With her retrospective show "The Cleaner" having its symbolic climax in the city where her career began, the celebrated performance artist is exhibiting in her hometown for the first time in nearly 50 years.
Image: Marco Anelli /Marina Abramovic Archives
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Marina Abramovic: A lifelong performance
She's renowned throughout the world for her extreme performance art: Marina Abramovic has greatly influenced the genre for more than 40 years, easing its way into the world's big art museums.
She laid naked on blocks of ice, cut herself and screamed until she lost her voice: Marina Abramovic used her body as a radical tool of expression like no other artist before her. A look back at the life and work.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
1973: Pain, but no pain
Her first performance involved playing the Russian game with 10 knives and two tape recorders. It was an eye-opener for her: "I felt as though my body had no limits, as though pain couldn't affect me anymore, as though nothing mattered anymore — an exhilarating experience," Marina Abramovic wrote in her autobiography. "At that moment, I knew that I had found the medium that was right for me."
Marina Abramovic, born to two partisans, grew up in Belgrade. She was privileged in that she was given an art education, but she also felt lonely and was often beaten by her mother. The oppression of Tito's regime in former communist Yugoslavia often features in her hazardous works. During this performance in Belgrade, she was rescued from flames by people in the audience.
Image: Nebojsa Cankovic/Marina Abramovic Archives
1975: Artistic development
In her early works, injuries inflicted by herself or others, nudity and unconsciousness were means of expression she frequently used. This was the artist's way of protesting against decorative esthetics that had marked her youth: "I was convinced that art ought to be disturbing, that it should pose questions while being trendsetting."
An encounter with German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) heralded a new era in Abramovic's work. They fell in love at first sight and worked as a creative team from then on. Their cooperation started off with a noteworthy performance at the Venice Biennale with both artists colliding against each other with their naked bodies — for 58 minutes.
Image: Ulay/Marina Abramović/Moderna Museet
1978: Creative fusion
The two artists lived and worked together for 12 years. It can be assumed that they spent half of that time on an artistic flight of fancy. Totally free, they lived in a small Citroen bus for four years, traveling to various locations where they were invited to give performances.
Even their separation in 1988 was sealed with a performance. In a piece called "The Great Wall Walk," they walked towards each other along the Great Wall of China, starting at opposite ends and meeting in the middle. The work was originally planned as a romantic manifesto, but they ended up doing the three-month walk to end their relationship. They separated, both as a couple, and as a team.
Rather than slowing down Marina Abramovic's output, the separation actually inspired her. In 1997, she was invited to present her work in the international section of the Venice Biennale. She was awarded a Golden Lion for her performance "Balkan Baroque," dealing with the Balkan Wars, in which she spent seven hours a day washing a mountain of bloody cow bones, over four days.
Her bone action was reminiscent of an earlier series of video performances called "Cleaning the Mirror," which was later reperformed in retrospectives of her work. Reperformances are an opportunity to preserve some of her performance artworks. Since the 1990s, she has also been transmitting her "Abramovic Method" to young performance artists.
Abramovic moved to New York in 2000, where she developed theater pieces, performances and encounters with other artists. It took the American public quite some time to accept her art. In "House with The Ocean View," the artist spent 12 days in three open rooms. Her vision for this piece was to transform the energy field between herself and the viewers.
The exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art was not only a comprehensive retrospective featuring re-performances of her best known works. She herself was present for three months so that the visitors could meet her personally — a huge success. The surrounding media hype helped her reach not only an elite interested in modern art, but a very broad public as well.
Image: Marco Anelli /Marina Abramovic Archives
2020: Remembering an icon
In 2020 the artist debuted the operatic project, "7 Deaths of Maria Callas," at Munich's Bayerische Staatsoper, which she re-enacted the deaths of an opera star whom she idolized. "Like many of the opera heroines she created on stage, she too died of love. She died of a broken heart," said Abramovic.
Image: Aris Messinis/AFP
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The final stop on the world tour of Marina Abramovic's epic retrospective will see her exhibit in Belgrade for the first time since 1975. The Serbian performance artist says it's her most important single show since The Artist is Present wowed the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010
"My professional return to Belgrade is a big deal for me,” Abramovic wrote in the weekly Serbian magazine Nedeljnik in August, as quoted in Artnet. The exhibition in her hometown is the final stop of the traveling retrospective titled "The Cleaner," which since 2017 has been on show in seven cities, including Bonn, Germany and Florence, Italy.
The 44-year wait for a homecoming will be ended with a show that fittingly brings together more than 100 Abramovic works from the 1970s to the 2000s, including videos, photographs, paintings, objects, installations and live re-creations of her infamous performances.
Marina Abramovic's "The Artist is Present" from 2010 was a defining work in which she sat for eight hours a day for nearly three months as nearly 1000 people took turns to stare back at her Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Marco Anelli/Courtesy of Marina Abramovic
Coming of age
Born in Belgrade in 1946, Marina Abramovic went on to study art both in her hometown and in Zagreb, developing an early interest in performance art, including experiments with sound installations. In 1973, she was invited to Scotland for an international festival where she debuted her first performance work, Rhythm 10, in which she thrust ten sharp knives between her splayed fingers — a daredevil act in which she occasionally missed and drew blood. There, the young artist and occasional painter met iconic German performance artist Joseph Beuys, and also realized she had found her medium.
"I had experienced absolute freedom — I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn't matter, that nothing mattered at all — and it all intoxicated me, " recalled Abramovic of that first performance in her 2016 autobiography, Walk Through Walls. "I was drunk from the overwhelming energy that I'd received. That was the moment I knew that I had found my medium. No painting, no object that I could make, could ever give me that kind of feeling, and it was a feeling I knew I would have to seek out, again and again and again."
A still from Marina Abramovic's breakout performance, "Rhythm 10"Image: Marina Abramović/Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018
Testing the limits
Abramovic has since carved a reputation as a pioneering performance artist who continues to test her physical and psychological limits. "The Cleaner" retrospective recreates several of her confrontational early works, including several from her seminal 12-year artistic collaboration, and relationship, with German artist Frank "Ulay" Uwe Laysiepen between 1976 and 1988. These include the 1977 work Imponderabilia, performed at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in the Italian city of Bologna, where Abramovic and Ulay stood at the entrance to the museum naked, forcing visitors to squeeze past to enter. In Belgrade, the public will again be part of the performance.
This followed what is arguably her most provocative work, 1974's Rhythm 0, a performance in the Italian city of Naples in which Abramovic directed the audience: "There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired." The objects included razor blades, knives and a loaded gun, the artist sitting motionless as people cut open her clothes or slashed her skin. "If you leave it up to the audience, they can kill," Abramovic said after the performance of an inherent human cruelty that she sought to expose — and which will also be recreated as part of the current restrospective.
Coming home
Abramovic represented Serbia and Montenegro at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 with the graphic and highly controversial sculpture, video installation and performance, Balkan Baroque — her very personal response to the ongoing Balkan Wars for which she won the Golden Lion for best artist.
But until 2018, when the Serbian prime minister invited Abramovic to bring "The Cleaner" to Belgrade, she saw few attempts to see her work exhibited in her homeland, despite spending her formative years there. "My birthplace and my background have contributed a lot to my work, many of my ideas are influenced by Slavic cultural space, Serbia and the whole of former Yugoslavia," she said.
"Balkan Baroque" was an often brutal indictment of the war raging across Abramovic's homeland Image: Marina Abramović/Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018
"I only came back to visit family," she added, upon reflecting on her connection to her home city since she left for Amsterdam in 1975. "Now, almost half a century later, I want to show, especially to the new generation, what I've been doing all these years."
Marina Abramovic, "The Cleaner" runsSeptember 21, 2019 through January 20, 2020 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade
