Behind knives and starvation, artist’s gaze unlocks art

Marina Abramovic lived for 12 days on nothing but water in November 2002. She migrated between… Marina Abramovic lived for 12 days on nothing but water in November 2002. She migrated between three platforms in front of the public in a New York City art gallery, and her only means of escape were ladders made of kitchen knives.

Abramovic, a world-renowned performance artist, described this as one of her most recent attempts to experiment with human limitations. The gallery was open 24 hours a day during the 12-day span, so the public could monitor her persistence.

The artist was invited to Carnegie Mellon School of Art to be the 20th Robert Lepper Distinguished Lecturer on Thursday evening. She described her performance, “The House with the Ocean View,” as a time of reflection for both herself and her audience.

“I was empty space [the audience] could project on,” she said.

Abramovic emphasized the relationship between the performer and the audience as being of utmost importance.

“Everything was about the gaze,” she said, attributing her concentration and endurance to the eye contact she maintained with members of the audience.

Abramovic told her history through her own recollections and a running film showing her past performances on a screen behind her. Her art is a combination of sometimes treacherous and unsettling demonstrations, used to defy her audience members’ personal boundaries.

Born in Yugoslavia, Abramovic now resides in Amsterdam. Her interest in art began when she was 12 years old and curious about painting. Knowing very little about art, her father asked one of his friends to give his daughter her first lesson.

“My first painting lesson was very impressive,” Abramovic said. The man teaching her placed a blank canvas on the floor and proceeded to cover it in everything from glue to paint. He then lit the canvas on fire and told her, “This is the sunset.”

Proud of the artwork, Abramovic hung the ash-ridden canvas on her wall. Just a day later, she found it in a pile of dust on her floor.

“My paintings are just ashes of my art,” she said. This early experience led her to the philosophy that her art and performances are all about the process, not the results.

This process for Abramovic begins with preparation for each performance. As a teacher, she attempted to illustrate to her students the level of preparation necessary by taking five-day excursions to remote areas of the countryside. She allowed the group to drink only water and herbal tea. After enduring both physical and mental exercises in the nude, they would receive their first meal of white rice. Only then were they allowed to speak.

Abramovic uses this kind of preparation to clear her mind and body before a performance. She values the importance of concentration in her art because performances must be “strong and mesmerized” to create intensity between the public and the artist, she explained to the audience.

From cutting her own hands with knives, to experimenting with consciousness by taking tranquillizing medication, Abramovic tests her own limits in conjunction with the limits of what an audience can bear to watch.

In a demonstration symbolizing a protest of communism, Abramovic once laid in the center of a five-point star made of flames. Eventually, she lost consciousness from a lack of oxygen and had to be carried away.

“I was absolutely furious because I was confronted with my body’s limits. I wanted total control,” she said.

In a performance that Abramovic described as one of her most frightening, she laid 72 objects in front of her audience. These objects ranged from a gun and a bullet, to salt and honey. She then directed her audience to use these objects to do anything they wanted to her.

“I wanted to see how far they could go, and I came to realize they could kill me.”

A fight broke out when someone tried to use the loaded gun, but through it all, Abramovic refused to resist the impulses of her audience. She left at the end of her performance naked and bloody. The audience could not believe what they had done, she remembered.

“I’m staging the pain and I’m staging the danger by using the energy of the public,” she said.

Abramovic did not always work alone. In the mid-’70s, she met Ulay. She described her relationship with him as “an incredible love story that lasted 12 years.”

The two lived in a van and performed together. Their endeavors included repeatedly slamming their naked bodies together to the point of excruciating pain, clamping their mouths together for 17 minutes until the brink of suffocation, and posing as tableaux vivants, or living art, in galleries.

In 1987, their relationship ended. As a final goodbye, Abramovic and Ulay walked across the Great Wall of China. Each began at a different end, and they met in the middle. Originally, this had been their planned place of matrimony, but by the time they had permission to stage the performance, the love affair had ended.

With the split, Abramovic found herself alone and ready for a change. She took this chance to move back to performing in theater.

“I could stage my life, step back, and liberate myself,” she said.

Abramovic vowed that she would continue these performances throughout the remainder of her life. She described them as her living biography, and a work in progress. Each performance is to be an artistic continuation of the last chapter of her life, striving to maintain the goals of all her other work.

“I don’t care whether my art is beautiful or ugly, but it must be true,” she said.