Vol. 12, No. 1 (2020)

Contemporary aesthetics binds itself to the dimension of the living, not only human but also animal, in a manner compromised with the very movement of the real. An art that builds itself upon the covering of every fragment and works, tests itself, lives together with the persistence of the particular to the point of paroxysm. Marina Abramović grasped this character in exemplary fashion. Beyond the label, within the riverbed of performance art, Abramović nailed the body to its concrete power, where lacerations, burns and cuts are nothing but a canvas unfurled in the capacity of an event, set in opposition, at once political and aesthetic, to a factuality so disfigured by today’s mass-media projection. From the Rhytm series (1974-1975) the notion of limit is pushed to re-enter the physicality of reality, finding in the body the load-bearing axis of this action; faced with the evident risk, the public, the body of the public, is moved to act, thereby taking part in the artistic praxis. As Jean Baudrillard put it: “[…] art itself has largely become iconoclastic”[1], so that in Abramović’s aesthetic the spectator apparently breaks the artistic moment but, on the contrary, contributes to its realisation. The absence of finality, of an a priori to follow, of a pre-arranged scenario, shows how the Serbian artist lets the aesthetic accomplishment bleed past its margins and implicates the bystanders in bodily terms, managing never to seal with a final word the boundary between art and life, thus enacting what might be called a philosophy of persistence.

What persists? Certainly the aesthetic gesture is never clearly grasped in its incipit nor in its ending; rather it is an outflow distinguished by two non-outcomes: the inexorable and repetition. With the attribute of inexorability, Abramović’s performances bind the body of the public to a generalised anxiety toward the inevitable which, as an unconscious power, becomes an interactive flow; from a ground of defeat it turns into an occasion for participation, previously unthinkable with such concreteness, with the act that is consumed upon the scene. The obscene is situated here, in a rhythm that seeks to arouse by overwhelming the range of traditional emotion, unsettling and disorienting the possible reactions; this is why her aesthetic philosophy coincides with activity and refuses reactivity, that gesture soiled by the empathy dictated by the pieties of common sense. In this one notes a proximity to Nietzsche, to a certain way of transvaluing values, of overturning and shaking in order to awaken at dawn as a novum. In Thomas Lips (1975) the razor on the belly thins the separation between performer and spectators, detonating the inexorability of an ethical conflict over whether to intervene and come to her aid. Materiality and the organic trace make an authenticity resound that is now lost in the mystification of the organised virtual, where the element at the centre of the aesthetic act is not commodified but, on the contrary, denounces a truly alienating commodification born of the false myth of the social or the reality show. Abramović weaves a reality that is raw because it is alive, where the inexorable stands there as confirmation of our insuperable finitude and immanence. The rope and the arrow of Rest Energy (1980) represent the phenomenology of limits forever in the balance, that inexorable at the door which serves as a communicative memory to remind us that transience and corporeality share a common destiny. The risk of absence is around the corner in its definitiveness, and another absence, that of bourgeois security, stands out with force. Speaking of Goya, Bataille states: “Modern radicalism – the abolition of conventional feelings, silence – is constituted by an interior violence that is its essence”[2]; a “violence” that Abramović rendered palpable, arriving at a phenomenology of determination, just as with the theatre of cruelty of Antonin Artaud[3].

The craving for reality becomes an act of denunciation in Marina Abramović when butchery is a vortex that involves everyone and not only countries at war in distant lands; thus Balkan Baroque (1997) makes blood and dismemberment into a gesture that, through aesthetics, becomes communicable, knotting itself to the throat of the world’s peoples like a responsibility that, though refused, cries out and clamours its legitimate clinging to what remains of political conscience. Whoever observes is wedged into the impossibility of postponing the choice, as a confirmation of that condemnation to freedom decreed by Jean Paul Sartre. The “closed door” admits no interpretations or ways out among the meanings, but requires and compels decision. In an acute essay Gillo Dorfles ties choice to the very moment of its irrevocability and undeferrability: “Time – and therefore duration, consumption, obsolescence – constitute constants of artistic making and of the ‘choices’ made by man”[4]. To withdraw from Abramović’s “making” means to be universally guilty.

There is a persistence that has become philosophy. Here is the use of repetition that surfaces in the works of the Serbian artist, furrowed by an obsession with the immobile, reiterated to the point of metamorphosing into pure difference. The two combs of Art Must Be Beautiful (1975) bind the bystanders to a cyclicity that, just when it seems to settle into monotony, varies in intensity and vents the accumulated charge into a real wound; and yet the gesture does not change, and the phrase that gives the performance its title loses neither vigour nor tone, proof that art needs a long, a very long and exhausting apprenticeship, and that it admits no mediocrity. The nudity of repetition recalls the licentious drawings of Gustav Klimt, his women immersed in mortal eros and in erotic death, a synthesis of the human condition[5]. Art becomes an irritation, a being pushed against the wall, since it never gives up, not even in its apparent idyll, on interrogating surfaces and depths. In the net of binding repetition there is language too, a swarm of cascading expressivity like a Rossinian ouverture, accomplice to the artistic act bent on reinforcing a monotony that is at bottom multi-tonal; Freeing The Memory (1976) is an exercise that cuts through the exhausting, returning a disordered bombardment within which words and their power have settled, struck and chilled by the indifferent compulsion of the watchwords of information, which is rampant chatter. The unconscious can once again be listened to, sensed as a desiring power, drawing voice, body and memory into a trilogy that, besides Freeing The Memory concerns Freeing The Body and Freeing The Voice, likewise in ’76. Elements that return to nudity through the constancy of persistence, a philosophical method that in no way concerns mystical flights of detachment from the self but, conversely, a reappropriation of the earthly essence of the human being. Marina Abramović thus opens her Venus, recalling a famous essay by Georges Didi-Huberman where it is made clear that: “Nudity that appears, nudity opened, slain, nudity that flees and returns sovereign beneath our eyes”[6].

Persistence becomes an uncomfortable, incipient, massive presence when the spectator chooses to confront it de visu, without barriers, without mass mediations, without vulgar filters; Abramović’s gaze does not intimidate, does not cajole, refers to nothing other than the presence-absence of art itself, introjected and everted into the pure materiality of corporeality. The artist is present, from 2010, narrates all of this; it is the event of persistence that seeks its own knowledge to the point of exhaustion (a hallucinated duration of 736 hours) and undermines the very category of imperturbability. Art disappears as the form of its most immediate presence, performative force and power, and does not conceal a certain irony, as Baudrillard reminds us. The body makes itself art and allows art to return to visibility, carrying with it the whole of classicism with all its variations, alternatives and reprises. Greek statuary, like Flemish ambiguity, seventeenth-century mastery like the black-as-wellspring, all the way to the informal and the abstract, return in the gaze of Marina Abramović, who belongs to the history of art. The contemporary urgency is to traverse absence as the only possible presence, an emancipatory and revolutionary viaticum, in a political sense too, and never severed from aesthetics. The surrealist legacy of automatic writing still leaves its trace in the work of the Serbian artist, as does the formula of stage writing in the theatre of Carmelo Bene or in the directorial strategies of Fernando Arrabal; the unsayable and the unrepresentable are staged as obscenity, and today, for Abramović as an artist in the age of the globalisation of images, this stepping out of the scene can only occur in repetition and in the inexorable, signifiers of a freedom that involves life tout court. That “second reality”[7] of the surrealists is re-transferred into the emergency of the present time like a deep incision within the everyday itself, within the habitual body of the spectator, rummaged through and catalogued by the artist Marina Abramović with the never-foreseen aim of altering the receptions of the real.

Danger and the nearness of the abyss express art’s vocation to speak from the standpoint of finitude and immanence, that is, from reality itself. Laconic, Arrabal states: “Around me there arose the impulse to judge myself and the habit of prejudging myself”[8]. For Marina Abramović the same holds true: the complication of existing is shown already in the immobilism of a gaze, of a reclining of the head, of the act of sitting down; the embarrassment aroused by Imponderabilia (1977), that passage between two naked bodies in a narrow gap, relegates the vitality of motion to a decision, to a choice, like a summons to the real that confounds virtual accessibility with the laborious condition of being immersed in the concrete. What arouses such substantiality is the body, the needle of Marina Abramović’s disequilibrium, which echoes along the wake of absences, whether it be a matter of white walls, of inexpressive gazes, of silences, of gestural incapacities.

The greatness of Marina Abramović’s art relates to the inexorable, by analogy with repetition, in order to found another possible communication that is a flight into the real and not from the real; the materiality of the interactive installations condenses the traits of a simulacrum that is neither an illusory mirror of reality nor something that “stands for something else”, but an immersion in a territory that can once again be explored, the cosmos itself. The limit of the body is an experimentation in inhabiting the earth, in entering into relation with otherness as a dimension of existentiality. The spiritual does not enter into this trait, since persistence requires, insistently, a “being here”, a Nietzschean “return to the earth”. The soul is the body that knows; it is organic matter in motion, a compromised vitality because it is “put with” others (vegetal, mineral, animal). The exhausted material profile of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures has always fascinated Abramović, who, before them, in an action-interview from 2017[9], interacts with her own body by imitating their postures, seeking out with her hands their contour and a hypothetical graspability, as proof that matter is an entity that converses and can be conversed with, the consistency of an existence in fieri. The dismissal of the flesh in Giacometti restores to matter the tangible visibility of its fullness, creating a veritable “galaxy” in which nature, body and matter interconnect.

The “Abramović method” bursts into the scenarios of the everyday, and whoever accepts its invitation experiences, on the other hand, its force, at times violent in the sense of the determination with which it is activated, because to follow freedom is to take charge of the body that turns its gestures into performance. Aesthetic absence is a presence that can unhinge current fashions, commodifications, mystifications and standardisations, where excess has become a hypocritical mask, losing that obscene swarming that makes a work an event. Marina Abramović persists in the invitation to compromise ourselves truly with and for existence, seeking anew what binds nature and history to the earth itself. As Virilio writes: “Absences can be truly numerous, many hundreds a day, and most of the time they pass completely unnoticed by those present”[10]. The work of Marina Abramović persists, and will persist, in alerting us.

Image: Marina Abramović, Anima Mundi, performance (1983).

Notes

[1] J. Baudrillard, La sparizione dell’arte, ed. E. Grazioli, Abscondita, Milan 2012, p. 14.

[2] G. Bataille, Manet, Italian trans. by G. Alberti, Abscondita, Milan 2013, p. 39.

[3] Cf. A. Artaud, Il teatro e il suo doppio, Italian trans. by E. Capriolo and G. Marchi, Einaudi, Turin 2000.

[4] G. Dorfles, Dal significato alle scelte, Einaudi, Turin 1973, p. 73.

[5] G. Klimt, Disegni contro la morale, ed. A. Bandinelli, Stampa Alternativa 1993.

[6] G. Didi-Huberman, Aprire Venere, Italian trans. by S. Chiodi, Abscondita, Milan 2014, p. 73.

[7] Cf. A. Hauser, Storia sociale dell’arte, volume two Rococò. Neoclassicismo. Arte moderna e contemporanea, Italian trans. by M.G. Arnaud, Einaudi, Turin 1977.

[8] F. Arrabal, Carta de amor, Italian trans. by M. Palermi, Datanews, Rome 2005, p. 63.

[9] For the video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxVEMaPyPDQ

[10]P. Virilio, Estetica della sparizione, Italian trans. by G. Principe, Liguori, Naples 1992, p. 11.

Alberto Simonetti (PhD in Philosophy and Human Sciences) studied in Perugia, Florence and Urbino. His publications include: Follia e politica, deComporre, 2014; L’insavio, Morlacchi 2016; La filosofia di Proust, Mimesis 2018; Il penultimo del pensiero, Mimesis 2019. He has written various articles for philosophical and cultural journals on wide-ranging, cross-cutting themes.