The upside-down values of the art world, popularly infamous, ridiculed, and resented, are by now the mark of the sphere itself, sufficient to establish the cynic’s principle that if you wish to succeed in the art world, do what you would never dream of doing in the real one. Take for instance Chris Burden’s 1971 performance piece Shoot, remembered in photographs with the artist’s dry captioning: “At 7:45 P.M. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” Burden was later awarded four grants by the National Endowment for the Arts; respected New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl calls him “pretty great.”
More recent in what has been named “ordeal art” was the late spring retrospective of Marina Abramovic at the Museum of Modern Art; an exhibition titled “The Artist is Present,” and the backdrop to a history-making endurance performance by Abramovic of the same name. For this, the longest performance staged in a museum, the artist sat motionless and silent eight to ten hours a day for nearly three months at the center of MoMA’s atrium. A preceding interview with the New York Observer stated that “Ms. Abramovic . . . expects her new piece to be one of the most physically and mentally punishing pieces she has ever undertaken” [1] — a far more meaningful statement taken in the context of her oeuvre. In 1973, Abramovic gave her first performance, Rhythm 10, which involved stabbing her fingers twenty times. For Rhythm 2, the artist swallowed psychopharmaceuticals to induce seizures and stupor. In 2004, for The House with an Ocean View, she fasted on display for twelve days, housed within three massive squares bolted to the interior of the Sean Kelly Gallery.
Although the performances may look like irrational feats of masochism, Abramovic’s work is rooted in ancient religious and philosophic traditions. The artist’s spiritual counselor is Lama Doboom Tulku Rinpoche; clearly, Abramovic has absorbed the Buddhist doctrine which emphasizes mortification as a facilitator of the mental states leading out from suffering to enlightenment. Reviewers even describe the artist’s experience onstage as a “spiritual transformation” although Abramovic mentors her young students through ascetic practices which more resemble the earthly, psychological methodology of late Greek Stoicism — the conditioning of the emotions against life’s unkind vicissitudes. Extreme asceticism is often a compound, or a conflation, of physical and spiritual transcendence, a confusion of chemistry and divine inspiration. Abramovic’s performances are no different: “All the aggressive actions I do to myself,” the artist told the New Yorker, “I would never dream of doing in my own life — I am not this kind of person. In performance, I become, somehow, like not a mortal.” [2] The practice is akin to Shinto coal-walking and the Whirling Dervish’s whirl: suffering staged to find the gods, and to become like one.
Still, to define Abramovic’s performances as ascetic exercise would be a contradiction; a performance as such has purposes which can only be fulfilled by an audience. Biographer James Westcott explains that “Marina has always seen her art as a kind of public service” [3] and in a March interview with the New Yorker, the artist described her own work as “heroic, legendary, and transformative” — the chance to “elevate viewers’ spirits and give them courage. If I can go through the door of pain to embrace life on the other said, they can, too.” [4] But Abramovic intends more than simple inspiration. She speaks often of baring “the energy of the soul,” and the transfer of what could be called a “religious experience,” the artist acting as spiritual medium. “The idea (of The House with an Ocean View) the artist told an interviewer, “was pure experiment: what would happen if I purify myself by not talking and not eating for a certain period of time. Can I project that to create a sort of invisible energy?” [5]
Abramovic’s statements are mysterious, mystical, and if we don’t understand what the artist means by them it is only greater evidence that the work intends to be spiritual food: “The built-in trouble with all these existential experiences” writes Francis Schaeffer, “is that the content of such an experience is not open to communication. Only the unknowing would demand, ‘Please describe to me in normal categories what you have experienced.’” [6] If the meanings attached to Abramovic’s work are inscrutable it is because they occur foremost as experiences, experiences that summon power, energy, knowledge, whatever, for the laity and artist-as-priest. The rites, however, are nothing like true faith, as they exchange orthodoxy for experiment.
Here it is impossible to ignore the words of poet Matthew Arnold, who imagined that art would one day supplant religion. [7] History shows that the substitution becomes urgent when religion is rejected or fails: Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God foretold the spiritual hunger of Gauguin, Marc, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and many other early moderns. Kandinsky sought to reclaim “the soul and the spirit of the twentieth century” through a new art, and Gauguin painted What? Whence? Whither? in existential despair.
The recent work of Marina Abramovic could be said to represent the height of this idolatry; in an inevitable conclusion, art has not only supplanted religion, but absorbed it. [8] Art has gained so much of religion that it can no longer support its own nature, and as a result, the aesthetic has been lost — eloquence, symbol, and material relinquished for utility.
Abramovic’s oeuvre captures this evolution in the microcosm of its own timeline. Occasional symbolism has given way to the experiential purity of performances like The House with an Ocean View and The Artist is Present. But even at the beginning the performances preferred scientific clarity to artistic emotion, presenting Abramovic’s usually naked body like meat hung at the butcher’s. Over time, the material has only been further reduced: Designing The Artist is Present at MoMA Abramovic exchanged stage and props for the white space of the atrium and a Shaker-simple table and chairs, inviting audience members to sit opposite her in meditative silence; little is needed when artist and audience are there only to “exchange energy.” [9]
Even to the art world’s infrequent visitor it is obvious that the mainstream is polluted, desecrated by pornography, violence, and kitsch, what British philosopher Roger Scruton calls signs of “the degradation of art” and of an overwhelming “spiritual hunger and longing.” [10] It is easy to condemn the self-torture of Burden’s and Abramovic’s performances like Shoot and Rhythm 10, to view the cutting, shooting, and stabbing as evidence of this degradation and longing. It is more difficult to see that performances like the one Abramovic recently endured at MoMA imply the same. If Burden’s violence affirms the spiritual deficit, then Abramovic’s MoMA experiment is an attempt to fill this void. We have erected art where faith once stood, and the substitution has left art shattered. Perhaps this proves what history has been trying to tell us all along — that art cannot exist where faith does not; that truth, goodness, and beauty are strands intertwined.
[1] Yablonsky, Linda. “Taking it to the Limits.” ARTnews December 2009: p. 91 3 July 2010 http://www.skny.com/artists/marina-abramovi/press/
[2] Judith Thurman “Walking through Walls.” The New Yorker 8 March 2010: p. 26 3 July 2010 http://www.skny.com/artists/marina-abramovi/press/
[3] Neyfakh, Leon. “Queen of Pain.” New York Observer 1 March 2010. 3 July 2010 http://www.skny.com/artists/marina-abramovi/press/
[4]Thurman, Op. cit.
[5] Morgan Falconer, “The Art and Death of Marina Abramovic” Art World Magazine Oct/Nov 2008: p. 40 28 August 2010 http://www.skny.com/artists/marina-abramovi/press/
[6] Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who is There (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1968), p. 28
[7] “The Study of Poetry” in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 306.
[8] Gene Edward Veith, Jr. State of the Arts (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1991), p. 138.
[9] Thurman, Op. cit., p. 26.
[10] Roger Scruton, Beauty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.188.