Here and Now╦ Again╦ and Again
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10.3726/85611_129 Here and Now... Again... and Again Re-Performance as Difference and Repetition Ana Bernstein The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed a surpris- ing resurgence of performance art, an art form that was the signature of the 1970s. The renewed interest in performance has been sparked, in large part, by Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces, a series of re-performances at the Guggenheim in 2005, in which she recreated legendary works of the ’60s and ’70s by herself and other artists, and her recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Artist Is Present (2010). During the three-month duration of the retrospective, Abramović performed a version of Nightsea Crossing, a work that she and Ulay – her performance and life partner for twelve years – did several times between 1981–1987: at the atrium of the MoMa, she sat in a silent exchange with any member of the audience who wanted to do so, for as long as s/he wanted during museum hours. On the sixth floor of the museum, the Citroen van used by Abramović and Ulay to live, to travel, and to perform Relation in Movement (1977) was stationed outside the exhibit, covering four decades of Abramović’s life and work. In addition, a group of performers trained by Abramović re-performed five of her works. These projects attracted large audiences1 and received great attention from critics, scholars, and art professionals. They also raised questions about the contemporaneity of performance, open- ing an intense debate about the possibility (and desirability) of re- enacting performances and of performance’s ontology, as well as bringing to the fore the issue of documentation and the performa- tivity of the archive. The performance art of the late ’60s and the ’70s sought to do away with the distinction between art and life. Artists performed in alternative spaces and private studios, usually for small audiences. The focus was no longer on the production of art objects that could 1 An estimated half million people visited Abramović’s retrospective according to the MoMa. Variations 19 (2011) 130 Ana Bernstein be sold and/or collected, but on the actions carried out by performers who often used their own bodies as medium, blurring the boundaries between subject and object. For the audience, the aesthetic experience changed from the contemplation of an inde- pendent art work to an intersubjective relationship with the embodied artist in the process of producing the work. Furthermore, since the emphasis was on processes and relations, performances displayed an open-ended nature and privileged the durational aspect of the work. For Abramović and Ulay that meant “no rehearsal, no predicted end, no repetition”.2 What mattered was only the here and now. The uniqueness of this exchange, its liveness (through the presence of the artist in/as the body of work), its ephemeral nature, as well as its resistance to commodification, in a sense conferred performance with that quality that Walter Benjamin defined as “aura”. In the age of mechanical reproduction, the discourse on performance has often framed liveness as its most distinctive trait, one that allows it to escape the economy of reproduction, in oppo- sition to all forms of mediatized art. This is the position articulated by Peggy Phelan in her famous essay “The Ontology of Perform- ance. Representation without Reproduction”: Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circula- tion of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontol- ogy of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappear- ance.3 Performance’s ontology is thus paradoxically predicated on both presence and disappearance. Here lies the main difference between theatre, also a live art, and performance, as it has been constructed within the discourses of performance studies and histories of performance art. Differently from the theatre, where the actor represents a fictitious character from a previously written script, performance sets itself up as a non-representational practice. 2 ULAY and Marina ABRAMOVIĆ, Marina Abramović/Ulay, Ulay/Marina Abramović, Amster- dam: Idea Books, 1980, 19. 3 Peggy PHELAN, “The Ontology of Performance. Representation Without Reproduction”, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance, New York: Routledge, 1993, 146–166, 146. Here and Now… Again… and Again 131 In this sense, this distinction reproduces J.L. Austin’s view of theatre as parasitic. Formulated in a series of lectures later pub- lished in How to Do Things with Words, Austin’s theory of speech- acts develops from his notion of performative acts, by which language does something instead of describing or telling some- thing. The performative utterance has no referent either outside itself, prior to itself or internally hidden from itself. The perfor- mative utterance is its own referent and therefore escapes the categories of true and false; a performative can be only happy or unhappy. In the theatre, however, the actor’s performative elocu- tions are considered by Austin as “hollow” or “void”, since they do not do anything but represent something. Not surprisingly, it is precisely in those terms that Marina Abramović defines perform- ance art: Performance is the moment when the performer, with his own idea, steps in his own mental and physical construction in front of the audience in a particular time. This is not theater. Theater you repeat, theater you play somebody else. Theater is a black box. Performance is real. Theater you can cut with a knife and there is blood. The knife is not real, the blood is not real. In performance, the blood, the knife, and the body of the performer is real.4 Endurance works, performances involving pain and the testing of physical and mental limits, of which Abramović herself has been a pioneer, serve as a clear reminder of the difference between repre- sentation and event. More than a new artistic genre, performance art in the ’60s and ’70s was a movement of resistance to traditional notions of art (the rejection of all forms of representational art, especially theatre, and of art as an independent sphere separated from life), and to the commercialization of art. As a durational event centered on the body of the artist, performance left no traces behind, except for documentation and the oral accounts of those who participated and/or witnessed. In this light, Abramović’s re-performances of Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, Gina Pane’s The Conditioning, Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure, Valie Export’s Genital Panic, and her own Thomas Lips in Seven Easy Pieces5, and her recent retrospective at the MoMa involving re-performances of her 4 Marina ABRAMOVIĆ, “What is Performance Art?”, The Artist Is Present retrospective, MoMa. The Museum of Modern Art Online, ‹http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/marinaabramovic/marina_perf.html›. 5 The seventh work, Entering the Other Side, was a new performance by Abramović. 132 Ana Bernstein works (solo and with Ulay) by other performers, might seem, at the least, paradoxical, not only for re-doing works that were supposed to be a one-time event, thus treating performances as musical scores or theatre scripts, but also for placing those works at the Guggenheim and the MoMa, the most prestigious institutions of modern art, and the kind of institutions that performance art historically positioned itself against. The idea of re-performances, as Abramović calls them, is imbricated both with the issue of performance documentation and hence performance history, and with the question of representation and repetition. In the ’60s and ’70s, performances were, in many cases, precariously documented; some artists refused to document their actions, believing that documentation could not replace the live experience. In this sense, Abramović is an exception, since she has always documented her works carefully. The occasional video (at the time still an expensive technology and not as accessible as it became later on) and photographs were supplemented by the description of the events circulated by the artists and audiences, leading sometimes to misrepresentations that were recorded as history. This is the case, for instance, with Abramović’s famous performance Rhythm 0 (1974), in which the artist laid 72 objects of pain and pleasure (including a gun and a bullet) on a table at the Studio Morra, in Naples, and invited the audience to use them on her as they pleased, for a stipulated period of time. The version of events widely circulated – and later printed in several articles and histories of performance art – is that the performance ended when a fight broke out among audience members to stop a participant who had loaded the gun and put it in Abramović’s hand, pointing at her neck. Although the gun episode was real – as documented by photos of the performance – and the audience did intervene to prevent things from getting out of control, the performance con- tinued uninterrupted after that, ending precisely six hours after its start, according to Abramović’s original concept: [The performance] ended when the gallerist came to me and said that the six hours were over and I turned from being an object to being my own real person, and that was the end. For me the precision of time is so important. [...] The gun was just one of the elements, and not the end of the piece; the piece continued after that.6 6 Marina ABRAMOVIĆ, personal interview, 18 January 2003.