Wednesday 15 October 2008

biography1

BIOGRAPHY


1981 Born in Webster, Texas
Lives and works in New Orleans
SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2006
I smell pregnant, QED, Los Angeles

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2005
Whitney Biennial 2006, Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

2005
Sympathetic Magic, Screenings of What’s The Love Making Babies For
and Yo a romantic comedy, Planaria, New York

SCREENINGS

2005
A Family Finds Entertainment, New York Underground Film Festival
A Family Finds Entertainment, Chicago Underground Film Festival (special jury prize)
Valentine’s Day Girl, Multiplex, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn
A Family Finds Entertainment, Big Muddy Film Festival, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

PERFORMANCES

2005
Alternative Theater Endings, with The Experimental People Band, New York Underground Film Festival
Nothing Wrong with August, with The Experimental People Band, Natural Disaster, New Orleans


Made with Jesse Greenberg, Mango Lady was originally shown in Ryan Trecartin’s exhibition I Smell Pregnant, a vast multi-room installation incorporating painting, video, and sculpture as a 3 dimensional ‘set’ and ‘narrative’ rolled into one. Facing the wall, she squats as some repulsive vegan-hippie-fertility totem, all co-ed haircut and pendulous breasts. Deliciously scabby, her entire body is plated in dried fruit. Conceiving his installations as a series of potentials rather than faits accomplis, Trecartin’s work openly shares the processes of its making, each piece relating to the next, forming a free-flow dialogue of strategies, approaches, and ideas. His figurative sculptures act as ‘anchors’ within his shows, creating relationships and conversations with each other, and providing recognisable ‘bridges’ between the viewer and the other work in the gallery. Posited between the familiar and the completely surreal, each sculpture conveys a character or ‘type’ specially cast for the scene.


Structuring his art practice in the same way as a director approaches film making, Ryan Trecartin’s sculptural and installation work incorporates a cast of dozens. Conceiving each show as an experiment in theatrical production, Trecartin conceives loose plots as a basis for collaborative endeavour. Working with a posse of his close mates, Trecartin delegates responsibility: inviting his friends to participate in the creative process, respond to his ideas, and contribute their own input and artwork. Through this unorthodox way of working, Trecartin’s work becomes an uncanny reflection of youth culture, presenting a Gen Y zeitgeist of commodity anxiety, spiritual nihilism, and community value.

Trecartin is currently living in LA as a hurricane Katrina refugee; World Wall was conceived as a form of disaster therapy. Working with fellow artist Lizzie Fitch, the project was begun as a simple wooden fence. Enhanced through a series of Mardi Gras float making techniques, this work evolved into a diaristic tribute to New Orleans, a means of engaging with dislocation and loss. Conceived as both a location and living organism, World Wall sprawls with animistic fervour, a seething monument of chaos, festivity, rebirth, and beauty. Through the window, a picture can be seen of the ruins of Trecartin’s old house.

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/ryan_trecartin.htm
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/ryan_trecartin_world_front.htm

Structuring his art practice in the same way as a director approaches film making, Ryan Trecartin’s sculptural and installation work incorporates a cast of dozens. Conceiving each show as an experiment in theatrical production, Trecartin conceives loose plots as a basis for collaborative endeavour. Working with a posse of his close mates, Trecartin delegates responsibility: inviting his friends to participate in the creative process, respond to his ideas, and contribute their own input and artwork. Through this unorthodox way of working, Trecartin’s work becomes an uncanny reflection of youth culture, presenting a Gen Y zeitgeist of commodity anxiety, spiritual nihilism, and community value.

Trecartin is currently living in LA as a hurricane Katrina refugee; World Wall was conceived as a form of disaster therapy. Working with fellow artist Lizzie Fitch, the project was begun as a simple wooden fence. Enhanced through a series of Mardi Gras float making techniques, this work evolved into a diaristic tribute to New Orleans, a means of engaging with dislocation and loss. Conceived as both a location and living organism, World Wall sprawls with animistic fervour, a seething monument of chaos, festivity, rebirth, and beauty. Through the window, a picture can be seen of the ruins of Trecartin’s old house.

Wednesday 8 October 2008

chris burden

PERFORMANCE
Chris Burden and the limits of art.
by Peter Schjeldahl
MAY 14, 2007
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Documentation of two of Burden’s early pieces: “Shoot,” top, from 1971, and “Trans-fixed,” from 1974.
KEYWORDS
Burden, Chris; Performance Artists; Contemporary Art; “Shoot”; Rubins, Nancy; “A Tale of Two Cities” (1988); The Orange County Art Museum
n efficient test of where you stand on contemporary art is whether you are persuaded, or persuadable, that Chris Burden is a good artist. I think he’s pretty great. Burden is the guy who, on November 19, 1971, in Santa Ana, California, produced a classic, or an atrocity (both, to my mind), of conceptual art by getting shot. “Shoot” survives in desultory black-and-white photographs with this description: “At 7:45 P.M. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” Why do such things? “I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist,” Burden explained, when I visited him recently at his studio in a brushy glen of Topanga Canyon, where he lives with his wife, the sculptor Nancy Rubins. “The models were Picasso and Duchamp. I was most interested in Duchamp.” Burden is a solidly fleshy, amicable man, given to arduous enthusiasms. Arrayed in ranks outside the vast, tidy studio building were more than a hundred and forty handsomely restored antique lampposts, units of an ongoing sculptural project. (Many are intended for the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, when its present expansion is completed, in 2008.) Reinstallations of two major Burdens are now on view in Southern California: “A Tale of Two Cities” (1981), a room-filling fantasy tableau of miniature metropolises at war, incorporating about five thousand toys, at the Orange County Museum of Art, in Newport Beach; and, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles, “Hell Gate” (1998), a twenty-eight-foot-long scale model, in Erector and Meccano pieces and wood, of the dramatic steel-and-concrete railroad bridge that crosses the Hell Gate segment of the East River, between Queens and Wards Island. Like most things by Burden, they are powerful works that deal ingeniously with aesthetics and ethics of power. You needn’t like them to be impressed.
“Shoot” was one of a number of perfectly repellent performance pieces of the early nineteen-seventies in which Burden subjected himself to danger, thereby creating a double bind, for viewers, between the citizenly injunction to intervene in crises and the institutional taboo against touching art works. (Such, at any rate, was my analysis of the distinctive nausea that I felt in thinking of those things, which I avoided witnessing in person.) He spent five days in a small locker, with a bottle of water above and a bottle for urine below; slithered, nearly naked and with his hands held behind him, across fifty feet of broken glass in a parking lot; had his hands nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen; was kicked down a flight of stairs; and, on different occasions, incurred apparent risks of burning, drowning, and electrocution.
Usually performed for small audiences, these events became word-of-mouth sensations on a radically minded grapevine in art schools, new contemporary museums, and grant-funded alternative spaces—an emerging academy of the far out. Anti-commercial sentiments held sway in those circles, although not altogether heroically, given the concurrent slump in the art market and the flow of patronage from such sources as the National Endowment for the Arts. (Between 1974 and 1983, Burden received four N.E.A. grants.) Earthworks, executed in remote locations, were the conceptual art that came closest to being popular. They had in common with Burden’s performances the fact that almost nobody saw them, except by way of documentation. The avant-gardism of the time wasn’t only reliant on publicity; it was effectively about the mediums of information—specialized magazines, insider gossip—through which it became known. Burden strummed the network like a lyre.

FROM THE ISSUECARTOON BANKE-MAIL THIS
Burden was born in Boston in 1946, to an engineer father and a mother who had a master’s degree in biology, and he grew up in France and Italy. At the age of twelve, on the island of Elba, he was badly hurt in a motor-scooter accident, and underwent an emergency operation on his left foot, without anesthesia. It was a formative experience, he said, as was a passion for photography, which he acquired during his long recuperation. He completed high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Pomona College, in Claremont, California, he declared an architecture major and studied physics, but gravitated toward art, with a special interest in Dadaism. Burden’s master’s thesis, at the University of California, Irvine, in 1971—where his teachers included the doyen of space-and-light installations, Robert Irwin—was the five-day locker stint.
He was immediately taken very seriously, as the most extreme and enigmatic of provocateurs in a subculture that, in highly educated ways, reflected the political disarray of the nation during the seemingly eternal Vietnam War, and prefigured the swing-barrelled rage of punk. By 1977, he had created performance pieces in two dozen American and European cities. They constituted a theatre of passive-aggressive cruelty. For one, in 1972, in Newport Beach, he sat immobile in a chair, wearing dark glasses, facing two cushions and an inviting box of marijuana cigarettes. Visitors naturally assumed that he was watching them, but the insides of his glasses were painted black, and he refused to speak. He reported, in his record of the work, “Many people tried to talk to me, one assaulted me and one left sobbing hysterically.” Plainly, Burden was not in sympathy with his supposed community.
Burden’s most trenchantly significant work was “Doomed,” performed in April, 1975, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He set a clock on a wall at midnight, and lay down on the floor under a leaning sheet of glass. Viewers came and went. Burden didn’t move. Inevitably, he soiled his pants. (“It was awful,” he recalled.) Forty-five hours and ten minutes passed. Then a young museum employee named Dennis O’Shea took it upon himself to place a container of water within Burden’s reach. The artist got up, smashed the clock with a hammer, and left. He never again undertook a public action that imperilled himself. It wouldn’t have made sense. “Doomed” unmasked the absurdity of the conventions by which, through assuming the role of viewers, we are both blocked and immunized from ethical responsibility. In O’Shea’s case, the situation was complicated by his duty to maintain the inviolability of art works. There should be a monument to him, somewhere, which would commemorate the final calling of the bluff of art as a law unto itself. (Would Burden have lain there until he died? “Probably not,” he said.) I have in mind Robert Rauschenberg’s famous intention “to act in the gap between” art and life. There isn’t any gap. Art is notional. There is always only life and death.
TOP: COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY; BOTTOM: COURTESY LOCUS+ARCHIVE/CHRIS BURDEN
Chris Burden (born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946) is an American artist.
He studied for his B.A. in visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine from 1969 to 1971.
Burden's reputation as a performance artist started to grow in the early 1970s after he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the performance piece Shoot that was made in F Space in Santa Ana, California in 1971, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters. Burden was taken to a psychiatrist after this piece. Other performances from the 1970s were Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Deadman (1972), B.C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), TV Hijack (1972), Doomed (1975) and Honest Labor (1979).
Several of Burden's other performance pieces were considered somewhat controversial at the time: another "danger piece" was Doomed, in which Burden lay motionless in a museum gallery under a slanted sheet of glass, with a clock running nearby. Unbeknownst to the museum owners, the concept of Doomed was that Chris was prepared to remain in that position until someone from the museum staff interfered in some way with the piece. Forty-five hours later, a museum guard placed a pitcher of water next to Burden, thus ending the piece.
In 1975 he created the fully operational B-Car, a lightweight four-wheeled vehicle that he described as being "able to travel 100 miles per hour and achieve 100 miles per gallon". Some of his other works from that period are DIECIMILA (1977), a facsimile of an Italian 10,000 Lira note, possibly the first fine art print that (like paper money) is printed on both sides of the paper it is printed on, The Speed of Light Machine (1983), in which he reconstructed a scientific experiment with which to "see" the speed of light, and the installation C.B.T.V. (1977), a reconstruction of the first ever made Mechanical television.
In 1978 he became a professor at University of California, Los Angeles, a position from which he resigned in 2005 due to a controversy over the university's alleged mishandling of a student's classroom performance piece that echoed one of Burden's own performance pieces.[1] Burden cited the performance in his letter of resignation, saying that the student should have been suspended during the investigation into whether school safety rules had been violated. The performance allegedly involved a loaded gun, but authorities were unable to substantiate this.
In 2005, Burden released Ghost Ship, his crewless, self-navigating yacht which docked at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 28 July after a 330-mile 5-day trip from Shetland. The project cost £150,000, and was funded with a significant grant from the UK arts council, being designed and constructed with the help of the Marine Engineering Department of the University of Southampton. It is said to be controlled via onboard computers and a GPS system, however in case of emergency the ship is 'shadowed' by an accompanying support boat.
Chris Burden is married to the multi-media artist Nancy Rubins.
Burden was referenced in David Bowie's 1977 song "Joe the Lion".
http://images.google.ru/images?q=chris+burden&complete=1&hl=ru&lr=&newwindow=1&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=images&ct=title
July 17, 2007
Chris Burden


In a current exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, world-renowned conceptual artist Chris Burden is presenting the new show "Yin Yang," which explores ideas inherent in the complementary principles of duality. The artist, who has a longstanding obsession with machines, motor vehicles and ready-mades, has chosen a 1973 Lotus Europa sports car and an International T6 crawler Bulldozer from his private collection to illustrate his ideas. The Lotus represents the perfect race machine -- light weight, fast, but completely impractical -- while the Bulldozer is a solid, heavy and otherwise unstoppable machine of duty. Burden will exhibit a series of photographs documenting the vehicles along with the machines themselves. The artist received his B.F.A. from the Pomona College at Claremont, Calif., and is a M.F.A. graduate of the University of California at Irvine. Burden first received international attention for his controversial performance in 1971 titled "Shoot," in which the artist instructed a friend to shoot him in the arm in a gallery full of people. The artist has since created numerous performances and conceptual projects exhibited internationally in venues such as South London Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London, as well as Magasin 3 in Stockholm, Sweden. Burden began teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978 and remained a faculty member until his resignation in 2005.

http://www.dailyserving.com/2007/07/chris_burden_1.php

chris burden

Performance Art and the Automobile: Chris Burden Crucifed on Beetle, 1974

Chris Burden has achieved an elder-statesman status in the art world—his latest installation, "Urban Light," graces the plaza of the new Broad Contemporary Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But back in the day, he was a wildman, a freak, fucking dangerous—nothing less than an art hoon. A performance art pioneer who in 1974 had himself crucified to the back of VW Beetle.

It was late April. The setting was a garage in Venice, CA, at a time when Venice was a funky sunsplashed beachside shithole full of losers and freaks and drunks and stoners and artists. A shirtless Burden—only three years removed from being shot in the arm with an actual bullet ("Shoot"), and less than a year after a self-imposed near-electrocution ("Doorway to Heaven")—lays across the back of the Bug and has his palms nailed to the sheet metal. Ouchie! The car is pushed out of the garage and the engine is run full-out for precisely two minutes. Photos are snapped. Urban legend says Burden is driven around like this, but the story is disputed and besides, there's no way the nails would have held.

The Beetle is lost to time. Burden, on the other hand, is world famous. The performance is labeled "Trans Fixed."

Tomorrow, check back when we tell the tale of Burden's 100mpg auto-bike, created in 1977. This boy had a thing for cars!
marina abramovic


Paris, June 1990

Bernard Goy: To introduce your current work, may I say that after you had been questioning the body in the mid-seventies, you are now more involved in listening to its answer, to its word?
Marina Abramovic: Actually, my area of interest is no longer in testing the body, like I and everybody else did during the body art movement of the seventies, which had a lot to do with pain and injuriousness in order to push the body to its border, even to the border between life and death. Later on there was a very interesting moment, when, at the beginning of the eighties, many artists stopped performing. That was a crucial point for me because, although they went back to painting, the symbols and gestures of performance were present in their new work. This is especially true for the Italians, like Clemente or Chia.

I asked some of them why they stopped performing, and the main answer was that it implied too much energy, that they could not deal with it. They needed more privacy, the security of the studio . . . and that was exactly the point where I did not want to stop [smiling]. But as Ulay and I had exhausted our possibilities in art, physically, and as we would not repeat our performances because we had never repeated anything, the only answer we could look for was in nature. We would expose ourselves to the most difficult circumstances. From our point of view we could find those circumstances in the high temperatures. We explored four deserts which may have influenced our work a lot, the Gobi desert, the Taar desert, the Sahara, and the Central Australian desert.
So my new work is based on the idea that what is important is less what you do than the state of mind you do it in. Then you must make enormous efforts to come to that state of mind. According to this, my new work deals with emptying my body: “Boat emptying, stream entering.” This means that you have to empty the body/boat to the point where you can really be connected with the fields of energy around you. I think that men and women in our Western culture are completely disconnected from that energy, and in my new work I want to make this connection possible.

Goy: As people are supposed to participate physically in your shows, can colors and materials express an immediate meaning, beyond cultural limits?

Abramovic: Well, that’s possible. But the basic idea in that participation comes from the fact that the public has always been passive in its relationships to works of art. Galleries and museums are some holy places where you can look at works that you’re not supposed to touch. I’m very interested in a sentence by Duchamp, saying that the artist is not the only one who should be creative: the public should be creative too. Art has changed a lot, but the public didn’t change that much, and the artists are preparing, by the way they live and transform themselves, an art which could be completely mentally developed. I believe that the art of the future will be an art without objects, because in the communication of pure energy, the object appears as an obstacle.
The only way for me to transmit my experience from the Chinese Wall was to build those “transient objects,” which are not sculptures but tools that help to make a work. During my walk I realized that my state of mind was different according to the metals in the ground. This relates to legends which describe the Chinese Wall as a dragon of energy. We all know that quartz is used to convey energy: this is not culturally limited.

Goy: That’s important because one could also look at the work as minimal art.

Abramovic: [smiling] The interpretation of Donald Judd . . . You know, when you entered the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition [at the Pompidou Center in 1989], you could see a wall with seven persons on it, and the quartz pillows appeared only after they had left. It’s about emptiness again, going up on that wall and emptying yourself. The Tibetans have a nice word for emptiness: when they speak of “full emptiness.” There is a void but it’s a positive void.
In our culture you get information all the time, reading papers, watching television. There is always something coming in. All my work is about emptying the mind, to come to a state of nonthinking. But to answer your question about cultural limits, I don’t have any feeling of nationality. I travelled so much that I really took the whole planet as a studio. And in a way I even think it’s too small [smiling].

Goy: There is a photo of your Night Sea Crossing performance that reminded me, in its form, of a Buddhist mandala. Do you think it can hold such a meaning for somebody who doesn’t know about that traditional image?

Abramovic: It’s a problem with art itself: there are different levels of communication in anything you see. I always answer people who ask: “What is this? Is this art?” with “It’s very simple: when you want to read a book on mathematics, you learn the language of mathematics. Art has its own language, just like spirituality. I went to the Louvre recently to work on a project, and as I entered the Mona Lisa room — you know, the painting is so removed from reality that any postcard seems more real — I saw another painting by Leonardo, three steps away, in which the positions of the hands of the characters express a deep mystical meaning. When you see the painting on one level, you just enjoy the colors, and then the composition, and then the beauty of the forms. But there is also that deeper level which the hands of the Madonna and Jesus reveal. Three hundred people would see it in three hundred different ways.
What I think is that a good work of art must hold prediction, definitely, and that it must have that energy which cannot be rationally understood.

Goy: As an icon which is supposed to lead the mind visually to a higher level?

Abramovic: There are many primordial images of us that can be rationally known, but act as archetypes in a way that we can intuitively recognize, even without knowing their meaning. When you see a Rothko painting, you may not even know what colors it’s made of, but as you stand in front of it, it acts in a way that you cannot define rationally. A good work of art should make you turn around when you’re not looking at it, the same way as you can feel somebody looking at you when you’re sitting in a restaurant. You’re not sure, but you turn around and there is really somebody there. That energy is really beyond cultures . . . I found a very interesting example concerning this at the Magiciens exhibition. The night before the opening, all of the non-Western artists made ritual sacrifices in order to put life into their works. The next day, an American journalist asked a Voodoo priest what he was thinking of the Oldenburg sculpture. His answer was: “No good. No sacrifice, no good.”

Goy: While watching your video piece Terminal Garden, I first tried to relate all the visual information to a single meaning. Then I felt like I had to fit into the slow rhythm of the film, forgetting my need for a clear understanding of the symbolic content.

Abramovic: I must talk a little bit about those videos. Until 1983, videos were just documents about our performances. In 1983 we were asked to go to Thailand by the Belgian television to make a video piece on any subject we wanted. For the first time we became directors, not only actors, as in the performances. Then we made that important video called City of Angels. It’s important for us because it was the first time we worked with people who had never been in front of a camera. We were using the same techniques as in our performances. Nothing cut, nothing repeated, real time. In this film we used Thai language as the language of the film and you follow the motion of the picture without any rational meaning to deal with. Then we decided to do a series that would be called Continental Series. Then came Terra degli dei madre which took place in Sicily where we filmed only very old men and women. There I made the sound for the piece by inventing a language, made up of Italian, Yugoslavian, and Russian.
In Terminal Garden we used a computer voice, but it’s so abstract that you cannot understand a word. As the words are so important in American culture, I collected many sentences from television commercials, without the names of the products. It’s all about how to do things, all manipulation. And in the middle of the tape we switched to Sanskrit, to a very old text which tells about “inside,” just as the commercials, the words of American culture. tell about “outside.” But City of Angels is the most important one as it introduces the idea of a nonlogical language.

Goy: A kind of meta-language, poetically founded?

Abramovic: Yes, a non-language. The first time I experimented with this was in 1980. Some artists were invited to spend four days together in Micronesia, a very small island near New Guinea. Among them were John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Brice Marden, and Daniel Buren. We were asked to talk for twelve minutes on any subject in front of the tribes who were there. I immediately decided to make up my language and after I had talked, people from the tribes had understood four words [laughter], because using that kind of meta-language or non-language, you actually communicate on another level.

Goy: It seems that you teach something that has no name.

Abramovic: I teach what I learn. Being in those deserts and being confronted with Aboriginal and Tibetan cultures, I realized what enormous power the body has, and my work should show ways to that power. If you had seen my opening performance at the Pompidou Center, which consisted of lying on the bed against the wall, it could confront you with this idea that we always forget: there and now. You could not see me moving, starting or stopping. The idea was that I’m lying there with my mind and with my body, and that is what we almost never do. Whatever you did or thought, you had this image of me, being there.

Goy: Do you think that it is possible today to reach up to a new spirituality without looking to the Eastern cultures?

Abramovic: I think it’s not possible. You must experience the difference between spending time in New York or Paris and being on a plateau in Tibet, four thousand meters high. That last place gives you as much energy as the first one takes from you. Your way of thinking is completely different over there. This is more scientific than spiritual [smiling]. As an artist I want to be a bridge.
Rhythm 5, 1974, published 1994 (detail). Gelatin-silver print with inset letterpress panel, photograph: 22 7/8 x 31 5/8 inches; text panel: 9 3/4 x 6 3/4 inches. A.P. 1/3. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Gift, Willem Peppler. 98.5214

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramovic has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. The tensions of abandonment and control lay at the heart of her series of performances known as Rhythms (1973–74). In Rhythm 5, Abramovic lay down inside the blazing frame of a wooden star. With her oxygen supply depleted by the fire, she lost consciousness and had to be rescued by concerned onlookers. In Rhythm 0, she invited her audience to do whatever they wanted to her using any of the 72 items she provided: pen, scissors, chains, axe, loaded pistol, and others. Truly ephemeral, Abramovic's earliest performances were documented only by crude black-and-white photographs and descriptive texts, which she published as an edition years later. Since 1976 she has utilized video to capture the temporal nature of her art. Cleaning the Mirror #1 shows videos of a haunting performance in which Abramovic scrubs a grime-covered human skeleton on her lap. Rich with metaphor, this three-hour action recalls, among other things, Tibetan death rites that prepare disciples to become one with their own mortality.
Marina Abramović (born 30 November 1946, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia) is a performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art". She is a lecturer at Bard College.
Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.
Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 Selected early works
2.1 Rhythm 10, 1973
2.2 Rhythm 5, 1974
2.3 Rhythm 2, 1974
2.4 Rhythm 0, 1974
3 Works with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen)
4 Seven Easy Pieces, November 2005
5 Later life
6 Prizes and awards
7 Bibliography
8 References
9 External links
[edit]Early life

Marina Abramović's grandfather's brother was a patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox church. After his death he was proclaimed a saint, embalmed, and placed in St. Sava's Church in Belgrade. Both of her parents were partisans during the Second World War : her father Vojo was a commander who was acclaimed as a national hero after the War; her mother Danica was a major in the army, and in the mid-sixties was Director of the Museum of the Revolution and Art in Belgrade.
Abramović's father left the family in 1964. In an interview published in 1998, she described how her "mother took complete military-style control of me and my brother. I was not allowed to leave the house after 10 o'clock at night till I was 29 years old. ... [A]ll the performances in Yugoslavia I did before 10 o'clock in the evening because I had to be home then. It's completely insane, but all of my cutting myself, whipping myself, burning myself, almost losing my life in the firestar, everything was done before 10 in the evening."[1]
Abramović was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965-70. She completed her post-graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia in 1972. From 1973 to 1975 she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts at Novi Sad, while implementing her first solo performances.
In 1976 Abramović left Yugoslavia and moved to Amsterdam.
[edit]Selected early works

[edit]Rhythm 10, 1973
In her first performance Abramović explored elements of ritual and gesture. Making use of ten knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the Russian game in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of her hand. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of ten she had set up, and recorded the operation.
After cutting herself ten times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging together past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body – the pain and the sounds of the stabbing, the double sounds from the history and from the replication. With this piece, Abramovic began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. “Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do.” (Kaplan, 9)
[edit]Rhythm 5, 1974
Abramović sought to re-evoke the energy of extreme body pain, in this case using a large petroleum-drenched star, which the artist lit at the start of the performance. Standing outside the star, Abramovic cut her nails, toenails, and hair. When finished with each, she threw the clippings into the flames, creating a burst of light each time. Burning the communist five-four rayed star represented a physical and mental purification, while addressing the political traditions of her past.
In the final act of purification, Abramović leapt across the flames, propelling herself into center of the large star. Due to the light and smoke given off by the fire, the observing audience didn’t realize that, once inside the star, the artist had lost consciousness due to a lack of oxygen. Some members of the audienced realized what had occurred only when the flames came very near to her body and she remained inert. A doctor and several members of the audience intervened and extricated her from the star.
Abramović later commented upon this experience: “I was very angry because I understood there is a physical limit: when you lose consciousness you can’t be present; you can’t perform.” (Daneri, 29).
[edit]Rhythm 2, 1974
As an experiment testing whether a state of unconsciousness could be incorporated into a performance, Abramović devised a performance in two parts.
In the first part, she took a pill prescribed for catatonia, a condition in which a person’s muscles are immobilized and remain in a single position for hours at a time. Being completely healthy, Abramović's body reacted violently to the drug, experiencing seizures and uncontrollable movements for the first half of the performance. While lacking any control over her body movements, her mind was lucid, and she observed what was occurring.
Ten minutes after the effects of that drug had worn off, Abramović ingested another pill--this time one prescribed for aggressive and depressed people--which resulted in general immobility. Bodily she was present, yet mentally she was completely removed. (In fact, she has no memory of the lapsed time.) This project was an early component of her explorations of the connections between body and mind, which later took her to Tibet and the Australian desert Following Rhythm 2, she set to develop the rest of the series of rhythm projects, continually testing her endurance.
[edit]Rhythm 0, 1974
To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her.
Abramović had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip, and, most notoriously, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.
Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained impassive) several people began to act quite aggressively. As Abramović described it later:
“The experience I learned was that…if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed.” ... “I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.” (Daneri, 29; and 30).
[edit]Works with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen)

In 1976, after moving to Amsterdam, Abramović met the West German performance artist Uwe Laysiepen, who went by the single name Ulay. They were both born on the same day.
When Abramović and Ulay began their collaboration, the main concepts they explored were the ego and artistic identity. This was the beginning of a decade of influential collaborative work. Each performer was interested in the traditions of their cultural heritages and the individual’s desire for ritual. Consequently, they decided to form a collective being called “the other,” and spoke of themselves as parts of a “two-headed body.” (Quoted in Green, 37). They dressed and behaved like twins, and created a relationship of complete trust. As they defined this phantom identity, their individual identities became less accessible. In an analysis of phantom artistic identities, Charles Green has noted that this allowed a deeper understanding of the artist as performer, for it revealed a way of “having the artistic self made available for self-scrutiny.” (41)
While some critics have explored the idea of a hermaphroditic state of being as a feminist statement, Abramović herself denies considering this as a conscious concept. Her body studies, she insists, have always been concerned primarily with the body as the unit of an individual, a tendency she traces to her parents' military pasts. Rather than concern themselves with gender ideologies, Abramović/Ulay explored extreme states of consciousness and their relationship to architectural space. They devised a series of works in which their bodies created additional spaces for audience interaction. In "Relation in Space" (1976) they ran around the room - two bodies like two planets, mixing male and female energy into a third component called “that self.” "Relation in Movement" had the pair drive their car inside of a museum for 365 laps; a black liquid oozed from the car, forming a kind of sculpture, each lap representing a year. (After 365 laps they entered the New Millennium.)
In discussing this phase of her performance history, Abramović has said: “The main problem in this relationship was what to do with the two artists’ egos. I had to find out how to put my ego down, as did he, to create something like a hermaphroditic state of being that we called the death self.” (Kaplan, 14)
To create this “Death self,” the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual's ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
In 1988, after several years of tense relations, Abramović and Ulay decided to make a spiritual journey which would end their relationship. Each of them walked the Great Wall of China, starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. As Abramovic described it: “That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye.” (Daneri 35)
Abramović conceived this walk in a dream, and it provided what she thought was an appropriate, romantic ending to a relationship full of mysticism, energy and attraction. She later described the process: “We needed a certain form of ending, after this huge distance walking towards each other. It is very human. It is in a way more dramatic, more like a film ending … Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do.” (Daneri, 35)
Abramović reported that during her walk she was reinterpreting her connection to the physical world and to nature. She felt that the metals in the ground influenced her mood and state of being; she also pondered the Chinese myths in which the great wall has been described as a “dragon of energy.”
[edit]Seven Easy Pieces, November 2005



Abramović performing Bruce Nauman's "Body Pressure." Guggenheim Museum, November 2005.
Main article: Seven Easy Pieces
Beginning on November 9, 2005, Abramović presented Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum. On seven consecutive nights for seven hours she recreated the works of five artists first performed in the 60s and 70s, in addition to re-performing her own "Lips of Thomas" and introducing a new performance on the last night. The performances were very trying and physical exhaustive, the involved the physical and mental concentration of the artist, this included Gina Pane's Self-Portraits that required lying on a bed frame suspended over a grid of lit candles and Vito Acconci's 1972 performance in which he masturbated under the floorboards of a gallery as visitors walked overhead. It is argued that she re-performed these works so as to pay her respect to past, though many of the performances were altered from their originals. [2]
Here is a full list of the works performed:
Bruce Nauman's Body Pressure, (1974)
Vito Acconci's Seedbed, (1972)
Valie Export's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969)
Gina Pane's The Conditioning (1973)
Joseph Beuys's How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)
Abramović's own Lips of Thomas (1975)
Abramović's own Entering the Other Side (2005)
[edit]Later life

Marina Abramovic purchased a theater two hours north of Manhattan in Hudson, N.Y., intending to establish the nonprofit organzation, Marina Abramovic Foundation for Preservation of Performance Art. She will use the space to work and develop ideas by including video and post-production equipment and a second property to house resident artists. [3]
[edit]Prizes and awards

Golden Lion Award, XLVII Venice Biennale, 1997
Niedersächsischer Kunstpreis, 2003
New York Dance and Performance Award (The Bessies), 2003
International Association of Art Critics, Best Show in a Commercial Gallery Award, 2003
[edit]Bibliography

Works by Abramović:
Artist Body: Performances 1969-1998, (Charta, 1998).
Public Body: Installations and Objects 1965-2001, (Charta, 2001)
The House with the Ocean View, (Charta, 2004).
The Biography of Biographies, (Charta, 2004).
Balkan Epic, (Skira, 2006).
Seven Easy Pieces, (Charta, 2007)
"Balkan Baroque," (Pierre Coulibeuf, 1999)
Critical and scholarly studies:
A Daneri, et al, (eds.), Marina Abramović, (Charta, 2002)
Laurie Anderson, “Marina Abramović,” Bomb Summer 2003: 25-31.
Jennifer Fisher, “Interperformance: The Live Tableaux of Suzanne Lacy, Janine Antoni, and Marina Abramović,” Art Journal 56 (1997): 28-33.
Charles Green, “Doppelgangers and the Third Force: The Artistic Collaborations of Gilbert & George and Marina Abramović/Ulay,” Art Journal 59.2: 36-45.
Shogo Hagiwara, “Art Hurts: Blood and Pain are Abramović’s Media,” The Daily Yomiuri 1 April 2004 p18.
Janet Kaplan, “Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramović,” Art Journal 58:2 (1999):6-19.
Zoe Kosmidou, “A Conversation with Marina Abramović,” Sculpture Nov. 2001: 27-31.
Tom Lubbock, “Visual Arts: Caught In the Act; It’s Video But Not As We Know It,” The Independent 2 September 2003.
Thomas McEvilley, “Performing the Present Tense,” Art in America April 2003: 114-117; 153.
Asami Nagai, “Art in Harmony with Nature,” The Daily Yomiuri 24 July 2003, p. 13.
Anna Novakov, “Point of Access: Marina Abramović’s 1975 Performance Role Exchange,” Woman’s Art Journal Fall 2003/Winter 2004: 31-35.
Jennifer Phipps, “Marina Abramović/Ulay/Ulay/Marina Abramović,” Art & Text 3 (1981).
Theresa Smalec, “Not What It Seems: The Politics of Re-Performing Vito Acconci's Seedbed,” PMC: Postmodern Culture 17 (1) 2006 [1]
“Writing Art,” Art Monthly 1999 230:13-17.
[edit]References

^ Quoted in Thomas McEvilley, "Stages of Energy: Performance Art Ground Zero?" in Abramović, Artist Body, [Charta, 1998].
^ James Westcott (November 9, 2005), Marina Abramovic, ARTINFO. Retrieved on 23 April 2008
^ Marina Abramovic to Open Foundation for Performance Art, ARTINFO, December 11, 2007. Retrieved on 23 April 2008
[edit]External links

Barzilian website about the performance art
Marina Abramović catalogue in Artnet's Artist Works Catalogues
UbuWeb Film & Video: Marina Abramović
Interview with Marina Abramović
Sean Kelly: Marina Abramovic
Artist's page in Artfacts.Net with actual major exhibitions.
Guggenheim page on Abramovic, with image from Rhythm 5.
Secondary source for the report above, quoting RoseLee Goldberg's Performance Art from Futurism to the Present (1988)
Guggenheim Press Release on "Seven Easy Pieces" - Nov.9-15, 2005
Interview New York Magazine - Provocateur: Marina Abramovic
Categories: 1946 births • Performance artists • Serbian artists • Women artists • Body art • Dutch people of Serbian descent • Living people • Amsterdam artists • People from Belgrade
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marina abramovic,2

marina abramovic, How we in the Balkans kill rats.

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