Seven hours in crotchless pants with an AK and an audience: arduous, but hardly far-fetched. She is a woman who once displayed herself for 12 days–starving, showering, peeing, sleeping–in bare suffering nakedness, the opposable thumb of the mise en scene. Marina Abramovic, performance artist, is covering famous works in a weeklong series at the Guggenheim, all of them physically exhausting at best; in a series dedicated to her friend Susan Sontag, she is quite explicitly regarding the pain of others. Last night she performed Seed Bed, the definitive wk from my top-three fave artist/architect Vito Acconci: Marina masturbated underneath a platform for seven hours while responding, via mic, to the audience above her. I missed it, but dirty talk, apparently, ensued–and intimacy was pondered. My roommate got busted by a security dude with a walkie-talkie because she was jumping up and down on the floorboards. QUESTION: Is the Guggenheim the appropriate venue for this? Isn’t time-based art kind of about interaction, quantum physics, increasing the possibilities for (and paths to) truth by altering the moment? Why is the Guggenheim so austere an environment that a lumbering authoritarian yells at my roommate for interacting with the interactive art? I mean, come on!
Tonight, Marina did Valie Export’s 1969 piece Action Pants: Genital Panic revamped: originally, Valie had projected pornographic images on a wall for ten minutes, then walked around the audience fully clothed but for a giant swathe of crotch cut from her pants, vagina on display. Says Export in the programme: “What you see now is reality, and it is not on the screen, and everybody sees you watching this now… Taken out of the film context, this was a totally different way for [the audience] to connect with a particular erotic symbol.”
But Marina’s version was pedestalized and spot-lit; no conversation, no projected images of naked ladies. Only her, sitting and shifting on a round, elevated platform, wearing a leather jacket, boots and the crotchless pants, naked below them, unshorn, wielding a real live machine gun, observing the audience looking, or not looking, or trying to decide whether to look at her pussy. When the porn star watches you, you must decide what you think right then, you must to deal with your relationship to her as woman, as art, as artist. I kept thinking she hasn’t peed in five hours, but her whole shit is some variation on physical suffering, on proving she would die or kill for her work, taking her faith in art to task through corporeal endangerment (Research: Is she Catholic?). She is a self-appointed (and self-compelled) soldier of expression. And we wanted to know what she was thinking.
Marina stared from the platform into a gawky, angelic, triangle-faced woman, and tears streamed down her face. Dribbled on the gun. The whole debate ’round performance art’s manipulation factor is pretty much bullshit when the “art” cries at you, cries first. Empathy trumped suspicion; the cynic groused, she’s good, oh she’s real good.
Some asshole yelled from above, from the second or the third floor, “What are you afraid of?” (What are you afraid of? Violence, sexual violence, the sexualization of violence, the security guard with the walkie talkie? Wasting time, wasting skills, wasting brain cells, forgetting to remove the tea kettle from the flame? Whether Marina snaps, cocks the gun, and wails, couching bullets and shrapnel in your flesh? Blowing up a balloon, it bursts, whips across your eye, slices open your retina? I can think of some things.)
This, on her fifth hour of sitting, genitals exposed, gripping the gun, looking into the new faces in the museum. You feel awkward even shifting your weight. Maybe she figured she didn’t need the porn.
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Has Kafka’s The Hunger Artist been assimilated In the Penal Colony? The visual spectacle and the suffering…it sexualizes Golgotha, which seems at once subversive and yet somehow strangely puritanical.
The Guggenheim seems like the perfect place for something like this; when The Cremaster Cycle was there, a friend of mine sold tickets…and gave plenty of refunds to unsuspecting tourists. Then again, the experience of going to a strip bar on a slow night, say midweek, can be equally tortuous, personal and labored for performer and spectator alike. But The Guggenheim’s rigid atmosphere, the sort of thing meant to contain art, delineate its boundaries and cordon it off from lived experience, blows up the synaptic bridge that would complete the analogy between the commonplace and the conceptual.
很意外找到这里。看到你写的文字。好想就像缘分一样，会常来看你~
noiiice blog, gol,
remind me to give you this article by andrea frasier about “the institution”. it made this whole thing easier for me to understand, ewpcially since at first i was pretty annoyed. the guggenheim is so weird – they do have a really diverse showing of art–that this series coincides with the RUSSIA show is pretty great–but it is pretty gimmicky. the talk was terrible. full of curator speak, which is insufferable and meaningless at the same time. lots of Tension and Intent and Context, and not a lot about the basic ideas contained within each performance, and their relation to each other, and their relation to, i dont know, say, the world? time? their past occurances? ack. but marina was luminous, and every once in a while would say something revealing or cute. like how she would forbid her students to use candles or eggs. the curator kind of looks like that edith head character from the incredibles, and obviously had very little to do with this program. some of the poor commenters in the audience were so star struck and clearly burgeoning “performance ARTists” themselves, that the q&a started to visibly try marina’s patience. either that or she was late (hahahah, as if) for a dinner date.
the thing with the guggenheim interference is that the more time i spent there, especially for the thomas lips performance, the more i started to understand her obsession with control within the institutional context. sort of like, you know, she rubs their back, they rub hers. that there is a real need for performance, which is one of the good things about this whole performa festival. that it is an experience, a skill, an art worthy (as all arts are) of being documented in varying levels within institutions. i mean, she’s been wanting to do this series for 12 years. the sounds of the credit card machine printing receipts, those fucking walkie talkies, the camera people, even the blithering idiot who told me not to stomp, etc, they all started to move within the rhythm and tedium that she controlled with her movements, her breaths, her choices. also that she only performed works by performance artists who are no longer performing. how would the series have changed, especially the dominant focus on time and documentation, were she to have re-performed a piece by an artist who is still working in this art? the last performance was really beautiful, though.
something funny–my boss (ex boss), thought, and ARGUED with me, that in order to perform marina has to “drink alcohol.” i was like, actually, the wine was part of the performance, and she maybe drank half a glass over 7 hours. and he was like, BUT you can’t deny that alcohol DOES affect you. right. right.
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