On May 1, the grand old Johannesburg Art Gallery was packed with a strange and unusual mix — a twittering swarm of students in black polyester, velvet-clad Goths, suburban gentry, children and an eclectic blend of artists. All arrived to witness what is probably the highest profile international art event to take place in Joubert Park in recent years. The visiting artists were Yugoslavian-born performance artist Marina Abramovic and her partner, Italian sculptor Paolo Canevari.
Abramovic is here fresh from her recent showing at the prestigious Whitney Biennale. Known internationally as the ”grandmother of performance art”, she was born in 1946. In the 1970s she pioneered the use of use the body to test the limits of human endurance. Abramovic is known for her interventions — like the performance titled The Lips of Thomas in which she cut a five-pointed star into her belly, whipped herself until she felt no pain, then she lay down on a block of ice. In Breathing In/Breathing Out she clamped her mouth to her partner’s and, with microphones taped to their throats, they breathed the air from each other’s lungs to the point of suffocation.
She once instructed a gallery audience to use objects like knives and needles on her body, ”as you desire.” At the end of a six-hour period, her body was bloody mess.
In 1997, Abramovic received the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale.
The night of Abramovic’s performance, which marked the opening of the current exhibition, was fraught with confrontation. Curator and artist Kendell Geers, responsible for bringing the two to South Africa said that he was fortunate to have been part of a select few who had managed to manufacture careers abroad. The rest of South Africa’s artists he accused of ”living under a rock.” He noted that local art is ”festering and suffering.”
For his part of the show, Canevari has presented three rubber tyre sculptures. The first is a giant coffin-like structure draped in the American flag. It is somber, iconic and placed in the middle of the room allows a funereal stream of visitors to parade past it. The second work, a loomingly large rubber box, is the size of a small township house. This object was later vandalized by a rather ineffectual paint-throwing incident. The third work by Canevari is a giant phallic construction of tyres stacked on an oil drum, flanked by two large tyre ”testicles”. These works echo the artist’s violent condemnation of American imperialism in developing countries.
But it was the two video installations and the performance by Abramovic that the audience had come to see. And they were not left disappointed.
Perched high on a pedestal fixed to the wall, Abramovic stood, a metal bucket pail on either side of her. At intervals (and this went on for hours) the artist crouched, dipped her one hand into a bucket of organs and blood, and the other into a bucket of mielie pap. Then she stood, allowing the slop to drip from her outstretched hands and splatter onto the floor below.
In the first of Abramovic’s video installations, the artist sits astride a stationary white horse, a white flag blowing in the wind. Ironically, the piece is titled Victory.
But is her second installation, Count on Us, that is the highlight of the show. Produced in Belgarade, Abramovic describes this complicated five-projection work as the ”most political piece I ever made.” On one screen the choir from the United Nations School in Belgrade sings a hymn composed in honour of the United Nations. Abramovic, dressed as a sideshow skeleton, conducts the choir. On a second screen, children from the school construct and deconstruct the five-pointed communist star with their bodies. In a third and fourth projection, two children from her hometown sing folk songs. The fifth screen shows Abramovic holding a flourescent pole as one would hold the flag of victory. A nearby apparatus allows her body to act as an electricity conductor, lighting the tube in her hands.
The similarities between Abramovic’s home country of Yugoslavia, and South Africa there in their forms of grand and authoritarian utopia. Counteracting the arrogance of Geers, and his dismissal of our current situation, Abramovic asserts that the restrictions within both countries have been essential for making art that is worthwhile. ”The very big problem when I left Yugoslavia and came to Amsterdam,” she insists, ”was too much freedom. I could not function in Amsterdam because I was used to restriction. These restrictions [became] material I could work with.
”Freedom,” says the artist, ”is unproductive. So I have to build my own restrictions, my own borders, my own problems, again, in order that I can break with them and work with them.”
What’s up next for this prolific performer who seems to be at the peak of her international career? She aims to present a biographical work in July this year at the Avignon theatre festival. Then, three months later, she will show at the Guggeneim Museum.
Abramovic lives a nomadic life, something she says she learned from spending a year with native Australians. Her record, to date is 15 aeroplane flights in 10 days.
She enjoys ”living in between”. She finds it inspiring. ”You become an antenna,” she says, and one can sense that Abramovic intends to shed all material and psychological notions of home.
The details:
Marina Abramovic and Paolo Canevari show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until the end of May.