InitiArt Magazine

Marina Abramović was born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Since the beginning of her career, during the early 1970s where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. As a vital member of the generation of pioneering performance artists that includes Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, Abramović created some of the most historic early performance pieces and continues to make important durational works.

In the video, The Onion, Marina Abramovic, is filmed framed like a portrait against a blue background. Holding an onion in her hand, she bites through and slowly devours the entire onion. As she eats the pain becomes intense, her eyes water, but she continues eating nevertheless. The soundtrack echoes this sense of resignation and endurance.

In another video, Image of Happiness, the camera frame is focused on Abramovic’s face. She is hanging upside down. She repeats three times, the same words, a poetic description of the moment when a wife welcomes her husband home. The image is sealed by the touch of the husband’s hand on the woman’s pregnant belly.

Extracts of an interview by Katy Deepwell with the artist in Amsterdam in September 1996. Interesting questions on feminist theories association in her work and why women artists so often seek to disassociate themselves from feminist movements.

KD: In your work, you tend to take something concrete and simple but by adding a metaphor to it you succeed in shifting the meaning quite dramatically. This creates quite powerful dissonances - but the work affects the viewer in so far as it depends on bringing those different associations together. Can you say something about your philosophy about transitory objects.

MA: Using simple things? The only thing about being an artist is that you must go inside of yourself because this is the thing you really know. The deeper you go inside of yourself, the more you encounter another side of yourself on which people can project. If you take all the personal stuff out of an idea, it’s no longer just a private thing. You have to transform it to shift these ideas to another perspective for things to become a kind of universal or transcendent truth for anybody else. So like the last video work I made, The Onion, I’m very proud of the title as it is so simple, in relation to women. Do you know how many men come home and the woman is crying and they say I’m just cutting the onions. This is one level, I used the onion as a tool to show something else, the suffering. This is almost a religious piece.

……

KD: A lot of descriptions I read refer to your work as emotional, intuitive. It doesn’t seem to me that this is what you are doing and is more the result of prejudices of Western critics about the feminine. Even though you are using your body as a medium, there’s a great deal of intellectual thought behind it.

MA: This generally comes after you’ve done something. When the idea comes, whether you’re in the kitchen - or on the way to the airport, most of the time I have a fear of the idea as it’s usually something outrageous. But then I know I have to do it. In my catalogues, there are many works I have done where in the beginning I have no idea why I have done them or of their relationship to other works. They came as an urge - from mind and body and only later could I rationalize why I did something and discover their relationship to other pieces. I get the idea and this always comes as a surprise - it comes from the stomach. Intuition is important, I do a lot of work on my body to be prepared to receive such an idea. That’s why the body is a house. And why I do a lot of exercise, eat pure food and eliminate obstructions, to keep the house clean. The body is a receiver.
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KD: Would you say there was irony in ‘Image of Happiness’ between the action and the words you are speaking?

MA: No, absolutely not. In the early 70s I wanted to be very radical, extremely focused both mentally and physically. Everything else was just groovy. Ulay and I made all these works together. When we came to walking the Chinese wall, I made a big separation with the major love of my life and, for a time, everything was falling apart. When I finished the Wall, the pain was so big it took me about 2-3 years to get over it. It is only through my work that I can express my emotions At that time I was 40, ending a very strong emotional relationship, and I was intending to make my own work. I was at rock bottom zero , leaving everything behind. It was the hardest part of my life.

Then I realised one thing that everybody has many personalities inside themselves and it is all the time will-power which decides which one one presents to the world. My presentation of myself was just one aspect of me - a heavy one going out into the world. This came out in A Biography. I had reached a stage in my life where I could restage performances, pasting, cutting, knives and acting which I cannot do (I was making fun of myself). When people saw my works, they were scared to talk to me in reality but my friends who didn’t know the work could not believe that I made this work because there was a contradiction in their eyes. Then I found out that there are contradictions worth exploring. I love kitsch; I indulge myself with sweets, vanity, and fashion. I love to make fun of myself, a very black humour, often politically incorrect. These are all these aspects which my friends know in a private situation about me and then there other aspects of myself which I explore through the works. In ‘Image of Happiness’ the image is something I really wish in one part of myself but it is not all of myself. It would be a dream to have a husband, family etc. but the other side of my self is stronger and I threw it away.

At 50, I now realize I can say this is how it is. One of the most difficult things is to do things you are ashamed of. My second theatre piece was called Delusional, to show people about shame as one of the most difficult emotions.

KD: Perhaps this is another difference from younger women whose works are more playful, ridiculous but more obviously mediated by the popular media whereas your pieces seem to be more about real life and experiences which are full of contradictions.

MA: I can only talk about spaces or experiences if I have been there. Otherwise I cannot presume things. I need to be honest, to have gone through this experience and then do something from this.

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KD: How would you define the feminine in relation to the feminist - one of the definitions from the 1970s was the idea of making the personal, political - that one should take personal experience and make it into political statements. This seems to be what you are exploring but I don't know whether you would call it feminist?

MA: Do you see me as a feminist?

Marina Abramovic, /How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare,/ 2005,
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

KD: Not in your presentation of your work but in the idea of exploring the self or questioning the self in the way that you do in this work, I would see you as identifying with the feminist project.

MA: I really don't think so. I explore the self as any man does, OK but I do so as a woman. I didn’t know what feminism was until I was 30 years old. I came from Yugoslavia where women are very strong. My mother was a Maitre in the Army. She was Director of Museum of Art and Revolution. All her friends were in high positions with the Ministry of Culture. women were totally equal in Yugoslavian society after the revolution. I came from this kind of background and I always thought the women were much stronger and more powerful than many men. When I left Yugoslavia, I saw this confrontation of women in the press. For me , its a completely psychological thing, if you believe in your own power, you can do anything you want. I never had in my life to do anything I didn’t want to.

When I came to Italy, I had many shows and lots of work and I looked around and saw there was not one Italian woman artist in the same position , except Marisa Merz who was always hidden behind Mario Merz. And many women said ‘Oh, we can’t do anything’. We can do anything we want! I was very much against this idea of a ghetto. Many of the exhibitions of women’s work I have seen , have been of very poor quality, because its a lot of bad art with 2 or 3 good artists invited in. I have never seen a really good exhibition of feminist art. If you put yourself in a ghetto, you deny the real meaning of art - art has to be good art whether by a man or a woman.

KD: Feminism is frequently only identified with as a language of oppression - or a ‘ghetto’ politics. This understanding of feminism as synonymous with oppression has become restrictive and many people regard it as no longer viable. I think it is necessary to go beyond this set of ideas which is not necessarily either an art world label, not is it caught only in questions about oppression and discrimination (which hasn’t gone away). For example, ideas about how you express your subjectivity through embodiment are close to some French feminist writing like Irigaray or Wittig which are often problematically attached to the label feminist, more to the feminine. Are you familiar with these ideas?

MA: Women artists always try not to attach themselves to notions of the feminine - by wearing certain types of clothes or not wearing make-up. There was a critic in a newspaper in Germany who wrote ‘Rebecca Horn has good connections and Marina Abramovic is too beautiful to be an artist’ I don’t think so. Feminism seems always to be about obstacles.

Quotations

Niki de Saint Phalle
Louise Bourgeois
Marina Abramovic

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