Marina Abramovic: Peeling potatoes at the Museum Folkwang
Sabine Oelze
July 2, 2023
Under the direction of guest professor Marina Abramovic, 24 students are developing extensive performances. The fun part: peeling potatoes together.
Peeling potatoes while singing operaImage: Sabine Oelze/DW
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I am sitting at a large table in the Museum Folkwang peeling potatoes, together with Aleksandar Timotic, a 31-year-old opera singer from Serbia. He was selected to take part in the interdisciplinary performance course with Marina Abramovic for a year. The world-famous artist joined the Folkwang University of the Arts in 2022 as Pina Bausch's first guest professor. A mountain of potatoes is piled up in front of us.
Timotic has time, as well as a potato peeler. He will sit at this table for six hours a day until July 9, peeling potatoes and singing opera arias (a self-contained piece for solo voice, usually accompanied by orchestra). He invites the audience at the Museum Folkwang to sit with him, listen and take up the potato peeler themselves.
"Are you hungry?" is the name of the performance, which Timotic also describes as a gift of love to the audience.
He doesn't know yet whether he will last the six hours, he says. But Marina Abramovic has taught him to believe in himself. For a year, the globally renowned, New York-based artist taught the students via numerous Zoom conferences, but also during personal meetings to prepare the performances.
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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Discipline and willpower required
Abramovic put her students through a tough schooling, including a one-week "Cleaning the House" workshop in Greece.
"Cleaning the house" is to endure physical privations as a means get to know oneself better. This training camp lasted seven days.
"Five days of it, there is no eating, talking is forbidden. Instead we do physical exercises to understand what time is, what presence means, and afterwards we worked on what can now be seen here as a result," explained Abramovic.
The six hours that her students now perform every day at the Museum Folkwang in Essen is not comparable to her own dedication, however.
Abramovic performed 'The Artist is Present' at MoMA in 2010Image: Marco Anelli/Marco Anelli/Courtesy of Marina Abramovic/dpa/picture alliance
Abramovic became famous for sitting on a chair for 600 hours for her retrospective "The Artist is Present," at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2010. For over three months, she invited people to take turns sitting opposite her while staring into her eyes without speaking or making physical contact.
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Abramovic not present in Essen
The 76-year-old Abramovic herself can only watch the performances live on screen. For health reasons, she is currently unable to travel. Full of pride, she told how she tried to convey the expansion of the concept of art, the involvement of the audience, discipline and self-conquest to the students of the Folkwang University of the Arts.
The results will be presented to the public for the first time at the Museum Folkwang at the end of the fourth and final phase of work, from June 30 to July 9.
"In such long-term performances you can't pretend, you become vulnerable," she said. "This creates a very emotional dialogue with the audience, which is something unique. And that's what the art students are showing now."
Translating experiences into art
A short time later, I am sitting on a chair again staring at a green wall. Behind me, Marija Radovanovic, dressed in a solemn green satin dress, is playing her violin.
"I wanted to create an opportunity for people to just sit there, without a mobile phone, just looking at a wall, resting their eyes," the performer explains.
Marija Radovanovic suffers from the need for perfection in her industryImage: Sabine Oelze/DW
She learned of art and sitting and contemplating at the "Cleaning the House" workshop. "I would like people to sit in the chair longer here too and just listen, look and think," she says.
A classically trained violinist, Radavanovic was born in Belgrade in 2001. In her performance, she also reflects on the pressure of being a musician.
"Especially string players, when they don't do something well they always want to punish themselves, because perfectionism is so strong in this profession, including me," she says.
Like Radovanovic, most of the other performers do not come from the visual arts, but are singer, directors, dancers or photographers. Abramovic has taught them each a universal principle, which is to always test one's limits.
Performances under live conditions
The fruit of the students' so-called Long Durational Performances is "54 Hours," a show wherein 24 very different performances happen in parallel in their own small booths.
With his performance "Tabula Rasa," Italian Francesco Marzano reads aloud from his diaries, then tears out the pages one by one and destroys them.
Metamorphosis into a chicken: Klara Günther covered in feathersImage: Sabine Oelze/DW
Camillo Guthmann injures himself while tap dancing on mirror shards. Klara Günther poses on a pedestal, smearing herself with turnip greens, rolling in feathers and transforming herself into a strange bird creature.
Abramovic is thrilled that the students ventured so far with their practice.
"I asked her [Günther]: 'What are you afraid of?'," said Abramovic. "She replied: 'Being naked and a chicken.' I replied, 'Let's do it. Now she is naked and a chicken. I wanted to encourage her to tell her own story, her own drama."
This article was originally written in German.
Marina Abramovic conquers the NFT world
NFTs are non-exchangeable digital objects, such as photos or videos, that have been stirring up the art market for some time now. Abramovic's performance art joins the trend.
Conceptual artist Marina Abramovic sits on a white steed and carries a white flag. This is a short clip from her video "The Hero" (2001), which she dedicated to her late father. Now this sequence is being offered as an NFT. Part of the proceeds will go to scholarships for people who contribute ideas "that make the world a better, more beautiful place," Abramovic explained.
Quentin Tarantino plans to auction off individual chapters of the handwritten screenplay for the film "Pulp Fiction" as NFTs via a series of auctions in January 2022. In addition, the highest bidders will receive a personal audio commentary by the star director. The screenplay nabbed an Oscar in 1994.
Image: United Archives/picture alliance
Contemporary self-portrait
US rapper and entertainer Snoop Dogg has already amassed a million-dollar NFT collection of his own. At the end of November 2021, he posted his first own NFT online, which he developed together with artist Coldie. The result is an animated collage of Snoop Dogg portraits set to music, with references to his first album "Doggystyle."
Rammstein frontman Till Lindemann had more trouble than success with his NFT drop in August 2021. Hardly anyone was interested in clips of him in front of paintings at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Furthermore, there was a dispute with the Russian museum where the video sequences were recorded, as it was said to have contravened NFT exploitation.
Image: Boris Roessler/dpa/picture alliance
Weed smoking felines
In July 2021, thousands of "Stoner Cats" from the animated series of the same name were sold. Mila Kunis' production company, Orchard Farm Productions, is behind the series. The cat pictures were so popular that they briefly paralyzed the Ethereum network. The sale of the digital images is intended to finance new episodes of the series.
Image: Tony King/Geisler-Fotopress/picture alliance
Heavy beats and golden chainsaws
In April 2021, US rapper and 15-time Grammy winner Eminem released his first three NFTs: animated images and Eminem-produced beats harking back to well-known songs from his first two albums. In addition, the highest bidders bagged themselves either a pair of sneakers or a physical print of the artwork, signed by the master himself.
Image: Brian Mccollum/ZUMAPRESS/picture alliance
Crypto queen
She is "obsessed with NFTs and the endless possibilities of this technology." That's what hotel heiress Paris Hilton told Bloomberg News in November 2021. Her own NFT collection, "Planet Paris," is an animated airbrushed dream (or nightmare — depending on the beholder) in pink with lots of glitter. She plays the lead role as a filthy rich Barbie and iconic crypto queen.
