Month: December 2023

The giants of the performance art world are growing away from their roots as we look back upon their works

Text and photography by Isaac Hodgson

Marina Abramović’s London takeover has been divisive, but regardless, unmissable. Advertisements of her retrospective exhibition and opera productions have covered my feed and streets for weeks, with a banner of her face adorning the Royal Academy’s building to top it off. With her extensive history of violent and controversial performances, fans may be upset with her complete lack of appearance at her show.

That said, there are performers present; artists trained in the “Marina Abramović method” recreating four of her pieces. Nudity, pain, and starvation are expected, problematic for an exhibition spanning multiple months. Whilst the performers rest, video works replace them, and during my visit two of four performances were supplemented this way. In an already overwhelming and expansive exhibition like this, I wasn’t overly displeased. Even so, I found myself wondering if the live performances would have been more moving and thinking of potential alternative presentations.

Besides the performance pieces, the retrospective is full of all things Marina. It walks you through a large portion of her life’s work with photos, videos, and sculptures, including pictures of the incredibly brutal Rhythm 0, wherein the public had full reign over her body and safety. A room filled with breathing and screams and heartbeats all intersecting follows as you are thrown into the centre of multiple video works. The essence of her work is palpable and quite literally screaming in your face. Later, interactive sculptures from her performances allow you to feel a hint of what she might (naturally these are mostly used for quick Instagram pics). But was this work as powerful as the performances individually, as they would have been shown originally?

This question was as divisive as Marina’s work itself. In asking my fellow exhibition goers, some marked Rhythm 0 as the most impactful art piece they saw (which was primarily displayed photographically) whilst others thought the live performances were “most evocative” and thought “most people would agree”; “performance makes me more self-conscious, more present, and feels like you’re there”. No one mentioned the video works that replaced the performances, and I wonder if this would have been different had they been live. Something that united my group was their lack of need to see Marina herself. They figured “it’s the same art”, and whilst they “obviously would be interested in seeing her”, they were “not interested in the cult of the artist”.

Marina is at the centre of London right now, but this lack of performance doesn’t begin and end with her. Other great artists have been having their moment in the retrospective spotlight, like Tehching Hsieh’s exhibition in the Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin, and Ana Mendieta’s growing posthumous recognition. In the case of Hseih, some of them are impossible to display; how can you exhibit someone staying outdoors for a whole year? His One Year Performance 1980-1981, wherein he photographed himself and punched a time clock every hour of every day, seems crafted for video. In the exhibition space, I felt overwhelmed and conscious of the time and consumption of the artwork. I heard the slide film video click and click with each hour of his life passing. It was incredibly moving, but it’s he’s not there with you.

Whilst it’s great to have growing recognition of performance art, which is too commonly thrown away as pretentious or humorous, this type of exhibition focuses on those who have already ‘made it’. To get the other side of the picture, I spoke to a young artist and curator Ivet Monova who recently exhibited a video of her performance alongside sculpture work at her exhibition Corpus Dilecti. “I do think people are getting more and more opportunities to do performance art and it’s not seen as this funny thing that people just try out”. However, the concept of reperformance doesn’t sit quite right with her. “Re-performing other artist’s work doesn’t then become that performance”.

Referring to Marina’s new stage production which she acts in, Ivet tells me it was magical “because it’s her. But if it was done by anyone else, it would be completely different. It wouldn’t even mean that much to me.” Despite what the exhibition goers said, I think seeing her would elicit a spontaneous response – anyone of her calibre would.

And it’s not as though Marina herself is the biggest fan of reperformance – it’s just become a necessity as she has grown older. “Anything is better than not to be performed, the performance is a living form”, even if it’s slightly different from the original. “It’s better to live than it to be a reproduction in a photograph”, she told The NYT in 2013.

“That is video work. I don’t think that’s performance art”

Ivet admits, perhaps controversially, that she thinks a real performance “should only happen once”. The alternative then, for the ever-growing following of great performance artists, is video. But this in her eyes becomes something completely different from the original live rendition of a piece. Ivet’s artwork was not performed for an audience and was displayed in video format. “That is video work. I don’t think that’s performance art”.

Unfortunately, I’m inclined to agree with Ivet. In going to these retrospective shows, video work simply doesn’t ignite the same emotion in me as live performance has. You don’t lock eyes with the performer, you don’t feel the same energy from sharing the space, and there’s a distinct lack of consequence and surprise. The video work is collectively moving, it’s simply a different art form.

It’s great to have a record of Marina’s performances, and as much as I’d love to feel everything one of her performances would make me, I think it’s something that will never really happen. These are imitations of the real deal. “you cannot transfer the same energy”, Ivet says.

With all the attention on performance art now, and with these great artists having paved the way for the youth so well, maybe we should shift our focus to new ideas. It seems to me a perfect time to look towards the fresh and innovative youth, to recapture some of the excitement that performance art is loved for – back to its roots.