Abramovich, Marina

Abramovich was born in Belgrade in Serbia. Her cousin was the patriarch of Barnabas from the Serbian Orthodox Church ^[5] . Her parents were Yugoslav partisans ^[6] during World War II. Marina Voyo's father was a commander who was greeted as a national hero after the war. Her mother Danica was a major in the army, and in the 1960s the director of the Museum of Revolution and Art in Belgrade.

At age 14, she asked her father to buy her oil paints. One of his father's friends decided to show her how to use them: he laid the canvas on the floor, splashed a mixture of paints on it and blew it up. With this example, Marina realized that in art “the process is more important than the result” ^[7] .

In 1964, her father left the family. In a 1998 interview, Abramovich described how her “mother took full control of the military style over me and my brother. I was not allowed to leave the house after 10 pm until I was 29 years old. <...> I performed all the performances in Yugoslavia before 10 pm, because at that time I had to be at home. It was an absolute madness, but all my cuts, whipping, burning, which could take my life, everything was done until 10 pm ” ^[8] .

She was a student at the University of Arts in Belgrade from 1965 to 1970. In 1972, she completed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in Croatia. From 1973 to 1975 she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad , giving her first solo performances.

From 1971 to 1976, Marina was married to Nesh Paripovich ^[9] .

Since 1976, lives in Amsterdam ^[10] . After moving to Amsterdam, Abramovich met with the West German performance artist Ulai . In 1988, after several years of strained relations, Abramovich and Ulai decided to leave. To do this, they took a trip along the Great Wall of China : setting off from opposite ends, they met in the middle to say goodbye to each other.

In 1997 she received the Golden Lion Prize of the 47th Venice Biennale for her work Balkan Baroque - the artist washed a mountain of bloodied bones in memory of the victims of the war in Yugoslavia .

In 2016, information appeared on the website of Penguin Random House publishing house that on October 25, 2016, the artist would release an autobiography “Walk Through Walls” ^[11] .

Installations of Marina Abramovich sometimes caused a shock among the audience: in 1988, one of the spectators fainted at her exhibition.

Rhythm 0

To check the limits of the connection between the performance artist and the audience, in 1974, Abramovich created one of her most complex and well-known performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, the audience had to act.

Abramovich placed 72 objects on the table that people could use as they like. Some of these objects could be pleasurable, while others could be painful. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip and even a pistol with one cartridge. The artist allowed the public to manipulate her body and movements for six hours.

At first, the audience behaved modestly and cautiously, but after some time, during which the artist remained passive, the participants became more aggressive. Abramovich later recalled:

My experience suggests that if you leave the decision to the public, they can kill you. <...> I felt real violence: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one took a gun and aimed at my head, but the other took away the weapon. The atmosphere of aggression reigned. Six hours later, as planned, I got up and went towards the public. Everyone rushed away, fleeing a real confrontation.

Work with Ulai

The main concepts that they explored were the personality and personality of the artist. Gradually, Abramovich and Ulai decided to create a collective being called the “other” and talk about themselves as parts of a two-headed body. They dressed and acted like twins, and had no secrets from each other.

At one of the first joint performances in 1977 , titled Relationships in Time, Marina and Ulai braided their hair and sat with their backs to each other in a similar position for 17 hours. For the first 16 hours they were only under the gaze of the gallery staff. For each hour, only 3 minutes of the break were allotted during which shooting was done. Only at the 17th hour of the performance, when Marina and Ulai were on the verge of exhaustion, was the public invited. The idea was to focus on the fact that, fueled by the energy of the public , a person raises the level of his capabilities, in this case, after sitting in this position for another hour.

For the performance "Death of Self", the artists joined their mouths with a special unit and inhaled each other's exhalations until oxygen ran out. Seventeen minutes after the start of the performance, both fell to the floor unconscious with lungs filled with carbon dioxide. This performance explored an individual’s ability to absorb another person’s life by exchanging and destroying it.

In the installation “Relations in Space” (1976), a completely undressed artist and Ulay depicted a completely free relationship, tormenting each other in front of the audience.

The composition “The Communist Body, the Capitalist Body” (1980s) became a protest against the separation of people by ideological barriers.

During the performance “Rest Energy / Residual Energy”, conducted by Marina and Ulai in 1980, Abramovich holds a bow, while Ulai holds an arrow aimed at her heart and a stretched bowstring. During the 4-minute performance, microphones installed in the Marina and Ulai and attached to their hearts tracked their heartbeat and transmitted this sound to their headphones. The idea of ​​the performance is to show the boundless trust that exists between partners.

In 1988, after several years of strained relations, Abramovich and Ulai decided to take a spiritual journey that would end their relationship. They hit the road from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and met in the middle. According to Abramovich, “This campaign turned into a complete personal drama. Ulai started from the Gobi desert, I - from the Yellow Sea. After each of us covered 2,500 kilometers, we met and said goodbye forever ” ^[12] .

"In the presence of the artist"

The first retrospective exhibition of Marina Abramovich took place in 2010 at the New York Museum of Modern Art ^[13] . During this exhibition, Marina Abramovich made a new performance - “In the presence of the artist” (The Artist is Present) ^[14] . The idea of ​​the performance was that Marina could, through a careful look, establish contact with any interested visitor to the exhibition. This moment was recorded by the photographer. The performance lasted 736 hours and 30 minutes, the artist looked into the eyes of 1,500 spectators ^[14] . On the first day of the performance, she met with Ulai. The artist could not restrain her feelings and burst into tears ^[15] .

Abramovich in Russia

In October 2011, the “largest retrospective” of Marina Abramovich under the title “In the Presence of an Artist” ^[16] , which was supervised by the director of the MoMA PS1 center , was opened at the Moscow Garage Center for Contemporary Culture and Klaus Biesenbach, senior curator of special projects at the New York Museum of Modern Art, ^[17] . As part of this exhibition, about 50 works by Marina Abramovich, created over four decades, were shown ^[17] . Four works were shown in the “reperformance” format by specially selected and trained performers by the artist ^{[17] [18]} . From October 2 to 6, Marina Abramovich herself held a five-day master class at the Garage, during which she taught future participants of her reperformances to her own methods ^{[17] [19]} .

In 2006, Marina made a short film entitled " Balkan Erotic Epic" for the compilation " Forbidden to Show!" ” , Consisting of several erotic films ^[20] . In 2008, she participated in the film project “ Stories on Human Rights ” , for which she directed the film “ Dangerous Games” ^[21] . She also starred for the clip of Antony and the Johnsons " Cut the World " ^[22] .

I have a theory: the worse your childhood, the better your art - if you are truly happy, then you will not be able to create a good work. My parents were careerists, striving to succeed in politics. Both of them after the Second World War were recognized as national heroes. They had no desire to deal with the child, and they gave me to my grandmother. Once, I was waiting for my grandmother when she was praying in church. There I saw a font - a container in which I had to dip my fingers before crossing myself. I thought that if I drink all the water, then I will become a saint. I was six years old. I got on a chair and drank this water. I just felt bad. I have not turned into a saint. In general, I spent all my childhood in the kitchen. The kitchen was the center of my universe. There I told my grandmother my dreams, and she told me different stories. There we consecrated each other in all secrets. It was a place of meeting and interpenetration of the everyday and spiritual ^[23] .

Many people don’t like performance because they saw a lot of bad performances. To tell you the truth, a person actually doesn’t have enough good performances in life ^[24] .

• Biography of Marina Abramovich
• Marina abramovic
• Yugoslav artist Marina Abramovich, master of performance, celebrates her 60th birthday // NEWSru.com. - 2006. - November 30.
• I. Tishchenko. The third act of Marina Abramovich
• O. Balashova. In the presence of media
• Lecture of Irina Kulik “Marina Abramovich. Performance Diva ”at the Garage Museum of Modern Art
• Marina Abramovich: In the presence of the artist / Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present. Documentary (USA, 2012, directed by M. Akers / Matthew Akers, J. Dupre / Jeff Dupre)