Above, Relation in Time (with Ulay), 1977 by Marina Abramovic
I have been aware of Marina Abramovic’s work for a while but with the reintroduction of several of her pieces in an art history class I have become interested in viewing her work from a different perspective. I was most familiar with Rhythm 0, for which she set a table with seventy-two objects including feathers, fruit, shoes, knives, pistol, bullet, and finally herself as an object. The audience was instructed to use any of the objects on her body and for the duration of the six hour-long performance she was to take full responsibility for what happened. I did not react very well to this piece, I found it to be digressive to women and society. If we are viewing art where a woman is an object among other objects on a table then what is this saying about our progress? (Now, I also realize artists have been depicting women as objects in art for centuries, but I am speaking of this work specifically) I basically dismissed this work due to frustration, now I am giving it a second thought. Abramovic has stated that she does not consider herself a feminist artist and she was not concerned with her body being a subject in commentary about women; she was concerned with making body art ( the body as a site for artistic exploration). After researching other works by Abramovic I have discovered that I share some of the same ideas she addresses in her work. Relation in Time (with Ulay) was a seventeen hour-long performance where she and Ulay sat back to back with their hair tied together in a continuous bun. The couple sat joined together alone and for the final hour of the performance the audience was allowed to view. Documentation of this work shows the neatly tied bun slowly unraveling and revealing strain. This work deals with trust, intimacy, and the very idea of something joining two bodies together and simultaneously pushing them apart. The visual image of the work is striking for me, I am interested in the two bodies relying on each other for physical and mental support and needing each other to exist.
Although I am not making art for the same reasons as Abramovic, I have found her work to be newly inspiring for me and will keep her way of approaching the body in mind when thinking about what I want out of my own work.
*interesting enough: Rhythm 0
