High Performance Art
Andrew Leci discovers that the much-maligned medium can be absolute torture. For both the artist and the viewer.
PERFORMANCE ART IS Marmite. It polarises opinions. You either love it or you hate it, and there are few who fall in the middle ground. To some it is pretentious claptrap. To others it is innovative genius; potentially life-changing for protagonist and observer alike.
The scene is Studio Morra in Naples, Italy. The year is 1974. Performance artist, Marina Abramović, has placed 72 objects on a table in an open space, and then stood in the middle of that space, inviting members of the audience to do whatever they wanted. With the objects; and with her.
“What is the public about?” Abramović wanted to ask, and “what are they going to do in this kind of situation?”
Objects included honey, bread, grapes; a rose, a feather, scissors; a scalpel, a metal bar, nails and a gun loaded with one bullet. What was going to happen? What was meant to happen? No one knew.
The six-hour performance art piece began innocuously enough – a member of the audience fed her a grape, while another daubed her with some perfume. Someone tickled her with the feather, and another person gave her a gentle kiss.
And then, things went horribly wrong/right, depending on the motivation and, indeed, the purpose of the exercise. The scissors were used to remove much of Abramović’s clothing, and one individual used the scalpel to slit her throat and drink her blood. At one point, an audience member put the gun to her head.
It was as though someone had flicked the switch on a wall-mounted adrenaline pump in the auditorium. The audience became emboldened; free to do what they would with the implicit assurance that for this work of art, they would bear no responsibility, nor suffer any consequences for their actions. Even if it meant putting a bullet into the artist’s head – at high velocity. Abramović’s role was to stand there (unless repositioned) and take it. We know that adrenaline fuels the human ‘fight or flight’ response. But she could do neither.
Abramović was a bit of a mess when she left the ‘stage’ after six hours, but she was alive. It was an evening she would never forget, and it did not deter her from continuing a career in performance art that has now spanned almost 50 years.
Is Pavlensky a nutbag, or the “patron saint of Russian dissidence” as one British newspaper described him? Is he an arsonist, or simply an arse?
A Dog’s Life
Oleg Kulik is a performance artist and curator who really likes to get his teeth stuck into his work, sometimes biting off more than he can chew. This is because his most notorious body of work involves him being (I want to say, “taking the role of”, or “acting like”, but I think he might object) a dog. He interacts with audience members, claiming that his point is to reduce the level of communicative interaction to a very limited vocabulary, suggesting, perhaps, that we have gone astray in the ways in which we treat our fellow human beings and that we need to get back to basics.
Infamously, in one performance, he posed (as a dog, (un)naturally) next to a warning sign; ‘Danger, dog may bite’, ‘Beware of the dog’ – something like that – and then attacked those who didn’t heed the warning. He did take time out to damage other artists’
works in the exhibition, and presumably justified it all by claiming that it was an inevitable consequence of any human being who channels his inner dog; his “conscious falling out of the human horizon” and onto all fours.
Adrenaline must have been flowing through his veins as he prepared to take a chunk out of a bleeding heart liberal New Yorker who loves performance art because it’s cool, but didn’t expect to end up as a snack when visiting an art gallery. While Abramović, for example, wasn’t necessarily trying to shock in many of the works she created and in which she knew as little about what was going to happen as the audience, Kulik would have had a fair idea.
Getting Fired Up
As would Pyotr (sometimes Petr) Pavlensky, a performance artist who specialises in vandalism and self-mutilation. He certainly knows how to get the adrenaline flowing as his body of work – they’re not ‘pieces’; he refers to them as “actions” – are frequently bizarre, high-octane, and often high-kerosene. He likes to start fires.
Pavlensky has spent quite a bit of time behind bars, and he wasn’t making cocktails. His intentional, premeditated acts of vandalism meant that he was always going to be sailing close to the legal wind, and he was highly critical of Vladimir Putin (which is never a good idea if you’re trying to prolong a career… or even have a career at all). On one occasion he set fire to the offices of the FSB (formerly known as the KGB, but now much more friendly, according to Russian government sources). His exile from his native Russia came not long afterwards.
Given ‘artistic refugee’ status by France, within nine months of his arrival he set alight the Banque de France (the country’s national bank, the equivalent of ‘The Fed’ in the US) in a performance piece, sorry “action”, entitled Lighting, part of which was the conflagration itself, with other parts consisting of the judicial process and the subsequent inevitable period of incarceration. It was a long action, and not always as compelling as the original act of arson, but it was equivalent to biting the hand that has offered to feed you. How’s that for gratitude?
When he’s not burning stuff, he’s wrapping himself in barbed wire (naked), sewing his mouth shut, nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones in Red Square, or lopping off his ear while standing on top of a psychiatric hospital in Moscow to protest against the political abuse of psychiatry.
While it’s difficult to imagine what was going through his head at the time – most of us write letters to the press or harangue our MPs – it’s easier to work out what was racing through his bloodstream. The adrenaline required would have been phenomenal, as it would be for any ‘artist’ making physical protests that involve feats of courage in the face of pain, or enduring suffering for lengths of time. Is Pavlensky a nutbag, or the “patron saint of Russian dissidence” as one British newspaper described him? Is he an arsonist, or simply an arse?
Be Seated
While Pavlensky has resorted to the often spectacular to make his point and perform his art, it’s interesting to note the change of direction that Abramović has taken in her later years. From her earliest days as a performance artist she decided to use her own body as the artistic medium, and put together adrenaline-fuelled performances in which she invariably put herself in danger of being harmed – cut, burnt (what a double act she and Pavlensky would have made), suffering some form of privation or other – to explore the themes that were important to her and which fascinated her – endurance, trust, connection, to name but three. Proponents of performance art will suggest that this is what it’s all about – a relationship, in real time, between performer and observer that will be more subjective and interpretative than anything other disciplines have to offer.
This is why, perhaps, Abramović’s seminal work took place in New York City back in 2010. In The Artist is Present, performed at the Museum of Modern Art, the then 63-year-old sat in a chair for eight hours a day (10 when the gallery had extended viewing hours) for three months. No food breaks; no lavatory calls. There was another chair opposite her, and members of the public were invited to sit opposite her… and just look at her.
“Nobody could imagine… that anybody would take time to sit and just engage in mutual gaze with me,” she said at the time, but more than 1,500 people did so over the course of the 90-odd days – in fact they were lining up around the block. She put it down to the “enormous need of humans to actually have contact”.
It was an incredible feat of endurance for the artist, and possibly the exact opposite of the adrenaline rush that would have accompanied Pavlensky’s and Kulik’s actions/pieces/works of art/ utter doggerel… you can make up your own minds, as you will do when tasting Marmite. What can’t be disputed, however, is the conviction of performance artists who put their health and personal safety on the line for their art. Their resilience, passion, and strength of mind and body frequently make their works compelling to those of us who can but marvel at the levels of creative energy.
Performance art comes in many shapes and sizes, and it can be torture for both artist and observer. But it’s never dull when adrenaline is part of the mix.