Movement, Style, School or Type of Art
Performance Art, video, photography
Date and Place of Birth:
November 30, 1946; Belgrade, Yugoslavia (currently Serbia)
Life:
Marina Abramović [Ah·brah·moe·vich] was born into a high-profile Yugoslavian family. Her work draws its energy from this celebrity and familial culture, which has met extraordinary tests of the body over long periods of time.
Her Performance Art has featured repetitive actions, physical injury (including self-mutilation) and long periods of inactivity. During her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (March 10 through May 31, 2010), she sat almost motionless opposite another participant for her piece The Artist is Present, whenever the museum was open: 736 hours and 30 minutes.
The daughter of a Montenegrin father, General Vojo [Voy·yo] Abramović etched his reputation into the national psyche when he fought the Nazis and Nazi-collaborators as the Commander of the First Proletarian Brigade in the Partisan Army, known as the fiercest troops during World War II. "He loved danger," the artist commented in a Washington Post review of her work The Hero (2001).
After the war, General Abramović became a much admired University of Belgrade professor in the School of Electrical Engineering. Remembered as charismatic, his required course, "National Defense" enthralled his students, who enjoy recalling his generosity. They were welcome to hang out in his large office and use his phones (when few people owned phones in Yugoslavia). His exams included demonstrating one's knowledge of firearms.
Marina's Serbian mother Danica Rosić [Don·itzah Rose·ich], a major with the Partisans, met her future husband on the battlefield as she lay in the snow suffering from typhus. General Abramović arrived on horseback and, like a medieval knight, spirited her away to a farm family where she recovered. A year after she returned to the front, Danica found Vojo in a field hospital bleeding profusely from a wound. She gave her blood to the soldier who saved her life. This time she saved his.
Danica Abramović was the director of the Museum of the Revolution (now part of the Museum of Yugoslav History). Marina recalled in an ARTnews interview: "My mother never kissed me or told me she loved me, because she didn't want to spoil me, and now I have to do so much to deserve attention. You have to get past the private suffering and translate it [in]to something universal, and then you detach from it."
Her home life was extremely strict and restrictive. Even in her twenties, when she performed her earliest pieces, Abramović obeyed her mother's 10:00 p.m. curfew. She moved out of her family home at 29.
The Hero (2001), an installation, displays a black and white 17-minute video of Abramović sitting astride a white horse holding a white flag high above her head, while her long dark hair flies freely in the breeze. Next to the video, a glass case of her father's personal effects and medals are deployed for study. This work is dedicated to her parents, who separated in 1964. Her father died in 1999. Her mother died in 2008.
Marina's great uncle Patriarch Varnava (1880-1937), on her mother's Rosić side, also became a national hero. He reestablished the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1920 and while opposing an increase in power for the Roman Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, he died mysteriously during the night of July 23-24, 1937. Some say he was poisoned.
How then could a young woman who inherited this heroic DNA express her own courage and self-worth? While painting compositions of clouds, she began to question her direction. The emergence of Performance Art in the 1960s and 1970s through such artists as Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman answered her need for a more visceral expression.
Abramović's Performance work focuses on the body’s stamina, strength, ability to endure pain and powers of concentration over long periods of time. Her work also follows her family's code of ethics: the mind and body should be resilient, disciplined and able to endure extreme hardship - testing one's will to survive.
Room with an Ocean View, performed from November 15 through 26, 2002, tested her resolve to live on only distilled water in three tiny rooms in Sean Kelly's gallery space in Chelsea, New York. She could not speak, but could sing. She was on public display during all the gallery hours and had to attend to all her bodily needs in public. This work, she claims, demonstrated her desire to suppress the ego through humiliating circumstances - inspired by Eastern philosophy. (You may recall that Sex and the City satirized this work in its final season.)
Abramović began her career in the former Yugoslavia. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts, Belgrade (Serbia) from 1965 to 1970, completed her master's degree at the Academy of Fine Art, Zagreb (Croatia) in 1972, and taught at the Academy of Fine Art, Novi Sad (Serbia) from 1973 to 1975. In 1976, Abramović moved to Amsterdam.
Abramović's career (so far) can be divided into three periods:
- 1973- 75: Early Solo Pieces - primarily about the body - during her professorship in Novi Sad.
- 1976- 1988: Relation Pieces with the German Performance artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), performed all over the world.
- 1988-Present: Solo Pieces, primarily about her identity.
The early solo work features repetitive actions that last for hours:
- Rhythm 10, 1973 – She played Russian 5 finger fillet, stabbing between fingers (or at least trying to and sometimes missing) 20 times.
- Rhythm 5, 1974 – She stood inside a burning 5 pointed-star and almost died of asphyxiation.
- Rhythm 2, 1974 – She took a pill for catatonia that induced uncontrollable movements.
- Rhythm 0, 1974 - She allowed the audience to do anything to her using 72 objects on the table, discovering how violent the crowd could be.
In other works she danced nude until she was exhausted, screamed until she lost her voice, and vigorously combed her dark, thick hair and face with a metal brush while intoning repetitively, "Art must be beautiful. Artist must be beautiful." This hypnotic ritual was painful.