Marina Abramovic: Witnessing Shadows

Born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Marina Abramović might be too old to qualify as an "'It' girl"—but certainly she is enjoying a new level of concentrated attention, if not quite celebrity. Her performance in New York's Sean Kelly Gallery in November 2002, TheHouse with the Ocean View, won the New York Dance and Performance Award (the Bessie) and Best Show in a Commercial Gallery from the International Association of Art Critics. The same performance was featured on HBO's Sex and the City during its sixth season in 2003, and the New York Times ran four pieces about Abramović's performance, including a short interview in the Sunday Magazine (the world's largest circulating magazine).¹

Abramović has been positioning herself for this kind of fame for some time now. She won the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale for Balkan Baroque, her meditative and mournful performance installation about the disaster in the Balkans. Before that, her collaborative walk with Ulay across the Great Wall of China (1986) commanded a lot of attention as well. But those pieces were celebrated for the endurance and strength they required. In 1998, Abramović began to change her image, and to some degree, her work as well. The cover of her extraordinary catalog, Marina Abramović : Artist Body, features a photograph of her romping on a beach holding a beach ball aloft.² This same image adorns the espresso cups designed by Illy and sometimes now available on eBay^TM. Posing more in the mode of a movie star than an ordeal artist, Abramović's recent photographs might have helped stoke her fame, but they are not responsible for it. Abramović's fame and its ties to the market—while not entirely unwelcome, I'm sure—sit uneasily with some of the premises of her art. Or to put it slightly differently, the gap between the art Abramović makes and the form of its most recent celebration raises interesting questions about both art and capital in the new century.

Abramović came of age as an artist in the 1970s, still performance art's most serious and daring decade. But unlike Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneemann, Adrian Piper, or Dennis Oppenheim, all of whom were working in the capitalist United States in the early 1970s, Abramović was exploring performance art in Belgrade under Tito's regime. A significant aspect of the US-based performance art of the early 1970s defined itself in opposition to the commodity based art market. Attempting to create art that had no object, no remaining trace to be sold, collected, or otherwise "arrested," performance artists of the seventies were working against the accumulative logic of capital. Adrian Piper articulated the problems with commodity-based art in 1970:

All around me I see galleries and museums faltering or closing as the capitalist structure on which they are based crumbles. This makes me realize that art as a commodity isn't such a good idea after all. That the value of an artwork has somehow become subject to monetary rather that aesthetic interest. That inconceivable amounts of money are lavished on objects, while artists expend their energy in plumbing and secretarial work in order to support themselves and their art. That by depending on a gallery to package and sell his [sic] product, the artist becomes a parasite who produces work tailored to sell rather than innovate. That the artist as parasite necessarily dies when the host dies. That all this wouldn't seem so inevitable if artists had the same social and financial status as all other civil servants who provide a service to their community.³

Some thirty years on, Piper's survey of the crumbling art market seems almost quaint. The connection between the parasite and host, however, has only gained in power as art and capital have become ever more intimate. Antonia Fraser's video, Untitled (2003), makes this parasitic relationship depressingly clear. Shown at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York 10 June-9 July 2004, Untitled is a video documenting a collector and Fraser having sex. According to the...