Not What It Seems: The Politics of Re-Performing Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1972)

For seven days last November, Marina Abramovic engaged in a seemingly simple art experiment. The Solomon R. Guggenheim’s program straightforwardly outlines her weeklong endeavor: “In Seven Easy Pieces, Abramovic reenacts seminal performance works by her peers dating from the 1960s and 70s, interpreting them as one would a musical score and documenting their realization” (9). Myriad complexities unfold, however, as soon as one asks what it means to re-enact a performance that was arguably only supposed to happen once. Furthermore, a musical score is typically understood as written composition, where parts for different instruments appear on separate staves. By contrast, performance has historically been viewed as a profoundly embodied phenomenon, with no easy way to isolate its formal, sociopolitical, and site-specific elements.

I explore the tensions outlined above by reviewing a particularly fertile and perplexing example of Abramovic’s efforts to re-perform the score. Before turning, however, to address the factors that make her rendition of Vito Acconci’s Seedbedso oddly provocative, I must elaborate on the basic theoretical issues at stake in her larger project. Back in the 1960s and 70s, the rules of performance were threefold: 1. No rehearsal. 2. No repetition. 3. No predictable end. ¹Each of the earlier pieces featured in Abramovic’s 2005 program loyally followed these maxims. Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure(1974), Vito Acconci’s Seedbed(1972), Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic(1969), Gina Pane’s Self-Portrait(s)(1973), Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare(1965), and her own Lips of Thomas(1975) shared a commitment to performance’s one-time insurgence. Because there were no dry runs, no one knew how things would turn out, not even the artists. And because these precarious acts were never repeated, many people argue that it has since become very difficult to pass on the knowledge they shared to new audiences. Indeed, the question of howto rebuild the genre’s ephemeral modes of transmission is integral to the museum’s account of what motivates Abramovic: “The project is premised on the fact that little documentation exists for most performance works from this critical period: one often has to rely upon testimonies from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given piece” (9).

Yet as usefully urgent as Seven Easy Piecesseems to be, the artist’s proposal to research and re-do the works of her peers threatens the cardinal rules that have long defined this art form as singular. Peggy Phelan explains her sense of the non-reproductive ontology of performance in Unmarked(1993):

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance . . . . The document of a performance then is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.

(146)

Part of Abramovic’s challenge to Phelan’s ontology comes from her never actually having witnessed most of the actions whose scores she would reenact. Her engagement with the remnants that survive of these works is not merely “a spur to memory,” because she has no first-hand knowledge to reactivate. Rather, her plan to use archival remains to literally reproduce acts that were previously “live” suggests that performance canbe transmitted across timeframes. Phelan insists that performance’s affective and authoritative power thrives solely in the here and now: “Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time and place can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward” (149). Contrarily, Abramovic locates its ability to endure and inspire new audiences as residing in the copy: “ Seven Easy Piecesexamines the possibility of redoing and preserving such performance work” (9).

In an unlikely way, then, Abramovic’s embodied experiment appears to support the counterintuitive theory that Philip Auslander puts forth in “The Performativity of Performance Documentation” (2006). Her implicit understanding...