasizing audience interaction.

For more information about Dada or Fluxus, follow the links below.

Performance and Body Art in the 1970s:

From the end of the 1960s forward, an interest in “body” art emerged, in which both male and female artists turned to the “isolated physical self,” sacrificing themselves to risky and distressing actions as a means to shock their audiences and to challenge commodification of art by museums and galleries. During this period of political and social activism, Marina Abramović, along with Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci, Yoko Ono, and other artists, turned to the physical presence of the body in performance and body art as an attempt to jolt the viewer from their traditional role of passivity. Performance through the medium of the body became a place to acknowledge issues linked to women’s agency, as well as issues of race, sexuality, and otherness. This heightened interest in performance emerged along with the influence of Fluxus, started by George Maciunas in the 1960s, in which artists embraced chance and audience interaction as a means to “purge the world of dead art.”

Duration:

Durational works  became increasingly popular in the 1970s for their rejection of traditional authorship or regularity, in direct opposition to the commodity culture related to the gallery or institution. These durational works were continuously in flux and therefore unpredictable and did not fit within a traditional gallery setting. Since the 1970s, Abramović has been a pioneer for the use of performance as a visual art form, using the body and duration as a means to test her mental and physical limits. In these durational works, such as her Rhythms series (1973-74) or Lips of Thomas (1975) (video available here), the long periods of time are used to push Abramović’s mental and physical limits, while also challenging the passivity of the viewer, who is made increasingly uncomfortable in watching the artist’s own suffering.

For more details, an informative, concise overview of performance in the 1960s and 1970s is available on the Walker Art Center’s website here.

Follow the links below to learn about other major body art and performance artists of the 1960s and 1970s: 

Carolee Schneemann:
In Schneemann’s 1975 Interior Scroll Schneemann, after applying paint to her face and body, and enacting a series of “life model action poses,” slowly drew a scroll of paper from her vagina and read aloud from it. By embracing core imagery through the presentation of her naked body, Schneemann rejected the phallus in favor of female sexual empowerment: “Using my body as an extension of my painting-constructions challenged and threatened the psychic territorial power lines by which women, in 1963, were admitted to the Art Stud Club, so long as they behaved enough like the men, and did work clearly in the traditions and pathways hacked out by men.”

Vito Acconci:
In 1971 Vito Acconci lay hidden under a wooden ramp in New York’s Sonnabend Gallery, and intermittently masturbated, basing his sexual fantasies off of the sounds of the gallery visitors above him. Acconci expressed these fantasies aloud, where they were then projected through speakers into the gallery space. The piece emphasizes the vital role of the viewer, whose actions directly influence the development of the work. The visitors are taken out of a role of passivity and instead are unexpectedly objectified by Acconci’s actions below the ramp.

Yoko Ono:

Another female artist who was incorporating the viewer as a vital component in performance art in the 1960s and 1970s is Yoko Ono. In 1964 Ono performed Cut Piece, in which Ono sat passively on a stage, fully clothed, and invited her audience members to mount the stage and cut off a piece of her clothing using the scissors she placed on the floor beside her. This performance reflects Ono’s participation in the Fluxus movement, through her emphasis on audience interaction. The performance is dependent on the actions and reactions of her viewers, and therefore is unpredictable and constantly in flux.

My personal favorite performance by Marina Abramović: Imponderabilia (1977):

In 1976 Abramović met Ulay, and over the next decade they collaborated in a series of relational performances during which they referred to themselves as a collective, androgynous being called “Ulay-Abramović.” In these works Abramović and Ulay questioned the socially defined identities of both femininity and masculinity, while also continuing to test their limits. These performances by Abramović and Ulay were not meant to be pleasing spectacles, but rather to disturb the viewer from a role of passivity.

In their 1977 performance, Imponderabilia, Abramović and Ulay stood as human doorposts on either side of the narrow entrance to the Galleria Communale d’Arte Moderna, in Bologna, Italy. The narrowness of the space forced visitors to squeeze sideways between them, forced to choose whether to face the naked Ulay or naked Abramović in order to enter the museum. Upon viewing the filmed footage from this performance, one notes that what stands out the most in this piece is not the vulnerability of the two naked artists, but rather the vulnerability and uncertainty of the visitors. Each person, upon reaching the entrance, was forced to decide first, whether they would enter the museum, and next, whether they would face the naked Abramović or the naked Ulay. By placing these decisions in the hands of the viewer, Imponderabilia becomes a performance of reflection on the subsequent reactions and interactions of the spectators. This piece also reflects Abramović and Ulay’s shared interest in duration, as the piece was performed in shifts, repeated throughout the exhibition, for a total of 700 hours.

Video of the Imponderabilia performance is available here.