This essay will
discuss in depth and analyse two contemporary artists Marina Abramovic and
Valie EXPORT, who engage with the notions of personal identity. It will
consider specifically one key work of each artist, which employ and operate
with subjective experience. Discussing firstly in relation to the Kate Love
article “The Experience of Art as a
Living Through of Language,” this essay will consider why these artist and
the concept of experience might be dismissed as autobiographical or lacking in
authority. In reference to Kate Loves article, this essay will engage in the contradicting
perspectives of German philosopher Giorgio Agamben who claims experience has
been destroyed in contemporary life. Negotiating through her own performative
transcript within multiple registers of discursive conversation between a
student and lecturer, and the description of an encounter with a photograph by
Gabriel Orozo, Kate Love immersed within the dialogue and notion of an
“activated space,” being “that precise moment when consciousness meets language
meets world…”
Articulating the work
of Kate Love “The Experience of Art as a
Living through of language,” to understand the philosophy and linguistics
of experience we must scrutinize and approach the deconstruction of experience.
Kate Love makes reference to Giorgio Agamben, who questions the concept and
correlations to how and why experience and knowledge became separated and
whether it is possible to talk of an infancy of experience, a voiceless
experience?
We are oblivious to question experience, which can be
sought only with an acknowledgment to the fact that experience is no longer
accessible to us. Modern man has been deprived of his biography; his experience
likewise has been expropriated.
Walter Benjamin accurately diagnosed that the 'poverty of experience'
was a characteristic of modernity, which has been thought to originate in the
catastrophe of the First World War.
In the repercussions of war, experience has never been contradicted and
accounted more thoroughly than by strategic experience by tactical warfare, the
mechanical warfare of bodily experience, experience by inflation, and
moral experience by those in power. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, editor of
Walter Benjamin's complete works, suggests we are aware that the destruction of
experience no longer necessitates catastrophes, as that mundane daily life will
suffice. For Agamben,
the everyday life experiences are being 'expropriated', for which contemporary
man's average day appears to embody virtually nothing, however pleasurable or
unusual, tedious or traumatic they are, none will translate nor suffice into
experience.
Agamben adheres to the term employed from Walter Benjamin, to make clear a
definition of experience to form a sense of this time in the deconstruction of
experience, exerting the two German words for experience, Erlebnis and Erfahrung. Erlebnis is reflected in the word’s
etymology to have something that is literally lived through in the sense of ‘to
have an experience,’ rather Erfahrung is
a term Benjamin employs when he speaks of the ‘poverty of experience’ in the
context that it is Erfhrung that changes you. Leland de la Durantaye’s
explication and articulation of Agamben’s oeuvre of terms suggests that
experience is not merely something that has been lived through, but that which
it changes you.
To articulate how might the concept of an experience be lacking
in authority, comprehensively in the relationship to the Kate Love article we are
imitated to the ideas of Giorgio Agamben. For Agamben, experience has its
necessary relationship not in knowledge but in authority, by which the potency
of words and narration suggest, “no one now seems to wield sufficient authority
to guarantee the truth of an experience.”
Kate Love questions whether this appears accurate in a contemporary art
context, which encourages art to form from within personal subjective
experience. Proposing on the contrary to Agamben’s claim that no one can claim
the truth of an experience, Kate Love suggests that there is a consensual view
in which to have lived through and encountered an experience, subsequently
underpins an authentic knowledge or authority of that experience.
Kate love suggests that a critical and analytical
reclaiming of experience is a rational method through to politically activating
a space and underpinning a negotiation between the art, artist and the viewer. Kate
Love notes that this experimental methodology would have immense power through words, which appears neither
fully comprehendible inside of language, nor outside of their capacitating
ability.
Kate Love considers two contradicting art forms, which she
articulates, suggesting that both extremities fall short in ability to
transform and enrich existence or making. The first as being too empirical and
personal, work that is essentially about the ‘self’, this which represents only
a mere margin of population and hence disengages the rest of the world. The second
she suggests as merely visually concerned, which ignores the emotional and
spiritual reality of the artist and viewer, the work being both conceptual and
intellectual.
For Kate Love, exerting in work that engages and appears of
reference to an experience ultimately takes us to the limit of our knowledge,
which acts as a form of criticism on the world it inhabits. Kate references an
‘activated space,’ a negotiation between the artists experience and an object
of reality. Both which are physically pushed the two to their ultimate limits,
enriching the language through which experience is operating in.
The space between the artists and the viewers response is where the value in
art is enriched, a value that comes within the responsiveness and openness to
new limits enriched in the experience. That is to say that this value is remotely
from the subject rather the value in the function and experience on the viewer
and artist. It is in this moment or encounter that space is activated and the
world begins to be transformed.
Marina Abramovic is a prolific artist whose
subjectivity has heightened as an author, material and image through her
embodiment by her self-portraying physical presents.
It is her acclaimed and ambitious use of the body that breeches her own
physical and metal limits that ultimately challenge, shock and move the
audience. A state intensely
charged by the audiences direct personal participation shifts from a work that
appears evidently biographical to inevitably a work that forces the gaze back
within audience’s own bodily existence.
Artist Marina Abramovic has a phenomenal oeuvre for performance
contriving from her personal identity she activates in space. Performance has a
powerful immaterial energy, an energy that has the power to transform. Performance for Abramovic is all about
state of mind, she concludes in her performance The Artist is Present, that excruciating physical and mental
discipline is indispensable for something that appears so close to doing
nothing but is demanding all of you, which she must use nothing but her own
presents and energy.
The Artist is Present, which was exhibited in MOMA in 2010, changed
the face of performance art, derived from re-enactments and historical
documentation, which represents a retrospective of Abramovic’s career.
Specifically articulating the centrepiece of the show at MOMA, a
performance based on Nightsea Crossing (22 performances, 1981-1987) made in
collaboration with former partner Ulay (Uwe Laysipen).
Abramovic’s ambitious plan lead her to sitting within the museums atrium, in a
staged theatrical square, where she would sit everyday, all day, from March
until the end of May 2010. An
empty chair invited the public to sit opposite Abramovic and engage with her
for an unlimited period of time. The audience were individually immersed in the
artist’s presents, with no overt communication or contact. The exchange of immaterial energy
within the performance from the audience fuelled her work to achieve a luminous
state of being, to which she calls ‘an energy dialogue,’ with her
audience. It is in the conceptual
and visual clarity that the public becomes immersed in an active role within
Abramovic’s performance.
The physical and psychological space surrounding the artist is stripped away to
create rupture, an abstracted environment, within which a moment of affirmation
forces the audience in seeing the world differently an encounter which
exchanges emotion and causes eventual catharsis. Abramovic’s silent expressionless presence communicates no
sense of abjection, psychological fracture or fear rather it transpires a
combination of duration and direct exchange of experience and the possibility
of transformation.
The work, which has been criticized as narcissism, Marina elaborates
that her entire work is about herself and the deeper she goes into herself she
gains a deeper understanding and becomes more universal. When the audience sit
in front of Abramovic the work is no longer about the artist, because very soon
the viewer begins to see a mirror of there own self.
Similarly
to Marina Abramovic, Valie EXPORT is a prolific contemporary artist who
transformed herself into a brand identity. EXPORT’s art explores the nexus of relationships including
experience, politics and personal identity. EXPORT continually uses the body in
performance as a means of investigating physical and psychological limits and
challenging false egalitarianism of gender and sexist ideologies that
subsequently characterise society. EXPORT explores and radicalises questions
surrounding the artist representation of mental states and the conditioning of
reality. Through her means of performance, experimental films, and conceptual
photograph trying to separate the female body from eroticism, EXPORT created
contradiction by exploiting her body directly without mediation. Her
paradoxical affirmation of the self and body by a masochistic fragmentation and
exposure, ultimately confronts the public with a provocative, aggressive and
invasive attempt to question their physical and mental identity.
Articulating one of
EXPORT’s most emblematic performance works, Tap and Touch Cinema 1968. EXPORT
provocatively sought to reverse the cinematic experience and voyeurism of
watching sexually portrayed images of women.
For EXPORT, the interaction of the human body and its media image motivates her
performances to communicate a direct analogy between the cinema screen and the
human skin. This confrontation challenges the perceived cliché of the
representation of women passively displayed as an object of pleasure, creating
a relationship with the body on proximity and intimacy rather than voyeurism
and visual mastery of the cinematic experience.
Rather than the viewer anonymously engaged in spurious pleasure, EXPORT
entices the public to feel her breasts the ‘real thing’ within a strapped on
box over her bare chest reminiscing a cinematic theatre.
Dependent on soliciting public participation collaborator Peter Weibel invited
members of the public upon the streets in Vienna, to exclusively access her
body for physical public molestation.
EXPORT who resembled a mannequin wearing a wig activates a space which
the beholders hands caressed her breasts, an act of sexual freedom.
For
export, the tactility of this performance was framed to directly confront
social prescriptions prevailing patriarchal ownership of women.
This subjective experience is an example of how reinterpretation can activate
the public, a powerful affect and encounter that forces the viewer to confront
their own bodily existence.
Marina Abramovic and Valie EXPORT both use
their body as a means of expression, which underpins an attempt to deal with
something repressed. This subsequently with all the narcissism and
autobiographical details that surrounds it returns to the surface of an
experience. Exploring the temporality, contingency and instability bound within
their bodies, each artist explores the notion that identity within and beyond
cultural boundaries appears to be ‘acted out,’ rather than being an inherent
quality.
Breaking down these boundaries between art and life, in proposing to erase the
division between the everyday and the artistically produced and more specifically
between the audience and artist.
For it is performance that critics such as Peggy Phelan, cognitively
argue that for the authentic witnessing of a performance, and the cathartic
physical experience for both the audience and the artist themself, appears to
inevitably guarantee that authentic knowledge and inviolate interpretation of
that experience. Phelan critiques
that experience is merely about the disappearance, rather than preservation in
performance that retains and transform one to an authentic knowing. Performance
creates immediacy and unpredictability, being ephemeral and ideally
spontaneous, with no repetition and no predicted ending, rather a place of
experience.
This place
of experience and encounter of an artwork opens up dialogue, an utterance or a
place of becoming. We are forced to thought. A fundamental encounter that is
not an object of recognition, or a representation of something already in
language, rather an object of encounter.
Our knowledge of meaning and our habitual modes of being and
subjectivities are challenged and ruptured.
For this encounter of rupture, a moment of affirmation occurs which obliges us
to see the world differently. Life
becomes a history of these encounters, always necessarily occurring beyond
representations. Art brings these two concise moments of rupture and affirmation
together, breaking one world and creating another, bringing the possibility of
something new.
To summarise it
is apparent that there is an enduring presumption in the transparency of lived
experience, which guarantees the authority of an experience. We must acknowledge and believe
that there is no apparent interface between experience and language to have
sufficient authority to guarantee the truth of an experience. For awareness
does not get wrapped up in language rather the whole system is enacted. That is
to have an experience with an immediate relation to truth, will always
necessitate the value of communication and representation of an experience,
therefore guaranteeing an authentic knowledge.
Meaning on the contrary to Agamben’s claim, it would appear that
experience still retains authority, for it is the realness, immediacy, and
authenticity that guarantee the truth of an experience.
You only begin to encounter and articulate what its means to have truly lived
an experience and to adequately assemble a conceptual model of what it feels like
to experience, when you are enabled to experience the world as a living through
of language.
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy
and History:Essays on the Deconstruction of Expereince, trans. Liz Heron
(London and New York: Verso, 1993), p. 13.
Klaus Peter Biesenbach, ed., Marina Abramovic: The
Artist is Present. (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 17.
Roswitha Mueller. Valie
Export: Fragments of the Imagination (Indiana: University Press, 1994), 15.
Tracey Warr, ed., The
Artist's Body (New York: Phaidon, 2000), 114.
Sally Banes and André Lepecki,
eds., The Senses in Performance (New
York: Routledge, 2007), 168.
Simon O’Sullivan. Art Encounters
Deluze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), 1.
