Marina Abramović is a contemporary artist who thrives off audience reaction. Her performances consist of taking her body and her surroundings to the next level. One of the performances which caused havoc which was she placed ” placed on a bridge a three minute looped recording of a building collasping” (Richard, 2010, p.8). The soundscape was removed shortly after after the public complained that it reminded them of the war. From then on, she has created many performances which has made her noticed around the world where many audiences attend to see her outstanding art work.
Our focus in class during this session was Marina Abramović and her performance of Nightsea Crossing. Nightsea Crossing is a durational performance which involves Marina Abramović and her partner Ulay. The performance consisted both of them sitting at opposite ends of a table staring motionless at each other. They did this for seven hours with no food, just water for sixteen consecutive days.
We started the exercise by doing a ten minute trial of Abramović’s performance as a whole class. We were positioned in two rows stretched across the space and was told to look at the opposite person. As the timer started, my first thought was that it was going to be easy and that ten minutes would go quick. I thought wrong. As time went by, I felt as though I was in a battle between my mind and body. Because my mind was concentrating too hard on focusing on the person in front this made time longer and more tedious. I felt the need to try and get past the barrier in order to keep this exercise going.
After the ten minutes had finished, we were told that we were going to repeat the exercise but this time for an hour and half. I repositioned myself into a more comfortable position and began the exercise again. I went in with a fresh mind so that I did not compare it with the one before but everything had moulded into one. At first I was relaxed and comfortable in my chair, even to the point where I had to move because I felt as though I was glued to my chair. As soon as I did, I could not stop moving around as my body became sore and aggravated.
Everything around me started to change as though it was drained of colour, even the person’s face I was looking at. Her face looked as if it was melting just like the clocks in The Persistence of Memory picture by Salvador Dalí:
This picture to me represents a dream – like world as the objects are surreal. When you are in a dream everything around you can feel distorted and out of place but as the time went by it became the norm to us because we were becoming used to the state we were in. It felt as though I broke through the “pain” barrier and that my mind could keep on going and going. A barrier meaning getting past that point where you felt a struggle but knowing you had to carry on.
I let my mind wonder and ideas were being explored in my head throughout the experience. Ideas such as performance ideas we could try out. This happened because I had broke through the barrier on mental exhaustion. I thought it would be a great idea to go further with this by exploring the fight between physical and mental exhaustion and how we could stage it as a performance. I was also interested after the exercise we did about audience reactions in how they react and their opinions.
The idea would consist of a group of people running around a large space until they could not move any longer. This would be a durational piece where audience members would be able to come into the space and either gives us aid to help us keep going or place obstacles in the way depending on how they reacted to the piece. This was taking the ‘pain’ barrier to another level and to see whether what outcome would come out of this. Just like the exercise of the Nightsea Crossing and what thoughts and the mind process we went through throughout the experiment.
This is a site specific piece of Martin Creed’s Work No.850
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U8Fl45-DFw
This piece of artwork is about standing out from the crowd, like he said in the video that if you see someone running whether it is theft or just someone running down the street, you as the audience are automatically drawn to what they are doing and question why are they running. He also quotes about “being alive” and feeling your heart beat when running. This artwork has inspired me into thinking about our piece and the phrase of “being alive”. This is by exploring the body and pushing our boundaries by developing a connection with ourselves and see how our body reacts when we push ourselves to our maximum.
As the process tried to keep on going, unfortunately we didn’t get anywhere with this idea. The positive outcome from this idea was that we still was still interested in audience reaction. In this we will take this further and see what we can explore and create with this theme in mind.
Works Cited
Klingsöhr- Leroy, Cathrin (2004) Surrealism. Köln: Taschen.
Richard, M (2010) Marina Abramović. Oxon: Routledge.