Installation view of Marina Abramo vi´c’s retrospective The Artist Is Present, with slide installation Freeing the Horizon , 1973. Digital image © 2012 The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar.

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MECHTILD WIDRICH

Marina Abramovi c´’s 2010 retrospective The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has rightfully been discussed as a milestone in the canonization of performance art. 1 Firsthand experience coexisted with a seemingly aggressive media orchestration of live events and their dissemination in the press. This volatile balance was achieved through the artist’s apparently unshakable sense of her own historicity. The live staging of this historicity left spectators and readers with varying but surely related impressions that Abramovic ’s “authoritative” approach to regulating audience experience was a fulfillment, betrayal, or refutation of the utopian promises of performance art. 2 The aim of the present essay is to broaden the debate by narrowing the object of investigation: I examine Abramovi c´’s Freeing the Horizon , an overlooked slide installation based on modified color photographs and shown in on June 7, 1973, two months before she began using her own body in performance. The work was effectively lost for thirty-seven years and re-created for the MoMA exhibition, an occasion that first brought its material character and historical specificity under scrutiny. The work raises questions about the use of docu - ments, about the status of documentary photography, and about “documentarity” in general. With my examination of Freeing the Horizon , I hope to introduce a novel, processual definition of the documentary that evades unproductive juxtapositions of the real and the fictional. This understanding of the docu - mentary concerns the politics of dissent in much contemporary art that pro - ceeds by the manipulation of documents. The tension between freedom and constraint in Yugoslavia under the regime of Josip Broz Tito in the wake of the 1968 unrest is the historical precondition for Freeing the Horizon , which takes as its subject urban space and as its means the ambivalence of censorship and authority in every document. 3 Freeing the Horizon consisted of manipulated color photographs screened as

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 slides on eight projectors set up in the rotunda of the Student Cultural Center (Studentski Kulturni Centar, SKC), the central venue of the Belgrade avant- garde community of the 1970s. Abramovi c´ shot the images herself in late spring 1973 while on a stroll along the main axis of Belgrade’s historic center, Prince Michael Street (Ulica Knez Mihailova), which leads to what was then Marshall Tito Street (Ulica Maršala Tita). 4 After developing the prints, she covered parts of them with white and blue acrylic paint, reshot them using slide film, and pro - jected the results in color. 5 An archival photograph in the SKC archive shows Abramovi c´ in a preparatory stage before the projection begins. In the photograph she sits in the center of the oval gallery space, operating a slide projector by hand. The installation reinforced the experience of architecture as lived space. 6 Each projector showed one slide for the duration of the evening, turning the hall into a photographic panorama. Just what was projected on those gallery walls? Because of the long-standing absence of the slides, scholars have tended to assume that the piece was projected in black and white, although black-and- white slide film was comparatively rare at the time, even in . 7 Their assumption may be traced to a black-and-white photocopy Abramovic produced for the occasion to distribute to the audience. This handout, which the artist describes as an “invitation card,” has also stood in for the work in sev - eral exhibitions prior to the 2010 retrospective. 8 This documentary remainder of the event (but not of the projection) has determined the work’s reception, col - oring scholars’ assumptions about both medium and live experience circa 1973. The slender yet complex reception history of Freeing the Horizon took another turn at MoMA in 2010. After the war and bombardment of Belgrade in the late 1990s, the historical resonance of the work’s subject had shifted, and this was met by a formal change in presentation: the work was screened on a single projector in a room dedicated to documenting Abramovi c´’s life, a room filled with exhibition posters, snapshots, and mementos such as Abramovi c´’s art diploma and her parents’ war medals. 9 The sole projector lit up the wall above the display cases, with one slide steadily replacing another in the manner of a long-lost family , revealing unfamiliar statuary, a cut-up cityscape,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 and people in bright summer dress. In New York, the projection seemed nostalgic, the evocation of a lost (East) European place and time, the context intimately biographical. “Looking at this piece,” Abramovi c´ notes in the exhibition catalog, “I was struck by the realization that some of the buildings from this project had been bombed and destroyed during the war in 1999.” 10 At MoMA, then, Freeing the Horizon was more than a newly rediscovered, precocious contribution to conceptual art in slide format. Consider, for instance, James Coleman’s Slide Piece (1972) in which an audiotape complicates what we assume is objectively visible for everyone, or Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966–1967), with images of mass-produced houses in suburban New Jersey that at once resemble and subtly parody the industrial aesthetic of minimalism. Both of these classics of slide conceptualism tackle urban space, playing on the anti- or nonaesthetic implications of the slide lecture in the classroom, the boardroom, or the family den. 11 The resulting irritating “banality” of subject and mode of representa - tion—detached from the biographies of their creators—seemed to reconceive documentary photography as something outside the photojournalistic rhetoric of beautiful images of horrible historical events. By contrast, Freeing the Horizon was staged at MoMA as a grand but muted gesture from a lost culture, a slow- moving slide lecture on war and loss, an experience Abramovi c´excavated from her past and that of her city. My interest in the 2010 MoMA restaging stems from a conviction that the obviously manipulated images carry within them inherent documentary claims that are not context independent but subtly context responsive, producing intel - ligibly divergent effects under different political conditions. Thus I discuss Freeing the Horizon through the relatively autonomous frameworks of urban experience, political documentation, and viewer experience, linking these through the process of document-making invoked by Abramovi c´to endow the work with its documentary status—a status secured not through formal features but embod - ied in a will to documentation, a visualized reflection on the ways documents are made and used. Documentation thus understood is a flexible venture, particularly suited to exploring what cannot be said and done under conditions of political duress; it also has inti - mate bonds to fiction, imagination, and performance that make its sub - sequent incorporation in events

Opposite: Marina Abramo vi´c preparing Freeing the Horizon at the Student Cultural Center, June 7, 1973. Courtesy of SKC Archive, Belgrade. This page: Marina Abramo vi´c. Freeing the Horizon , 1973. Handout. SKC Archive, Belgrade. Photo: Mechtild Widrich.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 like The Artist Is Present seem less like a betrayal of 1960s ideas than their log - ical development. In reframing Belgrade inside the walls of the student center as a city whose official buildings are removed, Freeing the Horizon is a complex reconsideration of three topics: (1) truth claims in photography; (2) political censorship––particularly under tightening control in the wake of the events of 1968; and (3) the role photography plays in shaping our experience of the world. The last topic lends the work not only its historical flexibility but also its stub - born claim to report truths that are not entirely visible. In examining the photographs more closely, we find a difficulty in establish - ing the work as a serial piece with definite limits of inclusion. The photocopy shows six images, and several of the corresponding slides were projected in New York. But significantly more than six slides were shot (some of these addi - tional slides were also shown at MoMA), and multiples of the same photo graph had different parts painted over. Moreover, Abramovi c´does not recall precisely which slides she projected at SKC. 12 Despite this, the extant slides are coherent in presentation. They favor significant architectural markers: the National Theater is conspicuous by its absence in one image, starkly isolating the equestrian statue of Prince Mihailo (Michael, 1823–1868), the first ruler of autonomous . The Dom Sindikata (Trade Union Building) is partially removed in another slide. In yet another, only the Palace is left standing in Square. This high-rise of 1938–1940 has historical and ideological significance: the planting of the red flag on its roof by the Red Army and Yugoslav partisans announced liberation from Germany in 1944. Finally and most pointedly, pedestrians throng the pavement before the spacious lawn in front of the absent Stari Dvor (Old Palace), the late-nineteenth-century royal resi - dence that, after World War II, served as the seat of the federal government before being assigned to the city assembly and thus functioning as a kind of Belgrade City Hall. Through the panoramic format of a multiple projection in the gallery space, visi - tors were confronted with an over - whelming experience of presence (of passersby) and absence (of certain buildings) constituted synchronously

Top: Marina Abramo vi´c. Freeing the Horizon , 1973. Detail, statue of Prince Mihailo. Courtesy of the artist. Bottom: Marina Abramo vi´c. Freeing the Horizon , 1973. Detail, Dom Sindikata. Courtesy of the artist.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 rather than chronologically. Freeing the Horizon had the scale of a panorama but used photographic means to achieve that scale. 13 The work also made visible the discontinuity of illusion: the perspective of the 35 mm prints must have been distorted by the variously sloping walls of the SKC, with gaps and over - lapping edges, which could only have amplified the internal discontinuity caused by the painterly erasure within the slides. As panoramist, Abramovi c´ created a disillusioned illusion, its truth-value disconnected from the collection of “reality effects” on display—an illusion comprising Belgrade streets and res - idents starkly outlined against white or blue space. 14 Scholars have discussed the panoramas of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as attempts to produce unhindered views through a controlled and controlling environment, granting illusions of omnipresence and of control over the image while at the same time fixing the subject in a windowless room, often in a clearly defined position in its middle. 15 Freeing the Horizon operated with just this manipulation of the field of vision, but in its technical inconsis tencies and in its juxtaposition with what must have been its audience’s far-more-coherent experiences of walking in Belgrade it fell short of effects of omni - scient perception. Instead of exotic destinations, the illusion Abramovi c´ offered was the familiar city—deprived of important landmarks but in a provisional and laborious manner, not miracu - lously freed of them. The work’s deficiency as classic panorama points to its mode of construc - tion. The panoramic mode of illusion formation is replaced by the documentation of illusion forma - tion. If the panorama sought to create an illusion in which the spectator collaborated by believing it , thankful for the sheer experiential novelty of its appearances, Abramovi c´ uncoupled compelling experience from truth claims. But on what did she thus cast doubt? On the seamless image of socialist well-being, which she had fragmented, or on the fragmenting activity of the “oppositional” avant - garde artist herself? To get a sense of the target of Abramovi c´’s critique, we must move from panorama to its con - stituent parts. The simulated reality of a walk through the city, akin to the

Top: Marina Abramo vi´c. Freeing the Horizon , 1973. Detail, Federal Assembly. Courtesy of the artist. Bottom: Marina Abramo vi´c. Freeing the Horizon , 1973. Detail. Courtesy of the artist.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 critical practices of walking that are familiar from the situationists and related theorists, is flattened onto an elliptical wall space. 16 This reality is balanced by an aesthetic act of erasure in monochrome paint, a symbol of postwar abstrac - tion and Russian formalism, here applied to a reproduction of the urban fabric in what can only be interpreted as a utopian gesture of vacating public space. In this vein, the young artist confidently announced her intentions in a local newspaper on the very day of the event, June 7, 1973: “I wish to remind people of everyday experience, of that which they lost the power to perceive and the possibility to enjoy.” 17 While experience and perception of the urban environ - ment are major themes of conceptual art across the globe, Abramovi c´’s appar - ently uncomplicated statement can be taken only as a cautious decoy. Freedom and constraint are in tension for Abramovi c´ here and elsewhere in her work. The newspaper text itself is peculiar for how it insists on the additive component in Freeing the Horizon —the “everyday experience” Abramovi c´wants to “remind” people of—when what she was displaying were transcriptions of experience with segments removed therefrom. To make sense of Abramovi c´’s own thinking about how the work tackled experience through documentation, we must set aside the experience of walking through the city, imputed to Abramovi c´ as photographer or to the pedestrians in her slides, and consider instead the spectatorial experience of the SKC audi - ence. For them, the slides did have a constructive component, visible as the accretions of paint, which do not so much erase as overlay a city they knew quite well. The conspicuous brushstrokes, their opacity emphasized by the transparency of the projected image, undermine a reading of Freeing the Horizon as unmasking the oppressive structure of the city. Rather, the slides unmask the erasing gesture itself as a mechanism of illusion. The argument seems to be moving in a circle here, but this is fortuitous because we have at any rate attained consistency: the self-presentation of the painted gesture matches the self-presentation of the mechanism of panoramic illusion. As a result, the work does not allow the view of a happily freed horizon as Abramovi c´ suggests in her statement. But she never intended the work to do so. The experiential negotia - tions presented here in the moral terms of free experience and the aesthetic terms of “pure” painting, however much they reflected Abramovi c´’s formal con - cerns, could not help but be read politically, as references to the practice of cen - sorship. But the initial ambiguity persists: is Freeing the Horizon analyzing or enacting censorship, and, whichever it is doing, is it doing so consciously? To answer this question, we must sketch the existing institutional context in which Abramovi c´acted. Her early activities took place in the liberal atmosphere of the Student Cultural Center, administrated by Belgrade University and a focal

Marina Abramo vi´c. Rhythm 5 , 1974. Courtesy of SKC Archive, Belgrade. Photo: Nebojša Cankovi c.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 point of the Belgrade art scene since its foundation in 1971. 18 But cultural auton - omy and student institutions were bought at a price. The student cultural cen - ters of Belgrade, , and Ljubljana represented a concession to the students after protests in June 1968, a fact not lost on the protesters, who cautiously wel - comed the result. 19 The centers were a means of “pacifying the young genera - tion’s growing discontent with any form of authority.” 20 The SKC in Belgrade became the most important base for the exchange between Yugoslav and inter - national artists. The yearly April Meeting –Expanded Media Festival orches - trated an ambitious series of exhibitions, actions, lectures, and dialogues. In 1972, the first year it was held, Gina Pane performed, and works by Allan Kaprow and Dennis Oppenheim were shown. Two years later, Joseph Beuys participated, and Abramovi c´ performed Rhythm 5 .21 Abramovi c´’s early work must be seen within the tension between political paternalism and aesthetic freedom under Tito that made the SKC such an exciting venue for experimenta - tion. 22 In this atmosphere, an aestheticized erasure of the built environment would not be swallowed in either purely formalist or conceptual terms: it could not fail but to suggest state intervention. The tradition of political authorities interfering with photographic documentation tended to center on the erasure of persons fallen out of favor, not buildings, which are easier to reuse and may be bulldozed if necessary. 23 But the issue of political censorship of ambitious art was a well-rehearsed one in Yugoslav society in the early 1970s, even receiving

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 lengthy treatment in the philosophical organ of the opposition and student movement, the journal Praxis .24 Abramovi c´ herself, as her colleagues were only too well aware, was the daughter of prominent Communists. In a slide known only from the photocopy (at middle right), the imposing façade left standing in the image belongs to the Museum of the Revolution (Muzej Revolucije), which Abramovi c´’s mother directed. Thus, autobiography and its political implica - tions were never absent from Freeing the Horizon . In fact, they gave political meaning to its acts of erasure. This implicit authority, the arbitrariness of Abramovi c´’s erasures, the visible use of paint, and the rephotographing and projection of the result add up to a doubly documentary gesture: the procedure is obtrusive enough to be questioned and yet covers its tracks sufficiently to resemble, at least conceptually, an official procedure of document-making. If Freeing the Horizon skeptically works through the truth claims advanced for public spectacles such as the panorama and for official media by press pho - tography, Abramovi c´ puts these claims in a context of political “truth-making” that extends beyond photography, beyond performance or installation or art in general, to grasp the means by which those in authority represent reality by stipulation—which is the essence of documentation. For any artifact identified as a document to be accepted as such, authority must be exercised, be it the expertise of the scientist generating data, the aesthetic assurance of the artist, the claims of professional honesty of the journalist or detective, or in extreme cases the raison d’état of the legislator who orders documents purged or forged. As we travel along the continuum of falsifiable public procedures (science, jour - nalism) to exercises of political power, correspondingly more forceful speech acts are implicitly deployed to authorize the document. This is not always sinister—nothing about an X-ray or house elevation formally ensures their veracity if no medical or architectural authority takes responsibility for them— but it follows that a political institution can generate documents and ensure their tacit acceptance by its subjects. This is hard on the political artist, who must somehow capture both this binding force and the need to doubt the offi - cial documentary version of reality. Abramovi c´ does this by reflecting on author - itative processes of document-making and by incorporating such processes into the very subject matter of documentary art. This processual model of documentation is flexible enough to apply not only to traditional documentary practices but to the critique of these practices by artists such as Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler. Sekula criticizes both the myth - ical “photographic realism” of documentary photography and the harmonization of documentary into art, proposing instead an artistic practice that is aware of its ideological entanglements and does not subordinate social content in favor

Marina Abramo vi´c. Project—Empty Space , 1971. From the catalogue Drangularijum (Belgrade, 1972). SKC Archive, Belgrade. Photo: Mechtild Widrich.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 of the “self-expression” of the artist. 25 But the opposition is illusory because the formal strength of documentary work exists precisely in its ability to reflect on its own procedures; for example, the dramatically lit portraits of child workers in factory interiors by Lewis Hine and the neutrally lit portraits of employees leaving the factory photographed and projected by Sekula. 26 Whatever the specific historical significance of this debate within the photographic tradition, Abramovi c´’s aim in Freeing the Horizon is necessarily somewhat different: she pulls the viewer into the process of making ideology and allows for its appro - priation as private experience. This immersion is disturbed only by the obvi - ously constructed nature of the manipulation and by the unsettling fact that the political direction of the process is left undefined. Abramovi c´, in playing censor and showing her process, not only documents a mode of image manipulation but arrogates a method of political pressure in order to inform herself and others—a supremely documentary taking on of authority. This interpretation of Freeing the Horizon as a procedural-documentary work gains in force when we take into account a related earlier work called Project—Empty Space (1971). Produced for the international theater festival Art BITEF (a forerunner of the April Meetings), Project—Empty Space pursued an analogous evacuation of the built environment through photography. 27 Abramovi c´ initially planned to operate in public, showing two photographs both indoors in the SKC and outdoors in Republic Square, in the center of Belgrade.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 Ultimately, the project took place only inside the gallery. The text exhibited in the gallery and reprinted in the 1972 catalogue Drangularijum describes the action as follows: “Two gigantic photos on Republic Square in Belgrade B.C. The same two photos in the Gallery of SKC (both photographs are taken from the same angle). One represents the theatre between two neighbouring houses and the other the empty space between the same houses.” 28 Abramovi c´’s account of the photographs mentions the theater and then sim - ply replaces it with “the empty space between the same houses,” as if this space existed just as firmly. 29 In the photograph, the theater is occluded with paint. A parallel is achieved here between pictorial manipulation and public action: the photograph no more existed in public space than did the empty space between the houses. The action is purely imaginary. And yet we puzzle over it and won - der whether it did, somehow, elusively take place. As a work of conceptual art, of art by decree, the work did take place: it is preserved in the catalogue. However, the original photographs, if they still exist, have not been exhibited in any of Abramovi c´’s many retrospectives, including The Artist Is Present. Conspicuously, the black writing on the sign mounted on the façade is left: “slobodne forme 71” (“free forms 71”). Abramovi c´ ironically partakes of this freedom by erasing the venue. As the result of her manipulation, the assertion of the existence of an “empty space between the houses” also bears an analogy to censorship: the assertion manipulates reality by simply claiming that the erasure has already taken place. The irritating ambivalence of making visible the process, simulta - neously declaring it to be the “reality” and the ambiguous political function of the target, leaves open the political entanglement. The continuation of the Drangularijum text makes manifest Abramovi c´’s awareness that authority oper - ates through the ambiguity between stating (the already real) and decreeing (making something the case politically): State—you are standing instruction—go! result—empty spac e30 These “instructions” pair an objective statement about the viewer’s condition (“stating” that “you” are standing) and an imperative from the artist (“[you] go!”) to produce the desired result, empty space. This result is not quite objectively real but is also no mere figment of subjective imagination, backed as it is by authoritative commands and the modified photograph. We could easily say that Abramovi c´’s own family connection to the political ruling class is the cardinal issue here, regardless of whether the young artist might have accepted such a statement. At issue, however, are not the artist’s

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 intentions but the way she obliges the audience to take a position in the process of manipulation she has undertaken, in the claims to reality she has packed into these highly poetic interventions. The bodies of the audience, wrapped into the photographic panoramas, experienced the distorted urban environment and might have wished for the interventions to actually take place, but most of all they experienced the document-making as a process of their own experience, unfolding in front of their eyes. The seemingly subjective liberation led only to the becoming aware of this process. Italo Calvino, a few years later, would describe a similar subjective intervention in the urban fabric in a particularly dystopian chapter of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979). The resemblance is stunning: Walking along the great Prospects of our city, I mentally erase the elements I have decided not to take into consideration. I pass a ministry building, whose façade is laden with caryatids, columns, balustrades, plinths, brack - ets, metopes; and I feel the need to reduce it to a smooth vertical surface, a slab of opaque glass, a partition that defines the space without imposing itself on one’s sight. But even simplified like this, the building still oppresses me: I decide to do away with it completely; in its place a milky sky rises over the bare ground. 31 Calvino’s character soon proceeds to erase “all people in uniform” and eventually all passersby except his love interest. But when he hurries toward her, he is intercepted by the secret police: he could not erase them. On the contrary, “sec - tion D,” as they call themselves, see him as a collaborator in the task of remaking the world. “But,” the protagonist asks with surprise, “weren’t you the ones who were always talking . . . of expansion?” They reply with bureaucratic patience: “Tendentially, something that might seem negative in the short run, in the long run can prove an incentive.” 32 Calvino’s morality tale might seem to warn against the illusion of a subjective freedom untouched by political reality. But the pecu - liar force of his story lies in how he allows for the subjective intervention to work; it takes place, the people and buildings stay erased, the protagonist gets a bit closer to the woman he loves, and the secret police want to harness his destructive potential. Consider the image of the neoclassical Yugoslav Federal Assembly included in Freeing the Horizon , with blue sky glaring between its columns as if no one were home to legislate, as if no one could be home. Such an evacuation may well have answered strong feelings and arguments felt by an SKC audience, but the power to put it into practice belonged to the authority they opposed. And, so, as with Calvino’s dreamer, Abramovi c´’s act of liberation was authoritative through

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 and through. But Freeing the Horizon contained cues that the 1973 audience could have read ambivalently, giving them a taste of subjective freedom only by acquainting them with the procedure of authoritarian city planning, which served also as the means for its critique. So, does the photocopy Abramovi c´ produced for the screening bear a docu - mentary relation to social reality, or is it predominantly a subjective aesthetics of power? In contrast to the use of color—redolent of the anti-aesthetic, of family snapshots and vacations abroad—the black and white of the photocopy recalls journalism, minimizes the painterly erasure, and brings what is left into emphatic focus. The audience, the archival photos show, carried the photocopy into the display hall as a handout. Are the formal qualities of the handout important? After all, the audience saw both black-and-white copies and color slides. Freeing the Horizon achieved a concrete social bond through the hand - outs: they made the audience collaborators in the imaginary action. Possession of the handouts, which resemble anonymous leaflets, made them political doc - uments, evidence of a shared experience, one that could incriminate the carriers or serve to identify them to other carriers as being participants in a common cause. Yet the slide projection, with its panoramic proximity to the experience of walking and its visible painterly interventions, recorded a counterfactual experience: what the audience knew not to be the case. The aesthetics of power remained something on the walls of the SKC, because already the gallery audience had at least two other ver - sions of reality with which to com - pare it: their own experiences and the photocopied sheet of paper. The documentary quality of the slide panorama, then, lay in being contex - tualized as the document of a process that did not result in a picture of the world as it is but as it could be. Whether that picture shows a way the world should be is another ques - tion, one that crucially goes unan - swered. Abramovi c´ positioned the audience in this process to experi - ence straightforwardly and explicitly what many had surely felt or thought more or less implicitly in daily life.

Audience with handouts during the presentation of Freeing the Horizon at the Student Cultural Center, Belgrade, June 7, 1973. Courtesy of SKC Archive, Belgrade.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 And so her “reminder of everyday experience” was not such a bad guide to the installation after all—at least not in its initial incarnation. Again context inter - venes, and the process of deletion can be read as a change for better or for worse. That in the 2010 New York retrospective the work could be interpreted as a piece of documentation strangely prophetic of the bombing of Belgrade should come as no surprise.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 Notes I thank the archivists at the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade for their help, particularly Dragica Vukadinovi c´. Vukan Vujovi c´ helped me greatly both with research and translation. I am also grateful to the staff of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for providing crucial information on the restaging of Freeing the Horizon , in particular Erica Papernik and Jenny Schlenzka. Marina Abramovi c´ patiently answered my questions on various occasions. I received valuable feedback on different stages of this work from Martha Buskirk, Ivan Drpi c´, Zoran Eri c´, Mark Jarzombek, Caroline Jones, Asja Mandi ´c, and Tijana Vujosevi ´c; colleagues at the 2011 CAA meeting in New York, including session chair Christine Kuan; the Grey Room editors; and, in particular, Andrei Pop.

1. Artforum dedicated two essays to the exhibition: Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Against Performance Art,” Artforum 48, no. 9 (May 2010): 208–212; and Caroline Jones, “Staged Presence,” Artforum 48, no. 9 (May 2010): 214–219. Amelia Jones wrote a highly critical (and disappointed) article on the impossibility of presence in recent performance art: “‘The Artist Is Present’: Artistic Re-enact - ments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR/The Drama Review 55, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 16–45. See also my forthcoming article, “Präsenz––Schichtung––Wahrnehmung: Marina Abramovi c´’s The Artist Is Present und die Geschichtlichkeit von Performance,” in Authentizität und Wiederholung , ed. Uta Daur (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, forthcoming). 2. Apart from Abramovi c´’s performance in the museum’s foyer, her decision to have actors and dancers restage some of her most famous performances was at the heart of this debate. 3. For some, Yugoslavia, a nonaligned country with relatively few restrictions (citizens could travel abroad) and an ideology of self-management, was an island of hope amid Cold War oppo - sitions. Still, within what Bojana Pej ic´, with Denis Rusinov, calls “laissez-faire-Socialism,” freedoms of speech and of press were severely infringed. See Bojana Pej ic´, “ Sozialistischer Modernismus und die Nachwehen ,” in 50 Jahre Kunst aus Mitteleuropa , ed. Lóránd Hegy (: Museum Moderner Kunst , 1999), 118. 4. The name of the street was changed in 1992 to Ulica Srpskih Vladara (Street of the Serbian Rulers) and subsequently to Ulica Kralja Milana (King Milan Street), which is how it is known today. 5. “ Freeing the Horizon was made very simply. I photographed the streets and buildings myself and developed the photographs and covered parts of the photographs with simple acrylic white paint. Then I re-photographed them again and made slides out of them.” Marina Abramovi c´ to the author, 26 February 2009. 6. According to Abramovi c´, she “demonstrated the process in the form of a slide installation in an oval room with eight slide projectors, showing a 360 degree perspective.” “Freeing the Horizon,” in Marina Abramovi c´: Public Body: Installations and Objects, 1965–80 , ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Charta, 2001), 50. 7. Abramovi c´ could also have used color slide film to shoot black-and-white paper prints, resulting in black-and-white projected images. But neither this option, nor that of color slide images, is explored in the literature. 8. “In a small room, a circle of slide projectors projected a panoramic sequence of large black and white images of Belgrade round the walls. As the sequence progressed, more of the city was removed, until the final image showed people in an open space.” Chrissie Iles, “Cleaning the Mirror,” in Marina Abramovi c´: Objects Performance Video Sound , ed. Chrissie Iles (Oxford, UK: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1995), 22. Iles refers to the work as Project—Empty Space , the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 name of a related piece by Abramovi c´. The recent MoMA catalogue adds to the confusion. An illustration caption describes the photocopy as “slide installation (black and white, silent),” while a catalogue entry shows color images and describes them as “retouched color photos.” Klaus Biesenbach, ed., Marina Abramovi c´, The Artist Is Present , exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 24, 54. On various occasions in conversation with me, Abramovi c´ called the photo - copy an “invitation card.” 9. The fact that Abramovi c´’s parents were partisan heroes and her grandfather a politically important patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church has become part of the artist’s self-presentation and public mythology. 10. Biesenbach, 54. 11. See Rhea Anastas’s entry on Homes for America in Darsie M. Alexander, ed., Slideshow (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art; University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 111–113. Alexander, drawing on Anastas’s 2002 interview with Graham, points out that the work was screened early on (mid-1967) in the intimate surroundings of Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt’s New York loft. Alexander, Slideshow , 11. 12. Marina Abramovi c´, interview by author, June 2010, New York. MoMA had thirteen slides (I saw the digitized files), numbered 1, 2, 5–7, 10–16. Given the numerical gaps and the absence of several of the photocopied images, we may safely assume Abramovi c´ made at least twice as many slides as she used. I thank Erica Papernik at MoMA for her assistance. 13. Jonathan Crary calls panoramas “distinctly nonphotographic forms” in “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Grey Room 9 (Autumn 2002): 18. See also, Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 112–113. For Crary, the panorama is a transitional technology between the stable fixing of spectator place in perspectival painting and the distrib - uted, physiologically invasive viewing apparatuses of the late-nineteenth century. Crary does not discuss photographic panoramas, a good 1880 specimen of which is published in Nigel Westbrook, Kenneth Rainsbury Dark, and Rene van Meeuwen, “Constructing Melchior Lorichs’s Panorama of Constantinople,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69, no. 1 (March 2010): 63 fig. 2. For panoramas as forerunners of immersive virtual-reality installations, compare Oliver Grau, “Into the Belly of the Image: Historical Aspects of Virtual Reality,” Leonardo 32, no. 5 (1999): 365 –371. 14. Reality effect is Roland Barthes’s term for a new mode, manifest in realist novels such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary , of granting assent to the reality of a representation on the basis of con - tingent detail. Crary emphasizes that Barthes applied the term not only to texts but also to objects, exhibitions, and so on. The visual force of the term lies in its picking out the detail as “model of the ‘real.’” Crary, “Géricault,” 11–12. 15. Stephan Oettermann, Das Panorama: Die Geschichte eines Massenmediums (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980), 18–19, 33. Available in English translation as The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books), 1996. 16. Henri Lefebvre’s Le droit à la ville (The Right to the City, 1968) comes to mind. In it Lefebvre broaches the “need for creative activity, for the oeuvre (not only of products and consumable material goods), of the need for information, symbolism, the imaginary and play.” Henri Lefebvre, Right to the City (1968), in The Blackwell City Reader , ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005), 373. Lefebvre is thinking mainly of cities in capitalist societies. Abramovi c´

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 probably knew of the situationists and Lefebvre’s writings, which were easily accessible: Lefebvre’s books were translated into Serbo-Croatian starting in the 1950s, and he had served on the inter - national editorial board of the journal Praxis and had visited Yugoslavia, , , and other countries of the Eastern bloc. Lefebvre was particularly interested in the Yugoslav model of “self-management” as an anti-Stalinist model of Communism. In 1986 he submitted a text and proposal (with architects Serge Renaudie and Pierre Guilbaud) for the New Belgrade Urban Structure Improvement by the Yugoslav State. In it he connects the “self-management” of Yugoslav socialism to urban practices. See Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, eds., Autogestion or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009); Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 233–244; and Zoran Er ic´, “Differentiated Neighborhoods of New Belgrade,” A Prior 17 (n.d.), http://www.aprior.org/articles/10. 17. File 44, press clip collection, Archive of the SKC, Belgrade; translation by Vukan Vujov ic´. 18. The organization and history of the SKC are described in Friedemann Malsch, “ Das Studentski Kulturni Centar, Belgrad,” Kunstforum International 117 (1992): 194–199. Belgrade art and the SKC in the 1970s are put in political perspective by Lutz Becker, “Art for an Avant- Garde Society: Belgrade in the 1970s,” in East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe , ed. IRWIN (London: Afterall, 2006), 390–400. See also, Dunja Blažev ic´, “ Wer Singt da Drüben?— Kunst in Yugoslawien und Danach 1949–89,” in 50 Jahre Kunst in Mitteleuropa , ed. Hegy, 81–96. In Belgrade, an informal group centered on Marina Abramovi c´, Nesa Paripo vi c´, Raša Todosije vi c´, Zoran Popo vi c´, Gergely Urkom, and Era Milivoje vi c´, among others. 19. See, for example, Stevozar Stojano vi c´, “The June Student Movement and Social Revolution in Yugoslavia,” Praxis 3–4 (1970): 394–402. 20. Branislav Dimitrije vi c´, “A Brief Narrative of Art Events in Serbia after 1948,” in East Art Map , ed. IRWIN, 291. 21. Beuys and Abramovi c´ also both participated in the Edinburgh Festival in 1973. Abramovi c´, who participated along with Todosije vi c´ and Urkom, performed Rhythm 10 on August 19 at the Richard Demarco Gallery, and Beuys held his 12 Hour Lecture . On the early years of the April Meeting, a publication, partly in English, by the SKC is indispensable: Prosireni Mediji (Belgrade: Studentski Kulturni Centar, 1974). The meetings were suspended from 1992 to 2001 and revived in 2002. See also the website of the SKC, http://www.skc.org.rs. An excellent tabular overview of art activities in Serbia during the 1970s, put together by Ljubica Stanivuk and Zoran Gavr ic´, can be found in Nova umetnost u Srbiji: Pojedinci, Grupe, Pojave: 1970–1980 , exh. cat. (Belgrade: Muzej Savremene umetnosti, 1983). In 1971, for example, exhibitions of Joseph Kosuth and Yves Klein took place in the same month (February), and the show At the Moment (April 1971) included Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Giovanni Anselmo, and others. The cultural climate in Serbia from 1945 to the 1980s is well reviewed in Dimitrije vi c´, “A Brief Narrative,” 287–296. 22. Political censorship concentrated on film. The artistic practices of performance art, conceptual art, and land art were considered marginal, even as art in public space started to play a greater role. Zoran Er ic´ (curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade), interview by author, Belgrade, July 2007. In 1979 Sanja Ivekov ic´ made censorship and political pressure per - form in her piece Triangel , which took place during a visit by Tito to Zagreb. Ivekov ic´ sat on her balcony, sipping whiskey, reading, pretending to masturbate. Even though she could not be seen from the street—only by a person on the opposite roof, presumably part of the police force—

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00071 by guest on 23 September 2021 public order had to be restored. A policeman soon rang her doorbell and “order[ed] that ‘persons and objects are to be removed from the balcony.’” Sanja Ivekov ic´, exh. cat. (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 27. 23. The now classic treatment of doctored photographs, albeit in a different context, is David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York: H. Holt, 1999). 24. Stefan Morawski, “Censorship versus Art: Typological Reflections,” Praxis 1–2 (1974): 153–167. 25. Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” The Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 859–883. Sekula mentions Rosler’s work as a model of the critical use of documentary photography. For a recent contextu - alization of Sekula’s essay within the documentary tradition, see Hilde van Gelder and Helen Westgeest, Photography Theory in Historical Perspective (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 153. 26. See Allan Sekula, “Untitled Slide Sequence: 1972,” October 76 (Spring 1996): 45–63, 65–71. 27. BITEF (Beogradski Internacionalni Teatarski Festival/Belgrade International Theater Festival), founded in 1967, presented works by John Cage, Merce Cunningham, The Living Theater, La Mama Troupe, and others. A year later, Art BITEF (which ran from 1968 to 1973) was launched by Biljana Tom ic´ in cooperation with Germano Celant, Harald Szeemann, Joseph Beuys, and oth - ers, to concentrate more on art. See Biljana Tom ic´, “Art—Life—Utopia,” in Living Art on the Edge of Europe , ed. Kröller-Müller Museum (Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber, 2006), 63. 28. Drangularijum , exh. cat. (Belgrade: SKC, 1972), n.p. Abramovi c´ confirmed (e-mail to author, 26 February 2009) that the project took place only in the gallery, in September 1971. Atelje 212, which opened in 1956 and became the most important theater in Belgrade, was from 1967 the location of BITEF. In the catalogue of the 1995 Abramovi c´ exhibition in Oxford, Project— Empty Space is mentioned as having taken place in Republic Square during BITEF 1971. See Iles; and Celant, 485. The theater moved into a new, larger building in the 1990s. 29. The definite article in English translation (“ the empty space”) implies an object rather than a concept that may or may not be instantiated. Serbo-Croatian has no definite articles, but the strict parallelism between the two clauses and the phrase “a . . . je prazan prostor“ do suggest “the empty space.” 30. Drangularijum , n.p. The English text concludes, “Text exhibited in the Gallery,” which sug - gests Abramovi c´’s instructions for “producing” empty space were available to spectators of the photographs in the SKC. 31. Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler , trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 244. The chapter title is “What Story Down There Awaits Its End?” A sim - ilar process of urban subtraction is described at the end of Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Putnam, 1959), first published in Paris in Russian in 1938. 32. Calvino, 249.

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