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. Here and Now… Again… and Again 133

Abramović herself recalls the version she heard of Chris Burden’s 1974-performance Trans-fixed, in which he was crucified to a Volkswagen, as an example of such mystification:

I was always very impressed by Chris Burden’s crucifixion piece, Trans-fixed. What I heard in Yugoslavia, although I didn’t even have a picture of it, was that Burden crucified himself on a Volkswagen, that somebody drove the Volkswagen through Los Angeles, and that he was arrested. That was my image. When I talked to Burden and to the only three witnesses, I learned that only four people saw this piece. The story was that he was in a garage with a doctor, who pulled the nails through and crucified him on the Volkswagen. Then the garage door was opened. The three friends pushed the car out of the garage, took the photograph, then put the car back into the garage. There’s such a huge difference.7

Trans-fixed was among the performances originally chosen by Abramović for Seven Easy Pieces, but Burden refused to grant her permission to re-enact his work. The idea of re-performing works, it must be noted, has not been accepted by some artists and critics who fear a “theatricalization” of performance.8 Like Trans-fixed, the performances chosen by Abramović for the Guggenheim series, were works that the artist never saw but which she regarded as highly influential for her development as a performance artist. Seven Easy Pieces was motivated, in part, by Abramović’s anxiety regarding the unreliability of performance documentation and her desire to explore how “performance can be preserved” and “the right way of documenting it”. In her view, “the only real way to document a performance art piece is to re-perform the piece itself”9, since performance makes sense only if it is live. Oscillating between liveness and documentation, Abramović’s proposed model for re-performance includes obtaining copyright permission from the artists or their estate representatives by legal and financial means, studying the documentation of the performances, and displaying them alongside her own interpretation of the work, which in this case consisted of stretching the duration of the

7 Janet A. KAPLAN, “Deeper and Deeper. An Interview with Marina Abramović”, Art Journal 58/2 (1999), 6–21, 14. 8 A good example is the sculptor Tom Marioni’s letter to the New York Times, denouncing Abramović’s project: “I don’t blame Mr. Burden for refusing to even discuss with Ms. Abramović having his work recreated. The performance art of the early 1970’s was concrete. We made one-time sculpture actions. If Mr. Burden’s work were recreated by another artist, it would be turned into theater, one artist playing the role of another”. Tom MARIONI, “Marina Abramović. Now Playing the Artist”, New York Times, 13 November 2005, 8. 9 Marina ABRAMOVIĆ, “Reenactment”, Seven Easy Pieces, Milan: Charta, 2007, 9–11, 10 [= A1]. 134 Ana Bernstein performances to seven hours, regardless of the works’ original duration. Moreover, Abramović carefully orchestrated the docu- mentation of the project by four cameras directed by filmmaker Babette Mangolte, a photographer, and the recording of conversa- tions among audience members (who were unaware they were being recorded) by volunteers. These materials were later edited into a film and a book of the project. While the re-performances seek to bring performances out of the archive and back to life, the extensive documentation functions as a way of securing the place of these performances in the history of performance art. As Abramović stated, she is interested in providing performance with “a stable grounding in art history” (A1, 11). The history of performance art, as we know, has been built upon such documents and oral accounts, viewed as the remnants of the live event, and performance scholars and critics have relied on them for their scholarship. As Amelia Jones notes in “‘Presence’ in Absentia. Experiencing Performance through Documentation”10, there is a whole generation of performance scholars (of which I am part) that did not have the chance to know performance except through documentation. Either too young in the ’70s or living in places too far from where performances were taking place, we came to know and study and think about performance primarily through old videos, photographs, and the accounts in history books, journals, and newspapers. These traces, usually regarded either as simple supplements or as indexical to an event irremediably lost in the past, as evidence of its existence, do, however, become alive and performed when read and interrogated by those lured to/by the archive. In this sense, the photo, video or narrative documentation is not a representation of an event, but a performative object that produces something in/by the interaction of reader and document. I am thinking of performance documents in the same way that reception theory looks at literary texts, not as a representation of a given object, which would fall into the category of a constative utterance described by Austin, but as performatives. As Wolfgang Iser writes,

literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meaning themselves. Their aesthetic quality lies in this

10 Amelia JONES, “‘Presence’ in Absentia. Experiencing Performance Through Documenta- tion”, Art Journal 56/4 (1997), 11–18. Here and Now… Again… and Again 135

‘performing structure’, which clearly can not be identical to the final product, because without the participation of the individual reader there can be no performance. It is then, an integral quality of literary texts to produce something which they themselves are not.11

Although embodied, the knowledge generated through the interplay of spectator and performance is not necessarily more authentic than the knowledge generated by the interplay of reader and document. In “The Performativity of Performance Documen- tation”, which discusses the difference between the documentation of an event that took place in front of an audience and one that is staged directly for the camera (either photography or video), Philip Auslander takes this point further and argues that there is no real difference between them if we regard the documents not as constatives but as performatives. For Auslander, it is the act of documentation itself that produces such events as performances: “Documentation does not simply generate image/statements that describe an autonomous performance and state that it occurred, it produces an event as performance and, as Frazer Ward suggests, the performer as ‘artist’”.12 In fact, many artists, including Abramović, Chris Burden, and Gina Pane, among others, have staged their performances either directly for the camera or given precise instructions for how to record them with an audience present.13 This is also the case with Ana Mendieta, whose body of work consists, in its great majority, of videos and photographs of her solitary interactions with nature. Her work is experienced by the audience only through documentation, which the artist regarded as an integral part of the process. Documentation, as we see, is thus very much a part of performance itself. This was clear both in Seven Easy Pieces and The Artist Is Present.

11 Wolfgang ISER, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, 27. 12 Philip AUSLANDER, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation”, Performing Arts Journal 84 (2006), 1–10, 5. 13 Abramović illuminates this issue in an interview with Aaron Moulton: “Once I saw a Gina Pane performance in which she was cutting her lips. The documentation gave you strong, very close-up images of the action. At the actual performance, though, the only thing you could see was the backside of the camerawoman taking the pictures, positioned between the public and the action. The camera should be positioned so it captures the audience and the action, without paying too much attention to trying to make the film an artwork in itself. I have made pieces just for the camera after the live performance, framed in a way that the viewer can see them as the public had seen them. Recently in Basel when I made a piece called Nude with Skeleton (2004), first I made the photograph, then the video and then I made the live performance (which I didn’t record) – the process was backwards”. Aaron MOULTON, “Marina Abramović. Re: Performance”, Flash Art 38 (2005), 86–89, 86. 136 Ana Bernstein

The careful and extensive documentation of both projects therefore does not necessarily guarantee a more authentic or com- plete access to these events. It does, however, signal Abramović’s desire to control the way the documentation takes place and secure a legacy, in a sense, to curate her own archive. In light of what we discussed above, it follows that it is not so much performance that creates the archive but the archive that establishes what we know as performance art, and hence the canon of works that define the genre. The archive is therefore invested with authority. The docu- ments chosen to be included, as well as those which are left out, delimit the field of performance art scholarship and establish the sources and references available for future interpretations of the past. Or for re-performances. It was to the archive that Abramović turned to create the re- performances of Seven Easy Pieces. In an effort she described as “almost archeological”14, the artist studied the documentation of the works by Nauman, Acconci, Pane, Beuys, and Export and sought to complement the existent documentation of the perform- ances by speaking with the artists who were still alive about their pieces. Direct access to the artists did not always help to achieve a clear or more complete understanding of the event, as Abramović recounts in an interview after the performances were over:

Valie Export did not give me a clear explanation of how this piece [Genital Panic] was, but from several photographs you have the piece: you see that sometimes she is sitting, sometimes she is standing, sometimes she is in the movie theater. There is also the problem of her clothes: sometimes she has sandals, sometimes she has boots, there is the open jacket. You never really know – were the pictures taken from just one piece, or were there several different recordings or was it just posed for the camera? So, in a way, the logical work is to find out what is the closest to the truth, what really happened, and then there is a lot of free space for interpretation. You have to somehow fill in with your own ideas how the piece could possibly look.15

14 Marina ABRAMOVIĆ, Guggenheim Symposium after Seven Easy Pieces, 18 November 2005. 15 Marina ABRAMOVIĆ, personal interview, 22 April 2006. Valie Export has made contradic- tory statements regarding this performance: one of them has her walking the rows of a porn cinema with crotchless pants; in another the action took place in a movie theatre during a film festival. Mechtild Widrich has established, however, that the photographs with the machine gun were made in Peter Hassmann’s studio and were not a documentation of the performance (which did not include a gun). See Mechtild WIDRICH, “Can Photographs Make It So? Several Outbreaks of Valie Export’s Genital Panic 1969–2005”, in: Hilde von Gelder and Here and Now… Again… and Again 137

The idea of re-performances is not, as pointed out earlier, free of contradictions. On one hand, Abramović does refer to the works she selected to redo as “original” works and wants to reconstruct them as “closest to the truth” as possible, displaying the documen- tation side by side with her own interpretation (both at the museum and in the book), which could be read as indexical to the original event, a representation of it. This desire for the truth of the original is echoed by Arthur C. Danto, when he writes that Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces involved “reenacting the perform- ance in such a way that a new audience would be able to experience the piece as the original audience did”16 – a challenging task, given the differences in the performances’ contexts and the horizons of experience of the artists and the audiences. On the other hand, Abramović performs her own interpreta- tion of the works, framing all of them within a period of seven hours. Moreover, if we look at the re-performances of Seven Easy Pieces, including Abramović’s own Thomas Lips, we will see other ways in which they differ, sometimes significantly, from the ‘original’ works. Bruce Nauman’s piece Body Pressure (1974), for example, was never performed by the artist but conceived as an installation in which the audience was invited to perform by pressing their bodies against an artificial wall built at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Düsseldorf. A pamphlet with a set of instructions for movements was placed on the wall and a stack of pamphlets left for the visitors to take. And Gina Pane’s The Conditioning (1973), in which the artist lay down on an iron bed with candles burning underneath, was just the initial action of a three-part performance, Self-Portraits, performed at a gallery in Paris. The other parts included cutting the tips of her fingers and her inner lip with a razor blade while images of women doing their nails were projected on a wall, and drinking and regurgitating milk, which came out mixed with the blood from her lip.

I find it more productive to think of re-performances not as repre- sentations of past works – and thus always measured by their identity (or lack of) with the original – but as repetitions, in the sense employed by Deleuze, inhabited by difference.

Helen Westgeest (eds.), Photography Between Poetry and Politics. The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art, Leuven: University Press, 2008, 53–68. 16 Arthur C. DANTO, “Danger and Disturbation. The Art of Marina Abramović”, in: Mary Christian (ed.), Marina Abramović. The Artist Is Present, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010, 28–35, 30. 138 Ana Bernstein

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that the model of thought as representation in Western philosophy is founded on a “transcendental illusion” that subjugates the concepts of difference and repetition to identity. According to this model, thought re- presents an essence that precedes conceptualization, with identity mediating the two. Difference is thus thought only as negative, as that which differs from identity. To this model of thought as repre- sentation, Deleuze opposes a model of thought as dramatization, in which difference is conceived as pure difference, as difference-in- itself, and where the relation between differences is not mediated by identity, but by difference itself. Difference has, in fact, an ontological status: “difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing”.17 Repetition is then not repetition of the same, of an original, but must be understood as the return of that which always differs: it means to start again... and again, differently. As Herbert Blau well notes, “[i]n the performativity of Deleuze, as in his prose, repetition acquires the value that the word has in French: répétition, rehearsal, trying this, trying that, also a form of testing, thus making something new of repetition itself”.18 In “One Manifesto Less”, an essay on Carmelo Bene’s staging of Richard III, Deleuze speaks of a non-representational theatre, a theatre of difference. Such theatre does not re-present something already existent, which precedes the performance; it does not refer to an identity but rather actualizes something new in the event of the performance; it produces new becomings. Representation, on the other hand, Deleuze tells us, “mediates everything, but mobi- lizes and moves nothing” (D1, 55-56). Like performance art, the theatre of difference is marked by continuous variation. This is a theatre of subtraction, of critique, of subtraction of the “elements that make up or represent a system of power”, for those elements “assure at once the coherence of the subject dealt with and the coherence of the representation on the stage”.19 The power of the theatre is imbricated with the representation of power in the theatre, even when it is done in a critical way.

17 Gilles DELEUZE, Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 56 [= D1]. 18 Herbert BLAU, “Performing in the Chaosmos. Farts, Follicles, Mathematics and Delirium in Deleuze”, in: Laura Cull (ed.), Deleuze and Performance, Edinburgh: University Press, 2009, 22–34, 25. 19 Gilles DELEUZE, “One Manifesto Less”, in: Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), The Deleuze Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 204–222, 207. Here and Now… Again… and Again 139

It follows then that the theatre of difference is necessarily a minor theatre, in Deleuze’s terms, a theatre that resists major lan- guages. In the ’60s and the ’70s, performance art was also a minor art that questioned the major aesthetic ideals of the time, in tune with the countercultural movements of those decades. It was an art of deterritorialization, moving away from museums, creating alliances between diverse artistic practices, experimenting with language (body, sound, visual). It operated by subtraction: subtrac- tion of the work of art as object, as commodity; subtraction of the artists as producers of goodies and collectibles for major insti- tutions and the art market; subtraction of text, lights, props (which would eventually come back in the ’80s and ’90s); subtraction of the rules for presentation of artworks, sometimes even subtraction of the audience. It was marked by mobility, permanent movement, and the crossing of boundaries (artistic, mental, physical, as well as geographical – Abramović and Ulay, for example, lived, worked and travel in a van, with minimum resources for years, creating works that pushed the limits of both mind and body and explored different states of consciousness in performance). Forty years later, the embracing of projects such as Seven Easy Pieces and The Artist Is Present by two of the most influential art institutions in the world makes clear that performance art is no longer minor, but has moved from a marginal to a center position, fully entering the economy of the art market. If in the past, museums and collectors dealt with the artists’ refusal to produce objects by collecting “authentications” and relics of performances, now the lack of art objects is no longer an obstacle: they can buy the concept of the work itself. The British-German artist Tino Sehgal has sold the rights of his works to major art institutions such as the Tate Modern and the MoMa, which can recreate the works according to his instructions. The idea appeals to Abramović, who believes that the “concept of collecting contemporary art has to change; collectors have to re-educate themselves, so that the idea [behind a piece] becomes as sought after as a physical object”.20 Performance art has achieved, it seems, Abramović’s desired stable ground, although with a price, as the artist herself acknowledges: to “have a retrospective at a place like MoMa”, she says, “is a reward for a life’s work, but it is also a kind of death for an artist”.21

20 Gareth HARRIS, “Performance Art in the Market Place”, Financial Times, London, 9 October 2010, 2. 21 Benjamin GENOCCHIO, “Seeking to Create a Timeless Space”, New York Times, 6 April 2008, 8. 140 Ana Bernstein

Marina Abramović Film still of Marina Abramović performing Vito Acconci’s Seedbed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, November 10, 2005 from Seven Easy Pieces directed by Babette Mangolte. © Vito Acconci. Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

Marina Abramović Film still of Marina Abramović performing Gina Pane’s The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portrait(s) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, November 12, 2005 from Seven Easy Pieces directed by Babette Mangolte © Gina Pane Estate. Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Here and Now… Again… and Again 141

To think then about Abramović’s re-performances as repetitions in a Deleuzean sense – and here I’m thinking mostly of Seven Easy Pieces – is to reflect on what in them is disparate, what divergences and variations they produce, what lines of flight they open up; it is to examine their contemporaneity. If we think of the re- performance of Seedbed22, for instance, it is clear that a (61-year-old) woman masturbating in public raises different questions than a man does; it is a question not only of difference but of sexual difference. Even the title of the performance – with the production of semen/seeds as a metaphor for creation – becomes problematic. What does a woman’s pleasure create? Is Abramović’s mastur- bation performance as seminal as Acconci’s? Or is it unproductive? How is sexual difference produced? What happens when women, constructed as both sexual objects and minoritarian subjects in patriarchal societies (a system indifferent to their pleasure) are in charge of their desire? What affects does such a performance create? How does it resonate with a twenty-first century audience? In this sense, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, but each re- performance needs to be examined separately, for they beg their own questions and relate to different contexts. We also need to look at how the museum as institution (from curatorial choices to physical and legal restrictions, economic inter- ests, etc.) impacts performances and/or re-performances. At the MoMa’s retrospective, alongside the extensive and fascinating documentation of Abramović’s life and work, a group of per- formers recreated Imponderabilia (1977), Relation in Time (1977), Point of Contact (1980), Luminosity (1997), and Nude with Skeleton (2002). Placed too close to each other, amidst the myriad of photo- graphs, objects, videos, and sounds, it was almost impossible for the re-performances to engage the audience in meaningful ways, with the result that they felt more like living illustrations of Abramović’s work than performances. Museum restrictions also rendered Imponderabilia irrelevant: the performance consisted in two artists standing naked at the doorway to the exhibit. Visitors wishing to enter had to pass between them, choosing which per- former they would face. But at the MoMa there was no room for the imponderable: another entrance was provided for those un- comfortable with the idea of rubbing against the artists’ naked

22 In 1972, Vito Acconci masturbated under a ramp built at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. Visitors could hear him through speakers while walking up and down the ramp. 142 Ana Bernstein bodies. Only Luminosity, placed in a room free of documentation, allowed performer and audience to focus on the event. The question of re-performance is thus not a question of betrayal of performance’s ontological nature, of crossing into repre- sentation (since a singular event can also be representational). It is a question of what these repetitions actualize, what becomings they produce. By actualizing what was just a virtuality, generating unexpected meanings and raising new questions, they can provoke a genuine encounter – in the Deleuzian sense, as something that forces us to think, that “moves the soul, ‘perplexes it’ – in other words, forces it to pose a problem” (D1, 140) – with a contempo- rary audience. An encounter that makes us see the world anew.

Ana Bernstein is a Performance Studies and Theatre scholar working in the United States and in Brazil. Her work focuses on performance art, performance theory, theatre history, and women’s and gender studies. She is the author of A Crítica Cúmplice. Décio de Almeida Prado e a formação do teatro brasileiro moderno (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2005). She is currently revising her doctoral dissertation Of the Body/Of the Text. Desire and Affect in Performance for publication. She is also a theatre translator, arts administrator, curator of cultural events, and photographer.

Abstract This essay discusses the contemporaneity of performance art vis-à-vis its open-ended nature and its ephemeral character by looking at Marina Abramović’s project of re-performances Seven Easy Pieces and her recent retrospective at the MoMa, The Artist Is Present. It draws on Deleuze’s concepts of difference and repetition to think about how performances can live and resonate outside their original historical horizon. Further, it engages with the issue of performance documentation, usually regarded simply as remnants of the live event, to reflect on the performativity of the archive.