The Performance Art of Marina Abramovic in the Culture Industries of a Post-industrial Age
One of the most influential artists in the performance arts is Marina Abramovic (Belgrade, 1946). Since she began her performance career about forty years ago, she has become an icon for her use of her own body as the subject, the object and the medium in her performances. More often than not, those performances test her physical and mental endurance, while also emphasizing audience interaction.[1] Back in 1974, she shocked the art world with her performance Rhythm 0. During this performance, seventy-two objects were laid out on a table, including a rose, a feather, perfume, scissors, a scalpel, a metal bar and even a gun loaded with one bullet. The audience was given instructions to use the objects on Abramovic as they wish. The purpose of the piece, she said, was to find out how far the public would go: ‘What is the public about and what are they going to do in this kind of situation?’ Subsequently, the audience acted in a violent, sadistic and perhaps even an animalistic way.[2] She was stabbed, cut and her clothes were ripped off. When a loaded gun was thrust to Abramovic's head and her own finger was being worked around the trigger, a fight broke out between different members of the audience.[3] Today, Abramovic is still performing. In 2010, she exhibited one of her other famous works at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; The Artist Is Present. Visitors were encouraged to sit silently across from her for a duration of their choosing, thereby becoming participants in the artwork.[4]
As a case study, we want to analyze the work of this much-discussed performance artist. In his article, cultural scholar Rodríguez-Ferrándiz states that:
‘... the concept of creative industries not only encompasses the cultural products of mass reproduction, but also the arts field and the performing arts, which is frequently excluded from studies of culture industries for being non-reproducible by nature and, for that reason, not industrial.’[5]
As a reaction to this, we find it interesting to focus on this often ‘left-out’ arts field and analyze its cultural products more in-depth. How does the performance arts fit in the culture industries of the post-industrial age Rodriguez-Ferrándiz writes about? And how can concepts like ‘audience interaction’ and ‘prosumerism’, popular within cultural production research, be applied to the work of Abramovic?
Rodríguez-Ferrándiz states that in the post-industrial age, ‘the product itself has become communicative. This means that industry, regardless of its activity, should anticipate and furnish a communicable product’.[6] This very much applies to The Artist is Present (2010) as described earlier. Abramovic becomes the product herself and invites the public to communicate and interact with her and therefore with the artwork. Like Rodríguez-Ferrándiz states, in our current times the user of cultural products:
‘develops an active, not only contemplative role. Intervention is not permitted: it is required, even to the extent of finishing the product to their liking. The user must be capable of intervening in, manipulating and finishing the product. It is therefore not a matter of merely acquiring the product, rather, it is a question of doing something with it: from a cultural experience to a (postcultural?) experiment.’[7]
As a consequence of the (inter)active role of the audience, the ‘author-function’, a concept that according to cultural scholars Kember and Zylinska entails a certain dominance of the author, gets pushed to the back. For Deleuze, the key issue is to actually do that; to push the author to the back, to move beyond the constraints of the individual, by intersecting with different things, by crossing lines that one usually doesn’t cross, for instance by giving the audience the direct power to destroy you, as Abramovic did in Rhythm 0.[8] The dissolution of the author-function can then be considered a form of convergence in this specific case: that of the medium, which is performance-art, the author, and the audience. Like Hay and Coundry state, ‘the focus on the issue of ‘convergence culture’ or ‘transmedia’ perhaps underestimates the many other types of ‘converging’ and it also raises the question whether or not something can still be called performance-art when it can have such serious consequences for the body.[9]
As mentioned earlier, Rodríguez-Ferrándiz states that ‘the user must be capable of intervening in, manipulating and finishing the product.’ Looking at the work of Abramovic, it is striking that the audience does not only interact with the artwork, but to a large extent also creates and finishes it. Would The Artist is Present still be an artwork without the audience participation? Rhythm 0 would have been more like a still life of the artist and the 72 objects if the audience wouldn’t have free access to these objects. In this way, the audience operates as so called ‘prosumers’; the audience does not only consume the cultural product, but produces it as well. Like Rodríguez-Ferrándiz states, prosumerism is ‘the agency of media consumers as amateur producers.’[10] The concept of prosumerism is much used in research on new media nowadays, but can just as well be applied to the more traditional media, like performance arts. In an interview about Rhythm 0, Abramovic says that she realizes that ‘the public can kill you’ when you give them the power.[11] Although Abramovic meant it literally, it can also be a good metaphor for the consequences prosumerism can have on cultural products in a ‘postindustrial age’. Like Rodriguez-Ferrandiz states, although the empowerment of the recipient leads to post-productive (recreational and even creative) cultural practices, it also ignores the traditional experts.[12] When the audience becomes too controlling, will there still be ‘cultural gatekeepers’[13], in Bourdieu’s words, or will the audience eventually control, both implicitly and explicitly, all the cultural production? Although we will not go further into this topic now, this could be an interesting subject for further research on the influence of the audience, both within traditional and new media.
In the work of Abramovic, the use of new media is often absent. Instead of using different kinds of media in her work, she puts herself as the primary medium and object of the performance. Despite this, there is definitely some overlap with the products that are being produced in the traditional, performing arts media and new media, on which the focus often lies in cultural and creative industries research in the post-industrial age. In the work of Abramovic, a clear convergence between the ‘medium’ and the audience can be seen. Furthermore, the audience acts as interactive prosumers and have the power over the cultural product, something we also see happening in new media nowadays. By focussing on the performance arts, which is so often left out in contemporary cultural industries studies, we wanted to show how concepts often used in - post-industrial - culture studies can be used in the more traditional arts.
A. vd. B., V. M., J. P.
Proposition
How does the performance art of Marina Abramovic fit in the culture industries of the postindustrial age?
The Artist is Present, 2010
Rhythm 0, 1974
[3] Frazer, 2012: 125.
[5] Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, 2014: 337.
[6] Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, 2014: 330.
[7] Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, 2014: 333.
[8] Kember & Zylinska, 2012: 178.
[9] Hay and Coundry in Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, 2014: 335.
[10] Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, 2014: 335.
[11] O'Hagan, 2010: x.
[12] Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, 2014: 328.
[13] Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, 2014: 336.
References
Frazer, W. (2012), No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience. University Press of New England: New Hampshire.
Kember, S. & Zylinska, J. (2012) ‘Remediating Creativity: Performance, Invention, Critique’, in: Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge: The MIT Press: 173-200.
Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, R. (2014) ‘Culture Industries in a Postindustrial Age: Entertainment, Leisure, Creativity, Design‘, in: Critical Studies in Media Communication, 31, nr. 4: 327 - 341.
O'Hagan, S. (2010). ‘Interview: Marina Abramovic.’ Retrieved at 02-11-2015, from: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/03/interview-marina-abramovic-performance-artist
Picture 1
Retrieved from: http://www.artway.eu/content.php?id=1826&lang=nl&action=show
Picture 2
Retrieved from: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/12/marina-abramovic-ready-to-die-serpentine-gallery-512-hours
I always thought Abramovic was fascinating, not only because she does use her body as main medium, but also because when she uses other media (Balkan Baroque comes to my mind) it is unconventional ways, I'd say.
BeantwoordenVerwijderenI wonder if the audience in performances like The Artist is Present feels like part of the performance or just as a spectator--their self awareness regarding the piece.