Marina Abramovic

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.