Wednesday 6 August 2014

Marina Abramovic

Performance artist Marina Abramovic has influenced generations of performance artists since the 1970s and worked in partnership with Ulay from 1976 to 1988.
Marina Abramovic 512 Hours, Serpentine Gallery
Abramovic's durational performance 512 Hours is at the Serpentine Gallery from June 11 to 25 August 2014.
This work is experienced in a very individual and personal way since it calls all attendees to become participants in the durational performance just by being there.

Abramovic video diaries of 512 Hours is here

We MustWait review by Brian Lobel here
Immaterial Digital Diary & Archive and MA Institute here 

List of press articles with PDFs here

Of more interest to me is that Abramovic and Ulay spent time in Australia in 1979 they were west of Lake Disappointment in the Little Sandy Desert, then again in 1980-81 travelled to Papunya and the Gibson Desert ( Leonora to Mount Newman). In Papunya they met Charlie Tararu Tjungurrayi who collaborated with them to make 'Conjunction' (1983) in Amsterdam, one work out of 22 performance series Nightsea Crossing.

Link to Nightsea Crossing here  and a clip here
Conjunction here
A useful critique here

The ease with which the artists romanticised and orientalised others is clear in the 70s and 80s, and Green suggests:
Abramovic and Ulay, it might be argued, were indulging in a problematic exploitation – an orientalisation – of Aboriginality and Tibetan culture through stereotyping. The chromatic coding [of their costumes] could be understood to fix their collaborators in aspic, according to which ‘Aboriginal’ art or ‘Tibet’ would indicate the condition of a ‘spiritual’ thing, thus undermining from within the primary sense of the collective inaccessibility from which these works emerge. 
Charles Green The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Sydney, 2001)

Jennifer Phipps, 'Marina Abramovic/Ulay/Ulay/Marina Abramovic,' Art & Text, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 43-50
Charles Green, 'Group Soul: Who Owns the Artists Fusion?' in Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 6, 2004, 595-608
DOI:10.1080/0952882042000285005

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