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
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
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".
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".
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
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!
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.
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 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.
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