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Camera Obscura 18.2 (2003) 98-117


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Marina Abramovic's Performance:
Stresses on the Body and Psyche in Installation Art

Maureen Turim


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
"Dissolution." Courtesy Marina Abramovic'

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Among the most prolific, accomplished, challenging, and disturbing of international performance artists, Marina Abramovic has also become a key figure for those of us interested in the intersection of performance art, installation work, and video aesthetics. In addition, her work has significant implications for feminist and psychoanalytic theories, raising as it does new dimensions to our ongoing inquiries into the dynamics of the gaze, the body, and the psyche as related to textuality and reception. After a brief overview of Abramovic's career, this essay will concentrate on the theoretical implications of her work with emphasis on a particular installation drawn from a 1997 work entitled "Spirit House." This installation, presented at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, excerpted from that five-part piece a triptych called "Luminosity," "Insomnia," and "Dissolution." 1 Through analysis of this triptych installation, I hope to indicate a new [End Page 99] approach to Abramovic's work as a whole, one that links it to psychoanalytic feminism, as well as to films and to theories of other feminist film and video artists such as Maya Deren and Chantal Akerman.

Well-documented, Abramovic's performance art has had an audience far beyond those who actually have attended her performances at galleries and museums throughout the world. She has produced impressive retrospective volumes and catalogs of individual performances, as well as a number of documentary photographs and videotapes of these events. The most comprehensive of these is the handsome Marina Abramovic: Artist Body, which not only traces her performance art, offering her descriptions as well as her photo documentation for each performed piece, but also includes interviews and essays on her work. 2 This volume divides her career into three stages: her solo performances from 1969 to 1976 in Yugoslavia, performances with the Dutch performance artist Ulay (1976-88), and finally, her return to solo performances after the breakup of that partnership (1988- 98). Other volumes are devoted to specific works of Abramovic, including some of the work since 1998. There are separate volumes devoted to "The Bridge," "Cleaning the House," "Energy Clothes," "Cleaning the Mirror," and "Spirit Cooking." 3 In addition, Abramovic has been featured in a number of group exhibit catalogs and in volumes on performance art. 4 As her performance work yields stunning photographs that have power in their own right, this body of documentation not only disseminates her projects, but also forms its own aesthetic.

Acts of ritual violence and self-sacrifice figure in Abramovic's 1975 two-hour performance "Thomas Lips" for the Krinzinger Gallery, Innsbruck, where they are coupled with a studied performance of eating as oral ritual. Here is the artist's description:

I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon. I slowly drink 1 liter of red wine out of a crystal glass. I break the glass with my right hand. I cut a five-pointed star on my stomach with a razor blade. I violently whip myself until I no longer feel any pain. I lay down on a cross made of ice [End Page 100] blocks. The heat of a suspended heater pointed at my stomach causes the cut star to bleed. The rest of my body begins to freeze. I remain on the ice cross for 30 minutes until the public interrupts the piece by removing the ice blocks from underneath me. 5

By collaging obsessive eating and self-flagellation with self-mutilation, "Thomas Lips" sets up a comparison of acts. Abramovic's female body gives particular inflection to the food obsessions and masochistic aspects of these works.

Let me underscore the connection of this performance with Chantal Akerman's Je tu il elle (Belgium/France, 1974), a film in which Akerman plays the central role. In the long first section of the film, she is nude, alone in her apartment...

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