Quotes

“Her generosity as a woman and as an artist is beyond all question: on very rare ocassions in the recent history of art has there been somebody who has delivered him/herself with the same openness and freedom, with the same coherence and rigor, with the same risk involoved…”

“Her personal and creative path has always been moving, passionate, courageous; a permanent and successive construction and deconstruction of herself, going to the limits, being painfully [and humanely] defeated to be later reborn like a Phoenix: clean, purified and beautiful… After drama and tragedy, the exemplary values of joy for life, hope and beauty are what survive.” Conuelo Ciscar

Role Exchange

Role Exchange was a performance done in 1975. Marina had been an artist for 10 years. She went to Amsterdam and found a prostitute who had been working for 10 years. Marina proposed that they witch roles for a night. She had a gallery opening at De Appel gallery in Amsterdam that she asked the prostitute, Suze, to attend. While Suze was at the gallery opening Marina would sit in her window in the Red Light District. While Suze was at the gallery she stated, “I don’t know nothing about art, but I know everything about fucking.” She simply didn’t know how to act in the gallery setting, she seemed very out of her element. Marina also seemed out of her element in the window. She had three clients come to see Suze, and they all realized that Marina was not her. From what I can gather about this piece she did not have to sleep with any of them. Suze commented that Marina would not make a very good prostitute.

This piece was a response to Marina’s upbringing in Yugoslavia. She was taught there that a prostitute is a nobody, the lowest that a woman can go. If you wanted to be somebody then you get educated. That is exactly what Marina did, she became somebody. She decided that she wanted to be in the place of what she was taught was nobody. She wanted to explore what it meant if she was there simply to be used. She writes, “The idea was really the aggression to your mental state of being of different situations, to try in the performance to see the all the different possibilities using the body.”

This piece slightly reminds me of Vallie Export’s piece in which she walked around asking people to grab her breasts through the box. She did this as an expression of freedom of being a woman, as well as to show that view of women during that time period.

Rhythm 0

This piece was a performance by Marina Abramovic in Naples in 1974. The piece made showed he relationship between an artist and the audience. She was the object of this performance. The instructions were, “There are seventy-two objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. I’m taking the whole responsibility for six hours. There are objects for pain, objects for pleasure.” Some of these objects that she placed on the table were cake, flower, an ax, and a gun with a single bullet. The audience was asked to interact with Marina for six hours straight. In this piece she made herself completely vulnerable, even open to the possibility of death. And the beginning of the piece the audience did not interact with her much. However later in the piece they began to act violently and aggressively towards her. She ended up getting the gun pulled on her by one member of the audience, but another member took the gun away. At the end of the two hours Marina walked out to the public, and they all ran away. They were afraid of confrontation with the woman they had just abused.

In Naples, Italy women in 70’s women did not do much. They were either mothers or prostitutes. The audience ended up projecting these ideals on her. Mainly getting aggressive towards her, and completely objectifying her. She responded to women’s roles in Naples, by being completely complacent to whatever the audience wishes for six hours then stepping out to them. Through this she could be saying that women need to stand up for themselves and fight back. She also was commentating on what an audience is capable of. She writes, “The experience I drew from this piece was that in your own performances you can go very far, but if you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed.” She made a risky choice by putting so much control to the audience, and what she learned was that they will take that control and become aggressive.

We covered this piece in class, but it also reminds me of one of Yoko Ono’s pieces. Yoko asked the audience to come and cut her clothes in anyway they wanted. At first they were quite respectful towards her, but eventually they began to disrespect her. This seems to be a common thread when it comes to performance art that involves the viewer.