8 Bizarre Performances by Marina Abramović That Will Leave You Open-Mouthed

Who is Marina Abramovic?

What kind of art does Marina Abramovic create?

Why is she so well known?

Marina Abramović is a Serbian artist specializing in performance art.

Describing herself as the Godmother of performance art, she has been active for over 30 years, offering public works that explore the relationship between the artist and the public.

Who is Marina Abramovic?

Marina Abramović was born November 30, 1946, in Belgrade, Serbia.

Her interest in the arts arose from an early age.

At the age of six, she began piano lessons, and although not painting, it was an activity she practiced assiduously.

Marina Abramovic's mother was a leader of the Orthodox Christian church in her country. Probably Marina knew from that moment that a common religion wasn't designed for her and all her spirituality.

It was not until 1965 that she began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade.

Raised in communist Serbia, Marina became interested in politics and leftist movements during her student years.

However, after becoming disillusioned with politics, she began to explore her more spiritual side.

With access to the libraries of prestigious personalities in her country, Marina and her brother Velimir began to read significant esoteric books (and such was their influence that Velimir became an influential author of the New Age movement).

Later, Marina adopted Joseph Beuys' idea about art: the artist could become a shaman and a healer of society.

That is how her performances took a path inclined to spirituality and esotericism.

In 1972 she completed her postgraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia.

A year later, while preparing her first solo performance called Rhythm 10 — the first of a series of four performances —she was teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad.

In the '60s and '70s, many accused Marina of performing occult rituals that allowed her to stay young.

They began to call her a vampire because of this "gift" she seemed to possess.

She claimed that the women in her family lived too long.

Since then and up to the present day, the artist has continued to use her body as a medium to explore new horizons, marking the rest of society with her strong presence and shocking proposals.

That comprises around fifty works, including sound pieces, audiovisuals, installations, photos, and objects.

And performances solo and with other artists.

Her first performances, known as the "Ritmo 10", "Ritmo 5", "Ritmo 2", and "Ritmo 0" series, took place between 1973 and 1974 and were marked by controversy.

With them, she explored the limits of her body to pain and the audience's resistance to see what Abramović showed in an energetic dialogue between artist and spectators.

The artist continued with the idea common to all performances in these actions.

That feeling of the world through the personal experience of one's body.

Rhythm 10 (1973).

To explore elements of ritual and gesture, the artist used a set of knives with different blades and two tape recorders to perform the Russian game of knives.

The performance begins when the artist gives rhythmic blows with the first of the knives between the fingers of her other hand until she cuts herself, at which point she goes on to perform the same operation with the different prepared.

After using all the knives and having cut himself more than twenty times, he reproduced the sounds recorded on the tape to repeat the same movements, with errors included, thus managing to unite the past with the present.

In this way, Abramović explored the limits of moral and physical resistance-the pain and sounds of stabbing, the double sound of history and repetition-

That led her to reflect on the mind's and the organism's behavioral patterns.

And consider the state of consciousness in which the artist finds herself at the moment of the action.

Rhythm 5 or The Fire Star (1974).

She then performed her Rhythm 5, which in those days was known as The Star of Fire; she set fire to a big five-pointed star made of wood, known as petokraka (used to represent Serbian socialism and the pentagram in occultism).

Then Marina cut her hair and toenails and prostrated herself in the middle of the star.

She lost consciousness due to a lack of oxygen, and one of her colleagues had to pull her out.

Abramovic said that with this performance, she wanted to reflect on the socialist oppression they lived.

Rhythm 2 (1974).

In the performance "Rhythm 2", Marina Abramović experimented with testing whether a state of unconsciousness gets incorporated into a performance action.

In the first part of the experiment, she took one of the pills used for catatonia to test what connection got established between her body and mind.

The pill ingestion caused violent convulsions that made the artist lose control of her body.

Her mind remained lucid, and she was able to observe everything that was happening around her.

Ten minutes later, she carried out the second part of the experiment, in which she ingested another kind of pill used by depressive and violent people.

They caused her body to become immobile.

Although he was physically present, his mind was not.

Rhythm 0 (1974).

Undoubtedly her most daring and well-known performance.

To test the bounds of the relationship between artist and audience, Abramović developed one of her most demanding performances.

She adopted a passive role while the audience forced her to perform through her body manipulation.

On a table, she placed 72 objects that could give pleasure or inflict pain, including scissors, a gun, lipstick, a fork, and knives.

And a whip, which the audience could use as they wished, under the sole condition of applying them to the artist's body.

Initially, the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as the six hours of the performance went by.

And in the face of the artist's impassivity, the spectators overcame their initial resistance and began to act more aggressively.

And violently, even leaving her clothes torn and shooting her with a loaded pistol.

That was one of the actions that best defined her concept of art and became her most characteristic artistic language.

With Ritmo Zero, the artist concluded the investigation with her own body, addressing how much we are affected and inhibited by the response of others before our actions.

She deals with issues such as alienation, tyranny, domination, and the sense of superiority.

Thomas Lips (1975).

Later she made another performance entitled Thomas Lips.

In it, Marina takes the "eucharist" while sitting completely naked.

She eats a kilo of honey and drinks a liter of wine.

She marks the pentagram on her belly with a sharp razor and begins to flog herself until she bleeds.

The performance ends with her prostration on an ice cross from which the audience had to remove her when she became unconscious.

In the 1980s, Abramovic decided to live for a year with the Australian Aborigines.

And she says that from them, she learned to control her physical and mental body.

She also studied the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and the powers of Brazilian crystals and practiced vipassana in India.

Marina, in fact, also built her healing method that promoted meditation and introspection: with muscle relaxation, deep gazes, and breathing exercises, she puts on (she still practices it) headphones to isolate sound and then relaxes her muscles with various poses that allow her absolute meditation and peace.

The lovers (1988).

With the performance, The lovers, one of the most emblematic of their careers, Abramović and Ulay staged the wear and tear of their relationship with the physical and emotional wear and tear caused by walking nearly 2,000 kilometers of the Great Wall of China, each from one end of the wall and for 90 days, approximately about three months.

They decided to make a spiritual journey to end their personal and professional relationship.

When they met at the center, the couple consummated their separation.

They provide a fitting and romantic end to a relationship full of mysticism, energy, and attraction.

Undoubtedly together, they formed one of the most fruitful sentimental and professional tandems in the history of art, with the support of their complementary complicity and attraction.

Their excellent harmony and understanding have had many brilliant pieces at a creative level.

Spirit Cooking (1997).

But her spirituality was cut short last year after accusations that she was satanic and demonic.

After Marina held a Kickstarter for her new project, she held a thank you dinner for everyone who had contributed.

Among the guests were Tony Podesta and her brother John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager.

Then the rumors that Abramovic's dinner was a satanic ritual began to be heard everywhere (to discredit the Democratic candidate's campaign and the grandmother's career of the performance).

Everyone tried to deny what happened; Podesta did not even go to the dinner where Abramovic would teach her guests to prepare soup; however, what gave the title to her dinner was an installation that the artist made in 1997:

Here, we see Marina Abramovic writing what seems to be cooking something that uses sperm and breastmilk with pig's blood.

A metal bucket, liters of pig's blood, and a fat brush were enough for Marina Abramovic to perform her ritual in an exhibition hall.

While wearing a black robe, the Serbian artist finished the last brush strokes and emptied the remaining blood (including clots) into some wax figurines in the room's corners. Then, she covered the exhibition hall's edges with the remaining contents.

The sinister mixture of pig's blood and precise instructions made part of her 1997 work Spirit Cooking.

Although they appeared to be incantations or precise instructions for a demonic ritual, Abramovic claimed that it was a questioning of religion's influence on her work and humanity.

We often let the inexplicable rule and legitimize our lives and actions.

And even our bodies; for Abramovic, however, it was poetry.

A year earlier, she had published a book of aphrodisiac recipes.

The artist is present (2010).

On March 14, 2010, a major retrospective of the artist's work opened at MoMa, including video recordings from the 1970s, photographs and documents, and a chronological installation with re-enactments by actors of actions previously performed by Abramović.

The exhibition got accompanied by an illustrated catalog that included an audio recording in the artist's voice to guide the viewer.

For the retrospective, Marina Abramović presented the performance ever, 716 and a half hours sitting motionless in front of a table in the museum's atrium, where viewers were invited to sit it to share the artist's presence for as long as they deemed necessary.

The performance took place daily for seven hours and was broadcast live on a website created for the occasion.

When the museum was closed, videos of other actions, workshops, and interviews could be through the web.

Although there was no verbal communication between Abramović and the public, the participation of the visitors was indispensable to complete the action so that they could have a personal and unmediated experience with the artist and her work.

In this way, it is possible to appreciate the artist's imperturbability and the reactions of her successive companions.

And the other visitors to her impassive behavior.

Ulay made a surprise appearance during the opening, participating in the action and meeting her traveling companion again after 22 years of separation.

Internationally recognized for her long-term works on artistic time and chronological time and the relationship between the two, the artist assumes with this performance a total commitment,

She stated that the longer the performance lasts, the greater the physical and mental transformation she experiences and the more she can transmit to the public.

She believes that the time we live in is so short that we must stop and think to be aware of the present.

Artists have to do so that people disconnect for a moment and go to the here and now.

It was 62 days sitting on a chair holding the visitor's gaze, who sat in front of her.

One at a time is another way of exploring the body's limits.

When she finished, she got dismissed by the audience with a 13-minute ovation.

Sources:

https://revistadiners.com.co

https://culturacolectiva.com

http://colaboracionum2013.blogspot.com

https://aminoapps.com

https://es.wikipedia.org

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QKMzKo9XZ4