Marina Abramovic (1st artist lecture of lockdown)

So we are now in Covid-19 isolation period and this is actually crazy, life just feels so surreal right now, but anyway for our first “visiting artists” lecture during this pandemic we are watching the documentary ‘The Goddess of Art- Marina Abramovic’ brought to you by BBC. Honestly, I feel weird writing this blog post, but here we go, I guess.

So the amazing Marina Abramovic a well-known performance artist, who has been breaking the boundaries of art as she explores the use of body, endurance, feminism, male and female dynamics and the interaction/relationship between the audience and the artist. Often her work can be described as being interventions. In this documentary Marina explained how she wanted this kind of performance art to be more respected and she has definitely achieved that. I’m just going throw it out there now, Marina Abramovic thank you and I love you.

The main piece of work that this documentary was discussing was ‘the artist is present’ where Marina had a set up of a table with two chairs, one on each side, she would sit in one chair, completely motionless for the entire day and the audience would come sit down and stair into her eyes. How crazy is that, she literally had a toilet kind of thing installed in her chair, now that is dedication. Anyway the ques of audiences waiting for a turn to sit with Marina was crazy, people where camping outside and waiting all day long, that alone is a huge achievement, the average time a person spends looking at an artwork is 15 to 30 seconds and she had people watching and waiting for the whole entire day. Later on in the duration of the 3 months the performance was held for, Marina decided to take away the table as she felt she didn’t need this barrier and was ready to be more vulnerable and direct with the audience. I’m just going to throw in a quote from the documentary that I liked her “she needs the audience, like oxygen”. Marina not only allows herself to be vulnerable, but she allows the audience to become vulnerable, many audience members during the performance left crying. One person actually decided to strip naked when it came her time to sit with Marina, I actually didn’t really like how she was then escorted out by the body guard. She explained how she wanted to make herself as vulnerable as Marina makes herself for the audience. But surely this kind of vulnerability is what Marina wants from her audience members and Personally I think it was kind of a beautiful gesture. I don’t know, but I definitely think that she should have been allowed back in after being told that not stripping off was a rule.

Obviously I love Marina, who bloody doesn’t, there’s the obvious reasons to relate to my work via performance, feminism and the use of audience interaction, but all around she is such a big inspiration for me and I can’t imagine what performance art today would be without the influence of her and other artists who done similar things.

Although I loved watching a documentary about the one and only Marina Abramovic I did think it got a bit boring at one point, like for a while it was going on about her relationship with her ex. Which I get, you know discussing their performances together and showing how she explored the male and female, domestic kind of relationship, but I felt it went on for ages, but maybe I was just tired, I don’t know. Anyway, that’s my blog post on the first Wednesday lecture of the Covid-19 pandemic.