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In recreating classic performance art pieces from the 1960s and 70s, veteran body artist Marina Abramovic wanted to ask an iconoclastic question: can performance art be treated like a performing art? Can it evolve beyond its puritanical origins in transience and unrepeatability, and become something to be reperformed and reinterpreted by others, like the script of a play or a musical score?

Seven nights of performances in the dizzying Guggenheim rotunda later, the answer is an obvious ‘Yes’. Abramovic’s pristinely-produced and highly respectful reconstructions showed that performance art can share in the grandeur and canonical weight of other performing arts, and this achievement may end up being her most important legacy. But whether performance art should be treated this way – scripted, heavily administered, and under constant threat of comparison with an original – remains unclear. Wasn’t performance art attractive exactly because it was ethereal, messy, and immediate?

The cheekily-titled ‘Seven Easy Pieces’, which took Abramovic 12 years to realise, started with Bruce Nauman’s austere Body Pressure (1974), for which he already had re-performance in mind. Nauman’s written instructions were meant for anyone to follow: ‘Press as much of the front surface of your body (palms in or out, left or right cheek) against the wall as possible.’ Abramovic had pre-recorded the instructions, and they rang out in the rotunda every few minutes. Standing on the circular stage, and watched by a couple of hundred beguiled people, Abramovic flung herself at a glass wall repeatedly from 5pm to midnight, smushing her face and body against it. But since Body Pressure is about personal responses to space, it may be that it’s more revealing to do the piece yourself, rather than watch someone else.





For Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) the next night, Abramovic masturbated under the stage for seven hours, completely out of sight, but miked-up for all to hear, and talking dirty constantly. The public was allowed to climb onto the stage, and even started to do the stamp-stamp-clap of We Will Rock You to help Abramovic along. Close to midnight, a dramatic wail echoed through the rotunda, and Abramovic said triumphantly, ‘Nine! That’s it. I can’t masturbate any more.’ Then there was post-coital cuddle-talk about being warm and happy. If Acconci’s original was full of dirty, secretive, and aggressive muttering, Abramovic made her version about healthy communal sexual healing. ‘I am with you. I feel your presence,’ she said to the delighted public.

Part of Abramovic’s rationale for redoing these old pieces, along with wanting to set an example by gaining proper permission to do them, is encapsulated by performance theorist Peggy Phelan’s famous remark, ‘Performance’s only life is in the present.’ Rather than relying on grainy old photos of performances that have become mystifying motifs of the original event, why not recreate the entire performance, giving it life again? So it was both appropriate and jarring that so many of Abramovic’s re-performances seemed to aspire to the status of a photograph. While Valie Export prowled around a cinema in crotchless leather trousers for Genital Panic (1969), Abramovic simply sat still on the stage, legs open and holding a machine gun, just like in Export’s iconic documentary photograph, which was actually made after the event.

And after the static torture of Gina Pane’s Self-Portrait(s) (1973), in which she simply lay on a metal frame above 15 burning candles for seven hours, Abramovic again focused on photographic imagery for Joseph Beuys’ much-loved piece How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). In between stomping slowly around the stage, obsessively rearranging three blank chalkboards, and occasionally whispering inaudibly to the rapidly-defrosting hare, Abramovic repeatedly reconstructed the famous image of Beuys with one pedagogical finger raised while looking lovingly at his hare. It was a powerful and telling tableaux vivant, but the archival image became domineering, and something of a fetish in a performance that was supposed to be an attempt to re-animate and demystify the image, filling in the gaps around it.

Abramovic said in a talk after the event that only now, upon doing her own Lips of Thomas (1975) again, did it make sense to her: eating the honey, drinking the red wine, whipping herself, cutting the star in her stomach, laying on the ice-cross – it was all an unconscious distillation of wild Balkan behavior, steeped in Christian and communist dogma. Each section was mesmerising (but unfortunately became less so as it was repeated and repeated), especially a new scene, in which Abramovic stood naked but for her mother’s Yugoslav partisan cap from the Second World War and the boots she wore to walk the Great Wall of China in 1988, while holding aloft a blood-stained white flag. A terrifying Slavic folk song about war being ‘our eternal cross’ (so the translation read) soared up into the rotunda from speakers. It was a haunting and expert synergy of symbols into – again – a biting single image.

I was very grateful to be able to see these classic performances that were done before I was born, but was left wondering whether maybe it’s the opposite of what’s usually claimed about performance art history: pieces might actually look better in mysterious old photographs than live again in the flesh.

JAMES WESTCOTT

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