(Marina Abromovic)
On 23rd September 2018 in Florence, Italy at the
Palazzo Strozzi, during a book releasing ceremony on the occasion of the world
renowned performance artist, Marina Abromovic’s major retrospective exhibition,
another young performance artist from the Czech Republic attacked Abromovic
with a portrait of her allegedly painted by the assailant himself. The man was
immediately overpowered (as the video grabs of the incident show) and the lady
escaped unhurt. In the post-truth world even the sincerest of protests could be
seen as a publicity stunt but when it comes to Abromovic anyone in his/her
right sense would not believe that she needs any kind of publicity stunt that involves
a physical attack on the artist herself. Abromovic, who is known as the ‘grandmother
of performance’ art (the term ‘matriarch’ may be reeking with the smell of a
binary that even her direst of critics wouldn’t like to attribute to her.
Grandmother, the affectionate term not only qualifies her authority in the
field but also positions her as the pioneer in/of it) has done enough acts that
extended, tested and problematized the enduring capacities of human body and
mind. She does not need an external attack on her body in order to grab
eyeballs from the art scene in Italy, especially a place where she had
performed her six hours long performance piece titled ‘Rhythm 0’ in which she
had let her body to be vandalized by the audience.
(after the attack on Abromovic)
I do not know too many details about the man who had
attacked Marina Abromovic. However, I would like to see his act as a
referential act devoid of any kind of reverence to the artist. The reference
should be to the performance titled ‘Rhythm 0’ done in 1974 in a studio gallery
in Naples. Forty one years have been passed since then and the impact of that
piece in the minds of the people/artists all over the world refuses to fade.
This performance piece of hers, devoid of sentimentalism of any kind stays in
the annals of art history as a pivotal work of art just like Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’
(1917). Any conceptual artist today cannot overlook Duchamp for his cleverest
of acts of bringing a readymade into the gallery context. Today, anybody who
goes for an object based conceptual art has to pay tribute to the temple of
Duchamp for one cannot have an object which is not a ‘readymade’ in one or the
other sense. A act of performance art anywhere in the world auto-creates
resonances with the performances of Abromovic for her sheer diversity of acts
using her body as the lone tool. Hence, I would say any artist who uses his/her
body owes a bit to the body of Abromovic, obviously the story-telling and ever
benevolent grandmother.
The man, the assailant, while attacking Abromovic was in a
way paying tribute to the master performance artist, the genius of body based
art and obviously was making a reference to one of her earlier works. The
attack in itself could be seen as a ‘performance’ which was not meant to hurt
the artist. Had the supporting wood hit her head it would have caused grievous head
injury to the lady is another matter, which had complicated the matter, in a
way transporting it from the aesthetical realm to the realm of criminal acts.
While once again testing the enduring capacity of the human body and mind, as
claimed by Abromovic herself almost forty one years back, the assailant was
making a point that a performance, however ephemeral and
anti-establishmentarian it remained in a given context, in a different time and
space the possibilities of it being read differently were more. The six hours long violence in an absolutely uncontrolled (self-restraint of
the audience was the only surety that Abromovic had when she placed seventy two
items of assault including feathers, needles, razor blades, knifes and even a
loaded gun) might not have caused serious injuries to the artist as she stood
there abnegating her selfhood and subjectivity, rendering herself into an
object to be acted upon. But a portrait of the artist done by the assailant,
which became a weapon of assault could be read as ‘this’ artist’s effort to
reclaim her subjectivity, the very subjectivity which he tested against her
real personal subjectivity in the act of assault.
(the beginning of Rhythm 0 1974)
By thrashing the portrait on her head, the assailant partly
annihilated the ‘created’ subjectivity of Abromovic (in this case, the canvas
portrait of Abromovic done by the assailant, and in the case of 1974 act of
Abromovic, the ‘object-hood’ that she temporarily created as her ‘subjectivity’
in the gallery premises) as she had wished in her original performance by
causing not so insignificant hurt on her body. The assailant has emulated the
same semi-serious hurting act in his attack; the only difference that we could
cite for changing an aesthetic act into an act of criminality is that he had
not given any intimation to the artist that he was going to do something of
that sort. While Abromovic’s original piece was done in a controlled atmosphere
where artist’s willingness was all the more important that had driven the whole
performance for six years, here the atmosphere was different controlled and was
not expecting any attack on the artist. I am sure, given all these the performance
artist in question can be given a let go only by Abromovic herself provided she
sees the man’s assault as a genuine piece of response to her oeuvre and a
originated out of a negative reverence.
(Mahatma Gandhi)
This is where I remember Nathuram Godse and Mahatma Gandhi.
On 30th January 1948, Gandhiji was on the way to his evening prayers
at the Birla House in New Delhi when Godse pulled the trigger at him. Godse, it
is reported that had reverence for the Mahatma but he did not like the way he
tried to interpret Hinduism. He suspected that by helping the Muslim community
in India and the newly formed Pakistan Gandhiji was eroding the cause of the
Hindus, who Godse thought would meet with its demise if Gandhiji was allowed to
speak for the Hindus. Gandhiji’s life was an ensemble of performance pieces,
carefully designed and performed by the Mahatma himself. Godse was the also a
performance artist in that case who was taking the Mahatma’s own reference to bump
him out. A chill went through my spine as I read the post attack statement
delivered by Abromovic in the media. It read: “The man came up to me looking
into my eyes and I smiled at him thinking that he was giving me a gift… In a split
of second I saw his facial expression change and he became violent, coming
towards me very quickly with force.” Doesn’t it sound eerily familiar in the
context of Gandhiji’s assassination?
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