Marina AbramovicCc’s Performance: Stresses on the Body and Psyche in Installation Art Maureen Turim Among the most prolific, accomplished, challenging, and dis- turbing of international performance artists, Marina Abramovic has also become a key figure for those of us interested in the inter- section of performance art, installation work, and video aesthet- ics. In addition, her work has significant implications for feminist and psychoanalytic theories, raising as it does new dimensions to our ongoing inquiries into the dynamics of the gaze, the body, and the psye he as related to textuality and reception. After a briet overview of Abramovic’s career, this essay will concentrate on the theoretical implications of her work with emphasis on a particu- lar installation drawn from a 1gg7 work entitled “Spirit House.” This installation, presented at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, excerpted from that five-part piece a trip- tvch called “Luminosity,” “Insomnia,” and “Dissolution.”! Through analysis of this triptych installation, I hope to indicate a new “Dissolution.” Courtesy Marina Abramovic Copyright © 2003 by Camera Obscura Camera Obscura 54, Volume 18, Number 4 Published by Duke University Press gg100 + Camera Obscura approach to Abramovic’s work as a whole, one that links it to psy- choanalytic feminism, as well as to films and to theories of other feminist film and video artists such as Maya Deren and Chantal Akerman. Well-documented, Abramovic’s performance art has had an audience far beyond those who actually have attended her per- formances at galleries and museums throughout the world. She has produced impressive retrospective volumes and catalogs of individual performances, as well as a number of documentary photographs and videotapes of these events. The most compre- hensive of these is the handsome Marina Abramovic: Artist Body, which not only traces her performance art, offering her descrip- tions as well as her photo documentation for each performed piece, but also includes interviews and essays on her work.* This volume divides her career into three stages: her solo perfor- mances from 1969 to 1976 in Yugoslavia, performances with the Dutch performance artist Ulay (1976-88), and finally, her return to solo performances after the breakup of that partnership (1988— 98). Other volumes are devoted to specific works of Abramovic, including some of the work since 1998. There are separate vol- umes devoted to “The Bridge,” “Cleaning the House,” “Energy Clothes.” “Cleaning the Mirror,’ and “Spirit Cooking.’ In addi- tion, Abramovie has been featured in a number of group exhibit catalogs and in volumes on performance art.* As her perform- ance work yields stunning photographs that have power in their own right, this body of documentation not only disseminates her projects, but also forms its own aesthetic. Acts of ritual violence and self-sacrifice figure in Abra- movie's 1975 two-hour performance “Thomas Lips” for the Krin- zinger Gallery, Innsbruck, where they are coupled with a studied performance of eating as oral ritual. Here is the artist's descrip- tion: I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon. I slowly drink 1 liter of red wine out of a crystal glass. I break the glass with my right hand. | cuta five-pointed star on my stomach with a razor blade. I violently whip myself until Ino longer feel any pain. I lay down on a cross made of iceMarina Abramovié’s Performance » 101 blocks, The heat of a suspended heater pointed at my stomach causes the cut star to bleed. The rest of my body begins to freeze. [remain on the ice cross for 30 minutes until the public interrupts the piece by removing the ice blocks from underneath me.® By collaging obsessive eating and self-flagellation with self-muti- lation, “Thomas Lips” sets up a comparison of acts. Abramovic’s female body gives particular inflection to the food obsessions and masochistic aspects of these works. Let me underscore the connection of this performance with Chantal Akerman’s Je tz ¢/ elle (Belgium/France, 1974), a film in which Akerman plays the central role. In the long first section of the film, she is nude, alone in her apartment, compulsively writing and then destroying drafts of letters to a lover as she eats sugar from a bag. In an essay on Akerman’s film, I note the film’s performance art aesthetic, citing not only the similarity to Abra- movic’s work, but also to that of AKerman’s Belgian compatriot, performance / video artist Marie Audre.® Here let me note that these contemporaneous artworks show an intertextual fixation on the stripped body in the grip of compulsive acts shadowed as the inauguration of a highly personalized ritual. In each case the actions pose their own enigma: why would anyone do this? We might choose one of two explanations for the accumu- lation across Abramovic’s works of torturous acts in which the body is submitted to pain. One lies in shamanistic ritual and tran- scendence of the body as derived from religious practices, partic- ularly eastern religions. This is the explanation repeatedly offered by the artist. She wants the mind to transcend the limits of the body. She says of her recent work “Dissolution,” “I whip my body to the point where I don’t feel the pain anymore,” a phrase quite similar to one in her description of “Thomas Lips” cited earlier.’ She wants this state of transcendence to be witnessed by an audi- ence. To this end, she blends rituals from numerous sources. She chooses the five-pointed star in reference to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. She uses crucifixion poses, as in the cross-shaped bed of ice in “Thomas Lips,” and elsewhere, as in The Biography (1993), places herselfon a medieval hanging cross.102 . Camera Obscura Yet we might seek another explanation, one that lies ina historically based psychoanalytic theory. Subjects who are acting out unconscious desires that they cannot express otherwise perform such rituals. Abramovic’s performances are conscious designs, but they carry unconscious motivations and meanings. They often receive less attention than they might, due to the phi- losophical and religious explanation that dominates the artist's discourse and from which the critical response takes its cue. Yet let us note that these performances alternate between the desire to control (note the minimalist precision in her scripts for the performances) and the desire to submit (once committed to the script, she endures the fate that she has planned). Pain here is clearly eroticized, presented in its discrete penetrations on a nude body. The star covers the region of the womb, substituting itself for caesarian surgery. The woman mutilates the expanse of flesh connected to breath, to birth, to life, which comes between breasts and vagina. Here we might consider how masochism is often misconstrued as direct pleasure from pain, rather than asa complex desire for pain, Abramovic’s performances differ from the pornographic staging of masochism for immediate sexual gratification; rather, they place before an audience the accomplishment of pain as something staged for interpretation and appreciation. In other words, they call for a feminist reintes pretation of masochism, but not simply the one circulating as the appreciation of the female dominatrix as powerful facilitator of male masochism that bor- rows from Gilles Deleuze’s reading of the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.* Rather the feminist issues at stake here involve a reconfiguration of the positing of three distinct forms of maso- chism in Freud's essay, “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” first published in 1924.” Freud distinguished erotic masochism from two other more extenuated and less erotic forms, one that he called “feminine masochism” and the other “moral masochism.” Feminine masochism was a concept overdetermined by Freud’s lack of a feminist consciousness and his historical moment: he essentially posits a passive attitude toward a more command- ing partner as an adoption of a feminine position. Freud distin-Marina Abramovié'’s Performance « 10% guishes moral masochism from the other two types in that he places it beyond the dualism of the subject and the other (the love object), but rather conceives it as a more general internaliza- tion of self-suffering as a moral alternative to inflicting pain on others. Interestingly, Freud links moral masochism to characters in Russian literature, a lead that Daniel Rancour-Laferriere fol- lows in his 1995 study, The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering." In both feminine and moral masochism, Freud sees the subject testing the limits of the pleasure principle through a longing for the stasis Freud connected to the death drive in his 1920 study Beyond the Pleasure Principle; the moral masochist withdraws from conflict, engaging only in selfdestruction.!! I wish to suggest that the masochistic aspects of Abramovic’s perfor- mances take on a heritage of Christian and particularly Eastern Orthodox moral masochism, along with any traditional links this may have to a feminine position. When such acts are performed or represented by a contemporary woman artist, when they are seen in relationship to early performance art that has been linked to masochism by Kathy O'Dell in her Contract with the Skin: Maso- chism, Performance Art, and the 1970 ‘5, it seems that what emerges is an active intervention into the representation and acting-out of the submissive subject.!* As a Jew who was raised in a Communist country, and as a modern woman of Europe, Abramovic less par- takes of the traditions of moral masochism directly than interacts with them as an outsider, The artist confronts the limits com- prised by our expectations of pleasure in aesthetic experiences of theater and art. She tests those limits as a collective, ritual act in which audience reaction becomes very much an element of meaning within the work. In the duo performances, the heterosexual union is traced through displaced acts where bodies remain detached, often sep- arated in space, even as they strike out at one another or until they collide. Despite the tension of violence, given the couple through which to displace desire, the performances are less vio- lent and less about pain than are Abramovic’s solo works before or after collaboration with Ulay. Yet the tension is often graphic, as in “Rest Energy” (1979), in which each artist holds onto a bow104 + Camera Obscura with an arrow pointed at Abramovic’s heart for four minutes and ten seconds, as microphones amplify their heartbeats. Sound here brings us into another contact with the body, as the amplified heartbeat exaggerates the bodies’ rhythmic and perhaps changing pulses over time and under stress. This focus on the body is another of the strategies both the artist and critics have taken to Abramovice’s work, and that of other performance artists. As with Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body, which argues for the body asa theoretical category for the study of cinema, much of the per- formance-art focus on the body remarks on the representation of the body as a philosophical insistence on the physical human body.!* This insistence stands at a particular juncture of postmod- ernism that otherwise supplements or replaces the body with technology. One less conscious consequence of body-oriented criticism, however, is the body’s opposition to the psyche. Acts of—or done to—the body are witnessed, described, and appreci- ated as such, and art that centers on the body is seen as having the body as its concern, Tautological, if not an entirely self-evident naming of thematics, this approach can beg the question of what the body represents and of how bodies in representation interact with each other, and the bodies of viewers, listeners, and readers. Often these questions, which demand other methodologies, are sidestepped. There may be an implicit removal of the psyche from the body, and a turn away from psychoanalytical theory asa result. The body should not be treated as a self-evident thematics, but rather one whose gendered historical construction has con- stantly shifting symbolism for the fears, anxieties, hopes, and desires of various cultures. Abramovic is included in a new volume, Body and the Fast: From the 1960s to the Present, which traces performance art in coun- tries of central and eastern Europe, and she was featured in a 1997 Australian exhibition and catalog titled Body, which looks back to the paintings of Corbet as a precedent for recent preoccu- pation with the body in art of all kinds.'4 These volumes suggest that the renewed focus on the body be putin multiple historical contexts and that it be seen as a discourse on our vers conception of sexuality and artistic representation. Alan Kresses’s essay in theMarina Abramovié’s Performance «© 105 Body catalog, “Fearful Desires: Embodiments in Late-Nineteenth- Century Painting,” speaks of the presentation in Manet’s Olympia (1863) of a “rampaging sexuality at once desirable and threaten- ing.”!5 Ifa woman’s naked body can no longer evoke such fears, a woman artist performs new fears tied to submission to pain, not for pleasure —or at least not in the direct form ofa pronounced sexual gratification. Here the ritual is rather that ofa performa- tive psychoanalytic space of enduring, representing, and witness- ing. Abramovié has relocated fear, giving it a postmodern con- text, where one no longer assumes that sexuality is necessarily threatening. She occupies the space of a self-creating woman artist who offers her performances and videos to those who enter into the watching experience cognizant that her creative power is on display. The acts performed may elicit fear for her well-being and unease about her intentions and endurance. Inversions of roles take place in other of Abramovic’s art- works. Her “objects for human use” set the stage for an art instal- lation/ performance piece, as they turn museum visitors into per- formers. “Green Dragon Lying” consists of a slab of marble and a quartz pillow forming a horizontal bed. “Red Dragon Sitting” consists of a similar slab of marble and a quartz headrest forming a row of chairs. The spectator is instructed to occupy the spaces, “Head Resting on the Quartz Pillow Looking Straight Ahead” or “Head Resting on the Quartz Pillow Looking Up,” respectively.!" This experience can be regarded as calm and peaceful, if cool and hard placements of the body in these objects for human use contrast with the torturous duration and painful inscriptions on the body that Abramovice undertakes in her performance pieces. Largue this difference is instructive, for as object of our gaze, Abramovic as performer does more than, as she often puts it, explore the limits of the body in a shamanistic ritual. She methodically sets out to perform an act that has clear parameters and goals, whose mise-en-scéne she desires to accomplish, and whose accomplishment she methodically documents. I wish to append to this documentation another text: Lacan’s numerous diagrams of desire. In these diagrams, Lacan traces the torturous path of the106 . Camera Obscura subject on a quest for recognition, an acknowledgment from the other.'!? Permutations of this desire take the form of attempts to possess the other as an object and substitutions of objects for this recognition. Sublimation is another path Lacan traces of the same diagrammatic quest, a lure, because all goals of desire remain for him beyond attainment, something he demonstrates in arch- ing diagrams that aim toward a completion from which point they remain suspended. If these diagrams serve us well here as inter- text to these performance pieces, it is by way of contrast. The per- formances may test limits but they also have limited goals, ones that can be met and completed, offered to us as a sublimated aes- thetic, if nota sublime experience. The psychoanalytic parti-pris receives a particular feminist inflection in the series of performances entitled “Cleaning the Mirror.” Abramovi¢ often uses gestures of cleaning to represent duration not simply as waiting or endurance, but as a never- finished process of work—work that is coded as proletarian or domestic and female. In “Balkan Baroque” she cleans blood off a pile of large bones. In “Cleaning the Mirror I, II, and LI” (1.gq5), performances recorded as installations, the mirrors are entirely metaphorical, embodied by the artist’s activities with a skeleton in parts land I. In part IL, the mirror constitutes itself in objects found in the anthropological and ethnographical collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK. Although actual mirrors find their place in other Abramovic pieces, and at least one critic has made the connection to Lacan's theory of the mirror stage,'* the psychoanalytic elements of the “Cleaning the Mirror” series derive in part from the force of metaphors that are always present in her work: objects that define the subject, actions that stand in the stead of desired objects, and subjects that stand in the stead of witnesses. Her ordeals qua performances mirror in the same way that the actions of another, played back, mirror one’s memo- ries, even when they abstract and exaggerate experience, The mirroring here is not to representation directly, not to the like- ness of image, but to that which is manifest in actions and desires. The precise, detached, minimalist aesthetic of her per- formances and their documentation contrast with the enduranceMarina Abramavtc’s Performance « 107 of discomfort, if not pain. This contrast accentuates the psychical tension of a determinant trial, All these works flirt with the fetish, with masochism, with exhibitionism, and place us as spectators in the uncomfortable place of a quiet and somewhat indifferent sadist, content to observe. In fact we have an uncertain contract with these works, to observe these limit experiences under the assurance that one real limit will not be surpassed, in that the artist may bleed, but she will not die. We anticipate that the cuts will be superficial and well photographed. No gallery will risk the infection of deep wounds left to putrefy, even though some per- formance artists have broken an unspoken contract and done lasting harm to their bodies. These extreme actions haunt all per- formance art, even those performances in which no threat to life takes place. I want to insist then that what fascinates us here is no mere dressing up of the parlors of sadomasochism as respectable spaces of high art, even though, of course, on some level that is precisely what is happening. Rather, I wish to argue that Abramovic’s per- formances and her objects for use are best understood by juxta- position with other artworks. One fruitful point of comparison might be with the exploration of female creativity that we find in Maya Deren’s films, as well as in her theories. Long before Abramovi¢é, Deren looked to ritual as a model for art making. She theorized in “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film” that the contemporary artist must embody rituals for a society that has lost much of the communitarian ritual that tribal cultures embody.!* In her recent installations, “Luminosity,” “Insomnia, and “Dissolution,” from the 1997 work “Spirit House.” Abramovic frames three quite distinct performances that she choreographs for the camera. In each, a single activity is held in view, so that we might witness it as ritual. Disturbing images projected as a nexus of performance art and video installation art, Marina Abramovic'’s three “stations” (as she calls these works) offer a perspective on eroticism, pain, and self-inflicted violence and another allegori- cal reference to religious imagery. Again the artist's body becomes asite for scrutinizing a limit, while the artist reconceives her rela- tionship to us, her witnesses.108 . Camera Obscura In “Luminosity,” the artist, nude, balances painfully on a bicycle seat attached to a pedestal apparatus. The image is bathed ina changing light and framed centrally ina deliberate minimal- ist aesthetic. The play with light on the body connects this work to “Insomnia,” in which the artist dances solo—a slow, introspective Tunisian tango rendition. She is dressed in the black lace dress and heels traditionally associated with the Latin dance. Finally in “Dissolution,” the artist, framed with her bare back to the camera, whips herself repeatedly; only in this piece does the camera move, to explore the flesh after the flogging. Powerful images, poten- tially frightening images. Abramovic performs and records rituals that beg us to question our witnessing. Why do we watch? What gaze are these images meant to evoke or to discomfort? What is the aesthetic of composition, display, duration, and transformation implied in these works as installations? We begin to answer these questions by seeing these works as coupling the spectator solicitation and the manipulation of duration characteristic of performance art with the aesthetics of representational form that installation work affords. Abra- movic brings to these art forms a social, historical context in which her biography and her engagement with history speak through the acts presented. Her desire to build on her corpus of works and on their relationship to other performance art is another key to understanding these “stations.” As I have sug- gested, her works evoke anthropological and psychoanalytical elements. The shaman, through ritual, exemplary acts, mediates a community's violence, sexuality, and willingness to endure, and in asociety in which such rituals are no longer generally available, such representations have psychoanalytic valences. Abramovic’s works explore the body in pain and the body as a source of pleasure —the body tested, and the limit approached. If we can support their intensity, it is to learn how much they have, despite their deceptive simplicity, to tell us about the history of art. Per- formance art tends to provoke controversy and spectator uneasi- ness through the manner in which the artist’s body becomes her element of signification, emotional expression, and confronta- tion. True performance artis live, staged with an audience, andMarina Abramovic's Performance + Log perhaps documented. Marina Abramovie built her early career on just such performance events, One that resonates with the challenge of violent endurance of the video installation work dis- cussed here, especially in its division into two parts, a perfor- mance for nude body and ventilator fan and its witnessing through video recording, is “Rhythm 4” (1974) a forty-five-minute work for the Galleria Diagramma, Milan. Abramovié describes the per- formance in space A: “I slowly approach the air blower, taking air in as much as possible. Just above the opening of the blower I lose consciousness because of the extreme pressure. But this does not interrupt the performance. After falling over sideways the blower continues to change and move my face.” Space B is the space of witnessing: “The video camera is only focused on my face without showing the blower. The public looking at the monitor has the impression of my being under water. The moment I lose con- sciousness the performance lasts 3 more minutes, during which the public is unaware of my state, In the performance I succeed in using my body in and out of consciousness without any interrup- tion.’?" Separation of the performance from its viewing through a framed representation creates a mystery: the seen yet unrecog- nized unconsciousness of the performer. Both spaces of the per- formance were, however, documented in photographs, as is the tradition in performance art—which, along with the description, becomes a third way of experiencing the art event. Abramovic’s theaters of pain may be compared to Antonin Artaud’s work, and this lineage allows us to see a historical dimen- sion of artists reacting to the social by projecting their interior states as that which they are compelled to offer.*! Distance, reflection, and statement are eliminated from art in favor ofa the- oretically designed direct connection to reactive states of being. Metaphor returns to such art only by way of history and social context. We understand Artaud as reacting not only to private demons, but toa larger cultural context. For Abramovieé this context is one of her attachment to and alienation from her native Yugoslavia, from its history. The resistance struggles against Nazi domination through which Abra- movic’s parents met, the Tito communism of the postwar years,110 » Camera Obscura and the current bloody history of disintegration into warring eth- nic enclaves, emerge as direct references only gradually and then late into her career as an artist. “Communist Body, Fascist Body” (1979), a performance of Abramovié and Ulay on their shared birthday of 30 November, placed the couple asleep near two tables set to represent Abramovic’s Communist background and Ulay’s German heritage. Yet only in some of Abramovic's recent work does more direct reference to history appear, and interest- ingly psychoanalysis is also referenced in this context. “Delu- sional” has Abramovice lying on a divan of ice blocks surrounded by plastic black rats, which cedes to sections that include stories from her childhood and projected images of her mother and her father telling stories of their lives and the war. “Balkan Baroque,” which earned Abramovic the Leone d'Oro Prize at the Venice Bienniale in 1997 (after a sustained controversy around its place of exhibition), also includes images of father, mother, and self projected behind a space in which are set three copper sinks that also look like coffins. The artist washes 1,500 large beef bones, piled into a mound, while singing folk songs from her childhood. These works of performative trial and endurance in an- nexing the historical and the biographical while still seeking a generalized symbolic mode of expression bring us to understand how fully the notion of a trial by fire, a ritual of submission and endurance, enters into Abramovic’s artistic practice. Returning then to the three images, “Luminosity” “Insom- nia, and “Dissolution,” we can see that they act as reiterated excerpts from this history of performance pieces, cast quite liter- ally in a new light. For each of the images is actually about the transformation of light within the frame. In “Luminosity,” the body poised ina precarious and painful balance increasingly is bathed ina white light as arms ascend to form a cross. Shadows of the body posed in crucifixion splay out to either side. Increasing intensity of light subsumes these shadows and effaces all detail on the body itself. In “Insomnia,” a spotlight forms a vector across the image that initially matches the triangle formed by the artist's elbow in close-up before the dance begins. The dance navigates