Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance

The following article was copied from The Brooklyn Rail

A single shot of an abandoned beach at low tide in jumpy, color super-8 film, Ana Mendieta’s "Bird Run" (1974) has a wistful quality of emptiness for most of its silent two-minute duration. A small white figure is barely visible along the horizon as the water gently laps at the sand and the low grasses sway in the wind until, in a flash, a naked woman covered from head to toe in white feathers runs towards the camera, across the screen, and then vanishes as the film loops to the beginning. The presence of the bird-woman is fleeting: watching the film over and over, I strained to get a better look at this mysterious body, frustrated by its elusiveness, trying not to blink as she ran by. It is this flickering between presence and absence that characterizes the best work in Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance, the first large retrospective of Mendieta’s hybrid, yet truncated oeuvre.

Ana Mendieta has become something of an art world myth. Born in Cuba in 1948, but exiled to the United States as a child, she is the beautiful young multicultural woman artist working with ideas and forms of gender and culture in the heyday of feminist art and identity politics. She is also the beautiful young woman artist whose life ended mysteriously one night after a violent fight with her lover, the older and more established artist Carl Andre, as she fell to her death from the thirty-fourth floor window of their SoHo loft in 1985 (Andre was subsequently tried for her murder and ultimately acquitted). The particular details of her biography make Mendieta a tragically romantic figure and it is tempting to read her work through her life as her image reappears over and over within her work, a haunting reminder of her life and death. This problem is not unique: Francesca Woodman, Hannah Wilke, Diane Arbus, Eva Hesse, the list of women artists whose tragic biographies tend to overshadow their work is long. That Mendieta, like Woodman and Wilke, used her own body as an instrumental part of her artistic practice makes the distance between art and life appear to shrink even further. Although the current exhibition includes and sometimes highlights the details of her biography, it also allows for an unprecedented consideration of Mendieta’s art, fragmentary, stunning, and uneven as it is.

The earliest work at the Whitney dates to Mendieta’s time as a graduate student in painting at the University of Iowa where she was profoundly influenced by the dynamic avant-garde community and the rolling hills of the Iowa landscape. In 1969, her first year of graduate school, she began a decade-long affair with the artist Hans Breder, who founded the Intermedia program at Iowa, a special interdisciplinary arts program in which Mendieta studied and taught. The pieces from this period are truly inter-media, combining performance, photography and film, and conceptual art, without any genre taking precedence as the art object. In the series of headshots dubbed Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations) (1972), Mendieta grotesquely transforms her visage with stockings pulled over her head, torn in different places, caked on makeup, wigs, and distorted expressions; while the related series Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) (1972) documents the transfer of fellow student Morty Sklar’s beard to Mendieta’s face. Although Mendieta appears in both projects, two of very few works in which her face is visible, she is not revealed in any traditional sense of a self-portrait. Rather these two works highlight indeterminacy—in individual identity and in the fluidity of artistic media—with a deadpan tone that verges on the absurd. The mocking film "Door Piece" (1973) limits vision to the gaze through a keyhole, an overly literal enactment of early feminist criticism of "the gaze" that ends in a humorous close-up of Mendieta rimming the peephole with her tongue. An odd and funny homage to Duchamp, the film casts the viewer into the space on the inside of the peephole of "Etant Donnés," limiting the viewer’s field of vision, and turning her into the object of the film’s blind gaze.

If Mendieta plays with vision and surface in these early works, she also explores physical and material transformations through body-based works. With a matter-of-fact, almost documentary aesthetic, "Sweating Blood" (1973) is a single shot of Mendieta’s head, eyes closed and unflinching, as blood slowly beings to trickle from her scalp. Without any sense of violence, "Sweating Blood" dramatizes the process of thought as a physiological experience. Blood is also the medium of artistic process in "Untitled (Blood Sign #2/Body Tracks)" (1979), a silent film projected directly onto a bare white wall of a woman in front of a bare white wall, her back to the camera, her body pressed into the wall, arms raised in a "V" above her head. As the film rolls, she slowly sinks to her knees, dragging her arms on the wall, leaving blood red tracks in their wake. Her ghostly image is seamlessly integrated into the gallery space, a haunting reminder of the presence of her body as integral to the performance. Accompanying the film are the paper and blood remains of Mendieta’s Body Tracks project, reminiscent of Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, but fragmentary and marked not with the artist’s signature color, but instead with the literal material of her body. Mendieta’s use of blood in her performances and in drawings, photographs, and films has been connected to Hermann Nitsch and the Vienna Actionists, who were well known among the students at Intermedia, but although Body Tracks shares a ritualistic character with the work of the Actionists, the encounter is between the artist and her own body and materials; it is visceral, not violent.

But violence also fascinated Mendieta. The dark scene in an 8×10 color photograph dated 1973 offers an almost matter-of-fact crime scene image: harsh spotlight illuminates an impoverished apartment with broken dishes on the floor and a decrepit wooden table, with the artist’s body bent at a right angle away from the camera, ass in the air, covered in blood dripping down her bare legs and pooling in the white panties around her ankles, head invisible in the shadows. "Untitled (Rape Scene)" (1973) is the record of a performance/ installation Mendieta created in her apartment in Iowa to recreate the scene of a real violent rape-murder of a young woman that March that had been reported in detail in the press. Although the image immediately suggests a feminist politics, a statement against violence against women, when coupled with the series of slides shown in a vitrine nearby of Untitled (People Looking at Blood, Moffit) (1973), rows of mundane street shots of ordinary passersby in front of a doorway where Mendieta spread animal blood, the effect is not a condemnation of violence, but a sense of detachment and displacement. The absence of causality in these images, the implication of violence but never its depiction, works to displace the viewer’s ability to comprehend each scene as a narrative; rather the images seem to challenge the viewer, to heighten a sense of dislocation, mediating any sense of transparency in Mendieta’s use of her own body in the work. These are images are some of the most tempting to read biographically given the intimate violence that lead to Mendieta’s death, yet it is precisely in these images that the artist refuses that paradigm: her defiant stare in "Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood)" (1973), bloodied face filling the frame is one of the most powerful in the show.

And then there are the Siluetas (1973-1980), begun in Mexico on a trip with Breder, and continued in Iowa, including Mendieta’s best-known images, and representing her most complicated and successful intermedia work. In the early Siluetas made in Iowa, Mendieta herself appears in films and photographs that record her process as well as the "finished" sculptures. In "Corazón de Roca can Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood)" (1975), the artist, naked, kneels next to an impression of her body that has already been cut into the soft muddy riverbank. She places a rock in the center of this bodily hollow, covers the rock with blood, and then places herself, face down, into the cutting, like a puzzle piece or a key in a lock. The film reveals the indexicality of the early Siluetas: like a fingerprint, they register the trace of the body in the world, as well as the chronological gap between action and image. The presence of Mendieta’s body, her performance of merging with the earth as her mark making process, registers the trace of the body in the earth, rendering the silueta more than a mere icon. The combination of Mendieta’s films and photographs of her first Siluetas in Iowa inextricably connect the images of bodily traces to Mendieta’s body, not a generalized female body, but the specific body of their maker, the artist’s body that is intimate with her materials. Yet the Siluetas are as universal as they are specific, metaphorizing the relationship between the body and nature, recording the unavoidable fact of human impact in the natural world, shallow and brief in geological terms, but beautiful and inescapable nevertheless.

The films and photographs of the Siluetas are tightly framed and mostly employ a single shot, containing only Mendieta’s body and the immediate material surrounding her figure. The straightforward documentary style is standard 1960s conceptual documentation, but replacing the white walls of the gallery with a lushly colorful landscape. The cool clear water running over her body, face down, head turned to the sky away from the camera in "Untitled (Creek)" (1974) captures a silueta of water, possible only by the body’s interruption of the natural flow of the creek. In The Tree of Life series that marks the beginning of the Siluetas, Mendieta incorporated her body into the landscape by covering herself with mud or flowers and grass, making a raised impression against a tree or in a field. The scale of the works never exceeds the scale of the body, and the effect is an overwhelming sense of intimacy: with the land, with the viewer, with her own body.

The Siluetas are the quintessential "Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance" referred to in the exhibition’s title, which belies the complexity of Mendieta’s relationship to land art. While the comparison to Smithson and Heizer is certainly historically appropriate, the Siluetas have a quality similar to Richard Long’s and Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral natural sculptures: both artists build forms out of natural materials in the landscape without permanently transforming the environment, but "fixing" these delicate, ephemeral impressions with photography. Rather than altering the landscape in the usual sense implied by the categories "earthworks" and "land art," Mendieta’s work at its best centers on the sensations of landscape, the physical experience of the world through natural elements that shapes, transforms, and even erases identity.

As the Siluetas progress, their forms spin further and further from the outline of Mendieta’s petite figure into round primitivized goddess forms. With bulging hips and arms raised like tree branches, her cipher reappears in the leaf drawings, tree and twig sculptures, and Rupestrian Sculptures carved in the Cuban landscape and documented in large black-and-white photographs, creating a prehistoric, fossilized quality through iconography and materials. While the resulting images register the trace of Mendieta’s hand, the forms themselves are not the indices of the early Siluetas, but rather symbols for a generic earth goddess. The catalogue includes exhaustive discussion of the various sources of this imagery, and while Mendieta’s references were vast, the images themselves lack the personal force of her earlier work. Aggressively pursuing grants and gallery representation after leaving the seminal feminist collective A.I.R. Gallery in 1982, Mendieta’s interest in creating lasting objects that could be sold is obvious. The growing force of identity politics and postmodernism in the 1980s is also manifest in these later sculptures that fixate on subject matter—femininity, fertility, death and rebirth—rather than the processes of earlier intermedia projects that foregrounded experience rather than issues. At the time of her death, Mendieta was exploring one set of possibilities suggested by her early work. Although it is pointless to speculate about what might have been, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance presents the gorgeous fragments and sketches of those possibilities. At its best, Mendieta’s work has a quality of displacement and longing, of indeterminacy and potentiality, which transcends identity politics and opens up the possibility of intimacy in a vast landscape.

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An interview with Marina Abramovic with Katy Deepwell

- from a conversation with Marina Abramovic at her home in Amsterdam in September 1996.

In September 1996, Marina Abramovic’s ‘The House,Five Rooms and Storage’ , an installation for Visual Arts UK 96, was about to open at Middlesborough Art Gallery and a major retrospective exhibition of her work was in preparation for the Groningen Museum, Holland.

Katy Deepwell: I want to begin by asking you about your idea for the installation ‘The House, Five Rooms and Storage’. Is it a model of a home? Or an attempt to conceive of different metaphorical spaces?

Marina Abramovic: When I first came to Middlesborough and saw the space (a former doctor’s surgery) , even though it was a gallery space, it had a homely feeling. There were old carpets, a fireplace and lots of elements remaining from its former use. It was not really a home or a gallery, it was something in between . So I was interested in what it was before. Although they told me it was a living space before it was a gallery, I like to work on locations and to take into consideration the history of the building. I wanted to return the idea of the house to the space - so I traced where was the living room, bathroom, kitchen etc. and where would be the storage space. But I didn’t take it literally. I then made my own arrangement. This idea of the house is more like a spirit house and the furniture is not normal furniture, its my interpretation of that space. So, if you go to the bathroom, there is a copper bath and a copper sink but the water has become like a mirror where you can go and look at yourself or not. Copper transmits energy as a material . I like the idea of bathing in copper. In the old days, baths were made from copper but now its just a purification or cleaning idea but the metaphor is still there. In the Bedroom, the bed looks like a cross and the material is lead and rosequartz, which I had not used before. I have made a bed for human use before, but here I made a bed for spirit use - this is a bed for a dead spirit. When I first made a bed for spirit use the idea was to make the invisible, visible. So by making a bed for a dead spirit you could become aware of what a dead spirit might mean.
The storage place has a six metre high metal construction with two glass sides of the cube. These are full of salt and coal. They are black and white, yes and no. The TV room is very simple, a TV and one high chair. The audience is invited to sit on the chair where their feet connot touch the floor facing the wall. The TV video ‘Image of Happiness’ is playing but the audience can only hear the video sound and look at the blank wall. The space is a metaphor.
The house also refers to my earlier works and workshops with students as these are called ‘Cleaning the House’. The question which house are you cleaning can refer to the body as house. Even my own house in Amsterdam is arranged so that each space has one activity at a time - a studio, thinking room, office, working room, exercise room, a kitchen for eating. The whole house has a construction that you can relate to the body. Louise Bourgeois,for example, made lots of drawings of the body as a house.

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

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

In the video, The Onion, Marina Abramovic, is filmed framed like a portrait against a blue background. The image echoes representations of the Madonna,particularly as the camera angle always looks up towards the face. Holding an onion in her hand, she bites through and slowly devours the entire onion. As she eats the pain becomes intense, her eyes water, but she continues eating nevertheless. The soundtrack echoes this sense of resignation and endurance :



© Marina Abramovic Still from video 'The Onion' (1996)

I am tired from changing planes so often. Waiting in the waiting rooms, bus stations, train stations, airports.
I am tired of waiting for endless passport controls.
Fast shopping malls in shopping malls.
I am tired of more career decisions:museum and galllery openings, endless receptions, standing around with a glass of plain water, pretending that I am interested in conversation.
I am tired of my migrane attacks.
Lonely hotel room, room service, long distance telephone calls, bad TV movies.
I am tired of always falling in love with the wrong man.
I am tired of being ashamed of my nose being too big, of my ass being too large, ashamed about the war in Yugoslavia.
I want to go away, somethere so far that I am unreachable by fax or telephone.
I want to get old, really old so that nothing matters any more.
I want to understand and see clearly what is behind all of this.
I want not to want anymore’



© Marina Abramovic,1996. Dallas, USA



© Marina Abramovic Still from video 'The Onion' (1996)

Katy Deepwell: In The Onion, you’re also metaphorically peeling back the Onion revealing different layers.

Marina Abramovic: There is an essence but no core. There is the hardness of the skin and softness of the flesh. If you look in history, the most difficult thing is to work in a simple way but if you succeed you can reach everybody. I’m not sure how many artists do this but I start with hundreds of ideas running around in my baroque mind and then I start reducing, reducing. Can I say one thing with twenty things, then with four, then 3 - finally can I say it with just one thing - a economic art. I was in the symposium Art Meets Spirituality in an Economy where there was much discussion of pollution but I think we should definitely be aware of art pollution. There are today, thousands and thousands of artists producing all kinds of art. The studios are stuffed with works - like a postoffice - producing, producing but when you think how little work really matters, how little art makes real sense, its incredible. All the really important artists of this century can really change the way society thinks, Duchamp did it, Malevich did it, Rothko,Klein,Pollock - certain key points and then the rest, you have thousands of people following their work.

Katy Deepwell: These are all artists who distil ideas, reduce to pure form.

Marina Abramovic: Yes, you need to reduce to the essence but it is a question of how to get the essence out? But then you see how their work comes from a very deep personal level and they succeed in shifting this experience into something else.

Katy Deepwell: Your work is often discussed by others in rather waffly terms of spirituality but I don’t see this method of work as a very spiritual way of working. Maybe this is because of my own secular beliefs.

Marina Abramovic: I have a huge problem with the labels that are put on me - New Age - spooky! It’s very interesting how the artworld today is competely allergic to spirituality, religion or any of these things. It’s like spirituality is taken as a negative concept rather than a positive one and this is so strange because for me there is a spritual element in my work but not all of it. I don’t agree with the labels which people project on to me.

Katy Deepwell: Maybe its necessary to use different terms to spirituality and talk about what it means to be a human being, to live, experience - not just in a spiritual dimension alone.

Marina Abramovic: Exactly, the spiritual is one dimenson and not the only one.

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

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

Katy Deepwell: This is like the medium, the spirit inhabing the body.

Marina Abramovic: I believe the artist should be an antenna - a vibrating antennae.

Katy Deepwell: In one of the articles I read you described yourself as the ‘Grandmother of Performance Art’ - along with Ulrike Rosenbach and Gine Pane - unlike the younger generation of video and installation artists or the ‘Bad Girls’, you always use real time, instead of using loops or technology to simulate experience. Their work, by contrast, seems less concerned with physical experience within the performance and more concerned with the ephemera of culture, language games , media games/codes.

Marina Abramovic: It is very interesting when I first met, Pipilotti Rist (a Swiss video artist) I loved the construction of her installations but they are often too much like MTV. She’s a very nice girl but when she was introduced to me she was completely shocked ‘Oh, you’re really alive!’. It was as if there was such a difference in age and somehow I’m part of history and don’t exist as a person. so I said ‘Yes, I’m really alive!’ The younger generation do seem ignorant or they don’t want to know the work of the 70s because they repeat the same ideas and many young critics don't refer to the earlier work for comparison, which is unfair. Either they just copy or what is equally possible, they just get very similar ideas. Like sleeping in the gallery (which Georgina Starr invited an actress to do at the Serpentine Gallery in 1995), Chris Burden and Ulay and I did this but it was so funny to see the huge publicity in the British Press, but you have another ten artists after Chris Burden who did the same thing and here it is presented as the latest thing.
From my own experience, I know of lots of artists who really redo my work all over the world sometimes referencing me - sometimes not. There was a piece we were invited to in a museum in New Zealand - which borrowed from an earlier piece by Ulay and I called Inpoderabilia (Bologna, 1977) - where two people stood in a doorway and the audience had to walk past but the only difference was the girl and boy were dressed not nude.
Then I got an invitation from 5 young artists in Poland to come and see a performance called Marina Positions - at first I was really angry but when I was watching the piece I thought it was fantastic and I understood that the idea of originality as ‘my-ego-my art’ is completely an obstacle to the essence of performance. A performance should be like a musical score - like Mozart, subject to interperetation and it can be performend as you want. I want to promote this idea at the ICA’s 50th Anniversary next year and to do a performance based on the performances of the 70s - a historical view of 6 pieces - 5 by other artists I like and the last my own. I am interesting in reperforming Chris Burden’s work on Crucifixion with gold nails. I really want to do this with the permission of the artists because I want to honour their work and how it was with my interpretation. I hope that this will open up the idea of performance as a free concept and demystify the 70s. Instead of the photo and all this projection on events where you were not there. I want to perform in this series, three I did not see - one from each continent. I actually want to do these performances. I think it would be interesting to have a woman on the cross in Burden’s crucifixion.

Katy Deepwell: But it would change the meaning.

Marina Abramovic: Yes and so would ‘Seedbed’ by Acconci where he raised the floor of the gallery and masturbated under the floor. The artist’s seed was supposedly inspiration.
When I was in the Art Academy, on the first day, when there were 2 women students among 17 men , an old professor came to us and said ‘to be an artist , you have to have balls’ I was shocked by this because all I wanted to be was a good artist with or without balls.

In another recent video work ‘Image of Happiness’ which was shown as part of the installation at Middlesborough, the camera frame is focused on Abramovic’s face. This time she is hanging upside down. A fact which only becomes apparent as you watch the entire video and see the blood rushing to her face and her struggle to speak the narrative. She repeats three times, the same words, a poetic description of the moment when a wife welcomes her husband home. The image is sealed by the touch of the husband’s hand on the woman’s pregnant belly.

Katy Deepwell: Would you say there was irony in ‘Image of Happiness’ between the action and the words you are speaking?

Marina Abramovic: No,absolutely not. In the early 70s I wanted to be very radical, extremely focused both mentally and physically. Everything else was just groovy. Ulay and I made all these works together. When we came to walking the Chinese wall, I made a big separation with the major love of my life and, for a time, everything was falling apart. When I finished the Wall, the pain was so big it took me about 2-3 years to get over it. It is only through my work that I can express my emotions At that time I was 40, ending a very strong emotional relationship, and I was intending to make my own work. I was at rock bottom zero , leaving everything behind. It was the hardest part of my life.
Then I realised one thing that everybody has many personalities inside themselves and it is all the time will-power which decides which one one presents to the world. My presentation of myself was just one aspect of me - a heavy one going out into the world. This came out in A Biography. I had reached a stage in my life where I could restage performances, pasting, cutting, knives and acting which I cannot do (I was making fun of myself). When people saw my works, they were scared to talk to me in reality but my friends who didn’t know the work could not believe that I made this work because there was a contradiction in their eyes. Then I found out that there are contradictions worth exploring . I love kitsch, I indulge myself with sweets, vanity, fashion. I love to make fun of myself, a very black humour, often politically incorrect. These are all these aspects which my friends know in a private situation about me and then there other aspects of myself which I explore through the works. In ‘Image of Happiness’ the image is something I really wish in one part of myself but it is not all of myself. It would be a dream to have a husband , family etc. but the other side of my self is stronger and I threw it away.
At 50, I now realise I can say this is how it is. One of the most difficult things is to do things you are ashamed of. My second theatre piece was called Delusional, to show people about shame as one of the most difficult emotions.

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

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



© Marina Abramovic Still from video 'The Onion' (1996)

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

Marina Abramovic: Do you see me as a feminist?

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

Marina Abramovic: I really don't think so. I explore the self as any man does, OK but I do so as a woman. I didn’t know what feminism was until I was 30 years old. I came from Yugoslavia where women are very strong. My mother was a Maitre in the Army. She was Director of Museum of Art and Revolution. All her friends were in high positions with the Ministry of Culture. women were totally equal in Yugoslavian society after the revolution. I came from this kind of background and I always thought the women were much stronger and more powerful than many men. When I left Yugoslavia, I saw this confrontation of women in the press. For me , its a completely psychological thing, if you believe in your own power, you can do anything you want. I never had in my life to do anything I didn’t want to.
When I came to Italy, I had many shows and lots of work and I looked around and saw there was not one Italian woman artist in the same position , except Marisa Merz who was always hidden behind Mario Merz. And many women said ‘Oh, we can’t do anything’. We can do anything we want! I was very much against this idea of a ghetto. Many of the exhibitions of women’s work I have seen , have been of very poor quality, because its a lot of bad art with 2 or 3 good artists invited in. I have never seen a really good exhibition of feminist art. If you put yourself in a ghetto, you deny the real meaning of art - art has to be good art whether by a man or a woman.

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

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

Katy Deepwell: Lucy Lippard made the same argument about European women artists in her essay on ‘The Pains and Pleasures of Women’s Body Art’ (From the Center) arguing that many women use their physical appearence - skin - beautiful bodies - in order to make their work accepted or acceptable to male curators. This, she states, is not the case in America.
I am interested in exploring the popular currency of certain American ideas and the differences in Europe. Everyone here is aware of discrimination and oppression against women but the point is to go on producing and speak about other kinds of experience. It is however necessary to overcome the almost-automatic dismissal of feminism. Maybe it’s also particular to different situations and where you come from in terms of background.

Marina Abramovic: Background is very important. If you come from Germany where it definitely is a rule that the major artists are all male and its very difficult to get a job if you are female. Whereas in Yugoslavia , you’re a hero!

Katy Deepwell: As you get older, are you still interested in making works which push your physical body to the limit?

Marina Abramovic: Oh yes, more than ever. Being 50 in American culture is something to hide, in my culture, this is dignity, something you really get to know on another level of consciousness - another part of my life. As an artist you really have to know when to stop and when to die , because so many artists repeat themselves. In a lifetime you don’t have 30,000 good ideas. In one artist’s lifetime, he or she may have one good idea.

Katy Deepwell: There are lots of artists who go on working until they’re 90 - look at Louise Bourgeois or Louise Nevelson.

Marina Abramovic: No, no , I want to go on to 100. This is not the problem. You have to concentrate differently. It is not important whether to stop here or here. There are real projects which can help you go further and it’s a question of stopping, focusing, recentering on what you should be doing.
But at 50, the administration for an artist is frightening, letters,faxes, send things here, there and you are overbooked.
I want to make a performance work which is about the limits of the Eastern body and the limits of the Western body.

Katy Deepwell: How would you define these distinctions?

Marina Abramovic: Well , it’s using the knowledge of people from the East, taking the body beyond our physical limits (through fasting, meditation, levitation). The West doesn’t live though the body it lives through the brain.

Selected Bibliography,1992-1996

Beatrix Ruf (foreword) Marina Abramovic: Double Edge (Kunstmuseum des Kantons, Thurgau, Kartause Ittingen, October 1995-April 1996)
Johan Pijnappel & Geert Schiever Marina Abramovic: Cleaning the House (London: Academy,1995)
Marina Abramovic Marina Abramovic: Objects,Performance,Video,Sound (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art,1995)
Bojana Pejic Marina Abramovic (Berlin: Cantz,1993)
Marina Abramovic The Spatial Drive (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art,1992)
‘Marina Abramovic’ Interview with Ingrid Hoogervorst Ruimte 2 1992 Jaargang 9

above copied from: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/n.paradoxa/abramov.htm

Looking for Roberta Breitmore

By Patricia Maloney, April 12, 2011
Roberta Breitmore (1974–78) is a critical work in the oeuvre of artist Lynn Hershman Leeson and is essential to any survey of feminist or performance art. In the piece, Hershman Leeson adopts an alternative persona, that of Breitmore, who possesses her own history, voice, posture, style of dress, personality, neuroses, credit, and driver’s license. Breitmore was a heavily made-up woman with depressive tendencies, who fled a childhood of sexual and physical abuse, attended a couple of sessions of psychoanalysis, looked for a job, and struggled with her weight. Upon her “arrival” in San Francisco in 1974, she took a room at the Dante Hotel, then rented her own apartment and advertised for a roommate. Those who responded and those who interacted with Breitmore became, as Hershman Leeson notes, part of her fiction.1 Frequently, those who encountered the artist as Breitmore did not realize it was a performance, so wholly did she embody this character. And while three other women also played the role during the project's existence, Breitmore's persona was intertwined with Hershman Leeson's psyche.2 As she notes, "Although I denied it at the time and insisted that she was 'her own woman' with defined needs, ambitions and instincts, in retrospect we were linked. ROBERTA represented part of me as surely as we all have within us an underside… To me, she was my own flipped effigy; my physical reverse, my psychological fears."3 As an artist, Hershman Leeson has incorporated a wide range of media into her practice: film, performance, photography, video, installations, and interactive and digital technologies. Her subjects range from establishing identity in a consumerist culture to negotiations between privacy and surveillance, and throughout her career, one sees the persistent restructuring of institutional, social, and interpersonal space. In the Dante Hotel (1973–74), the nine-month project she created with the artist Eleanor Coppola and from which Roberta Breitmore evolved, Hershman Leeson invited the public to imagine the life of a fictitious individual through the personal and utilitarian objects left behind in a hotel room. Similarly, artifacts such as medical and legal documents, photos, letters, and surveillance reports are all that remain of Breitmore, who was “exorcised” in 1978 on the grave of Lucrezia Borgia at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Italy. The Dante Hotel and Roberta Breitmore artifacts function as markers that map out these fictive identities and allow one to imagine or reconstruct the paths these characters may have taken (or did take) through space and time. These early works created openness: information flowed from the body (the imagined body of the Dante Hotel; Hershman Leeson’s actual body) and traveled though architecture, rather than being contained within it. In other words, the body made architecture. It is notable that the Dante Hotel came about after the UC Berkeley Art Museum cancelled an exhibition by Hershman Leeson because her sculptures included a sound component, which fell outside the realm of what the museum would exhibit at the time. She additionally went on to create the Floating Museum (1974–78), a project in which she commissioned artists to create site-specific and ephemeral works in public spaces. One looks at these projects together and understands that Hershman Leeson has consistently and successfully expanded the possibilities for sites of encounter with art throughout her career. Her work has been both embodied and interactive; she has situated it far outside the institutional realm of the museum, in places that are liminal and virtual. She has gone beyond representing identity to producing identities. But, as the conversation below reveals, that accomplishment has confounded and, to a certain extent, thwarted her representation of herself as an artist. In his 1983 essay, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” the critic Craig Owens notes that “(i)t is precisely at the legislative frontier between what can be represented and what cannot that the postmodernist operation is being staged—not in order to transcend representation, but in order to expose that system of power that authorizes certain representations while blocking, prohibiting, or invalidating others.”4 Hershman Leeson’s early performative work did not so much expose the museum’s institutional power as it denied and defied it through constitutive frameworks that were more invested in actual presence than in forms of representation. Roberta Breitmore emerged and operated in a space between institutional authority (she had a driver’s license and bank account) and individual agency (she appeared when and how Hershman Leeson determined). However, since her exorcism, museums have incorporated many of the artistic forms inaugurated or utilized by the feminist art movement, including performance art, installation, and site-specific, sound-based, and ephemeral work. For Hershman Leeson to assert that local institutional validation is necessary for her historical position and financial security as an artist is a tacit acknowledgment of the museum’s power to represent. But is it possible for an artist who operates in the fluid space between the real and the fictive—and constitutes her own subjectivity—to gain validation within this system of representation without losing her power to refuse it? _____ Patricia Maloney: I’m interested in speaking with you about your early performances and how they might intersect with the idea of women operating from marginalized positions to create their own sense of empowerment and identity. I’ll start with a quote from a 2005 interview that is included in the !Women Art Revolution [!W.A.R.] archives, as I think it touches on much of what I’d like to talk with you about: It is easier to ignore the work than to place it… In that conversation, you are speaking specifically about the critical reception of your work, and the lack of effort on the part of art historians to contextualize the interactive work Lorna (1983–84), but it seems that was the position from which so many women artists were operating, particularly at the starting point of !W.A.R., in 1968.5 They were grappling with their frustrations of being overlooked. What were your frustrations at that moment, and how did they lead, for example, to Roberta Breitmore? Lynn Hershman Leeson: It was difficult to get your work shown, or to be taken seriously, or to be heard. The Roberta Breitmore project came out of the fact that I had a work at the museum at Berkeley with sound, and they said sound and media don’t belong in a museum. So they closed the show, and I thought, “Well, who needs a museum?” Eleanor Coppola and I put some work in hotel rooms.6 That was 1972. My project went on for almost a year. The work was constructed with the ephemera of somebody who might have lived in that room. It was all the negative space of that person: the books she’d read, the glasses she’d wear. Going through the room was essentially like an architectural flow chart of time. And then I thought, what would it be like to release this person into the world? That’s how she was born, really, out of rejection. PM: Essentially, the rejection from one space creates an investigation into other spaces. LHL: Absolutely true. It was the 1960s, so people didn’t need an authority to tell you where art belonged, or what art was, so why not have it accessible to people just to come and look at? PM: But how did people access that work? Was it viewable by subsequent hotel guests, or did you arrange for people to see the rooms? Did you have openings? LHL: I put an ad in an art journal, and then people wrote about it. It became very successful. You could just sign in at the desk and take the key. PM: But how did that become this alternative persona? To go from visitors seeing evidence of a life lived in this space to creating an alternative persona? LHL: I first had to fill out the skeleton and the structure of who she was: where she came from, what her education was, what her traumas were, how much money she would have, how she would survive, and what she would do. There was a whole backstory to her character, and it all built from that idea: what would she do with these circumstances? She came to San Francisco, stayed at the Dante Hotel for a couple of nights, put an ad in the paper for a roommate, put an ad out for a job, and just went forward. Originally, I didn’t want to [play her], but no one quite understood it, so I had to do it. PM: Eventually there were three other people who played her, as well, though, right? LHL: There were three, but not until 1977, and she started around 1972.7 PM: First, with the Dante Hotel, you have the personal paraphernalia that is left in the hotel room, and then, with Roberta Breitmore, you create entryways into this life, by marking this person in various respects, such as the want ads. Her identity came into being via the evidence you laid around her. LHL: It was all through evidence. PM: How did you arrive at who she was? I think it was very interesting that she had these depressive tendencies. She went to see a psychiatrist and bordered on being suicidal. Why did she have those attributes? LHL: She was sexually and physically abused as a child. That is why she left home, to start her new life. She didn’t have a full college education; she had only had a year of college. All of that impacted her. In fact, I started to get a PhD in psychology to work up her traumas and her background. PM: So her actions evolved from this psychological profile? LHL: Yes. PM: How entwined did you become in who she was? LHL: I needed to keep her separate. She had her own language, her own voice, her own gestures; she was very different than I was physically. So I tried to make her objectified, an archetype of stereotypes. PM: And she touches on various zeitgeists of the era, right? She joins Weight Watchers and struggles with gaining weight. But what was the purpose in putting her forward as an archetype? Was it about separating her from you, or about highlighting certain perceptions of women that dominated the broader cultural consciousness? LHL: I saw her as a mirror of culture. If you are going to take a profile of the context you live in, then she was a composite of all those stereotypes that people had at that time. PM: To what extent did people encounter her as a real person? LHL: She was not an artwork to most people. PM: So they weren’t reading her as an archetype or set of stereotypes? LHL: People she met became part of who she was—in how they treated her and became part of her history. They affected her behavior. PM: Looking back on that work, how did it fit into what women at the time were trying to project in terms of their identities, or how they tried to create voices for themselves? LHL: My sense was that women didn’t have any history; that they were just becoming aware that they weren’t in any books, that they had never been taken seriously. A lot of the work produced at this time was to create a history, a context of who they were and how they fit into the world. PM: So like Roberta, everything was being created from that moment forward. LHL: Of course, there were other people, such as Claude Cahun, who had played with identity, but I don’t think they were dealing with the historical loss that women were feeling at that particular moment. PM: To what extent did women try to insert themselves into the dominant history vs. demand that a new history be generated? LHL: I think women were and are still trying to insert themselves into an existing history. PM: How did you make the break between yourself and Roberta? LHL: I had to be vigilant and conscious of the difference. Of course, the makeup and the costume helped. Ultimately, Roberta was as objectified as a sculpture or a wax object. She was a piece. PM: So it was about putting on her persona. LHL: Embodying it. PM: Even if no one else was embodying fictive identities to the extent you were at the time, performance was very much a medium that female artists were embracing at that time, and that is a significant thread that runs through your film, !Women Art Revolution. Could you talk about why performance was such a viable option for women in the late ’60s and through the ’70s? LHL: Because it could be done anywhere; it didn’t need to be shown in a museum or gallery. It was a completely autonomous way of communicating. PM: Whose work were you looking at during the time that you created Roberta Breitmore? LHL: Eleanor Antin and Suzanne Lacy, the people I showed at the Floating Museum. PM: Will you talk about the Floating Museum? LHL: Like the Dante Hotel, the Floating Museum existed because museums were closed to the work of most people. I created a museum without walls, so people could show their work anyplace, whether it was in hotel rooms or staircases. They used the city as a recyclable resource, as backgrounds for pieces that took place in environments that were site-specific. I think the Dante Hotel was one of the first site-specific works. I wanted to expand that experience for other people. PM: To what extent was the museum a framework that you were responding to? To have your work seen in an institutional context as opposed to just trying to have your work seen? LHL: I think that I wanted to be taken seriously, but I realized I wouldn’t be. And I am still not. PM: You don’t think you are? LHL: No. My work is not well-represented in the collections of the local institutions, despite the length of my career and the broad scope of my work.8 PM: But you are the chair of the film department at the San Francisco Art Institute and you are considered a seminal West Coast artist. LHL: Those are two different things. You can be seminal and have important influence, but still not be taken seriously. I continue to meet with incredible struggles to produce my work. Every time I create a film or do anything, I have to start from scratch. When people start to take you seriously, they collect you and your work is taken care of beyond your own efforts. PM: Do you think that is because of how you work, embracing bleeding-edge technologies? LHL: That is true, but on the other hand, I have a trail of forty-five years of work that is proof, and important work that should be collected and cared for. PM: Do you have any thoughts on why you are not taken seriously? LHL: Being female, living here in the Bay Area. PM: Which brings me back to my opening statement—your statement: the work being easier to ignore than to place. LHL: It’s true. When you are doing truly innovative work, nobody understands it. There is no language; it doesn’t fit into any categories. I remember being rejected from the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] because there was no category that Lorna fit into, and no one understood what interactive work was; it was the first one. And rather than trying to understand it, they ignored it for twenty-five years. PM: There are contradictions in your work that I find very interesting. For example, Roberta Breitmore is an embodied performance, but as a character, she is very isolated. Taken a step further, Lorna is not an embodied character, and while she is equally isolated, it is the first interactive work of art. The audience controls her decisions and her actions. You make this shift into work that is virtual and technologically driven; it is not tangible, but we as the audience are able to connect with her. LHL: Well, just as I embodied Roberta, anyone could embody Lorna. It was the bridge between the self and the virtual, and what one chooses. Transferring the self into the action. PM: I wanted to discuss with you the sense of urgency for the work that you were doing, and the work your female colleagues were doing in the ’70s. What was that urgency toward? LHL: It was about freedom of expression; it was about equal rights and civil liberties. It was about making change in the world. PM: How did work that was performative, time-based, and fleeting—in which the impulse was to see it rather than to document it—carry this urgency? Was there any thought of creating the assurances that this work was going to carry forward what it needed to, in terms of equal rights and civil liberties? LHL: Well, I always knew that it was important to document things, to have records of what went on. You can’t expect the change to be immediate, so you put it in the world and keep going. _____ NOTES: 1. Lynn Hershman Leeson, “Roberta Breitmore: Performance in real life, using real materials, experience and real time, San Francisco, San Diego, Italy,” http://www.lynnhershman.com/investigations/privatei/roberta_breitmore/roberta_breitmore2.html 2. The art historian Kristine Stiles, who was a practicing artist at the time, was the first person besides the artist to assume the character, before Hershman Leeson conceived of having "multiples" for the work. As she notes in an email to the author from April 13, 2011, "[Lynn] asked me if I would dress as Roberta Breitmore and go with her to gallery openings in order to confuse the San Francisco art world, which always associated her with this character 'Roberta Breitmore.' This was 1976 or 1977. I accepted and assumed the character of Roberta." 3. Hershman Leeson, “Roberta Breitmore: Performance in real life.” 4. Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1994), 168. 5. !Women Art Revolution is a film produced by Hershman Leeson that culls from hundreds of hours of interviews with female artists conducted over forty years. The entirety of the archive of interviews is available online through the Stanford University library at http://lib.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution. 6. This is The Dante Hotel work, which is dated as 1973–74 on http://www.lynnhershman.com/. 7. On Hershman Leeson’s website, the dates listed for the project are 1974–78. In an email to the author from April 13, 2011, the artist clarified the contradiction in saying, "The conceptualization began as early as 1971 when I was thinking about The Dante Hotel, but Roberta did not enter the world physically until 1974…Roberta is about time and process, so I always envisioned her earlier than 1974 and continuing after 1978, but that was the cut off of that phase of her being and exorcism." 8. A search of SFMOMA’s online catalogue shows that the museum acquired the web-based project Agent Ruby (1999–2002) in 2008. However, the work is currently not available for viewing, and no object-based work by Hershman Leeson is owned by the museum.

above copied from: http://www.artpractical.com/feature/looking_for_roberta_breitmore/

A COLLECTIVE RESOUNDING BODY AIMING TOWARDS AN AUDITORY TACTILITY, Enrico Pitozzi

/ Eng: Luisa Bertolatti


Among the more interesting figures on the international circuit, the choreographer Isabelle Choinière has been developing a journey connected to sound qualities in movement for many years. She founded and currently directs the Corps Indice of Montréal (Canada) company with which she develops research projects on the relationships between dance and technologies.


From 1995 her creations have been present in many international festivals: in France, Germany, Denmark, Brazil and the USA. Among her main bodies of work are Le Partage des peaux I (1994), Communion (Le Partage des peaux II) (1995-1996) – La Démence des Anges (2002). Alongside her work as a choreographer she also works intensely in research: her texts have been published in 2008 at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2009 one of her contributions appeared in the book Point of being by Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Program of the University of Toronto. In 2006 she began developing a new project called Meat Paradoxe dedicated to the concept of a collective resounding body, working in collaboration with the French composer Dominique Besson.


I. Intro


We are currently in an epistemological passage point which marks a real movement in the scenic arts and that primarily regards the role of the performer favouring other – plural – manifestations of their physicality.





This break passes through a relationship that the contemporary scene has initiated with technology: here we will look at a particular aspect, specifically interrogating the definition of scenic soundscape derived from the movement of the performer in the work of the Canadian choreographer Isabelle Choinière.


It is here that the concept of “resounding body”, which is at the centre of this intervention, takes on meaning as an audible expression and manifestation of the relationship that movement and perception create with sound. The resounding body does not look to something that is simply anthropomorphic, the sound reconstruction of the shape of the body is not an issue: the investigation of the issue of “resounding body” - a voluntarily ambiguous term – means to penetrate into the matter of sound and at the same time, of the body. It means to operate inside a fine limit where the shape of the body and sound are dissolved leaving a plot made up of different intensities that operate within it: we will therefore speak of a “molecularised” form of the body and sound that resonate with each other. In other words, it means to work on a series of internal tensions that allow the shape of the body and of sound to be in constant mutation.


II. Toward a collective resounding body


To come close to an initial manifestation of this relationship between body and sound, we will cite the work La démance des anges (2002) by Canadian choreographer Isabelle Choinière where thanks to technological means, the presence of the body is extended to a different place to where the performance is physically taking place. Two different spaces and two different bodies live in these two different spaces. Two dimensions of presence are in relation with each other inside the same physical space: a physical body of the performer and a “synthesis” body that is “present” as a projection. This way the dancer who is physically present sees her performance replicated in the image and the sound track of a second dancer (spatially collocated in another place, even in a different continent, if necessary) transmitted by a MIDI data system via the internet. Therefore in this case the resounding body is the result of an encounter between physical and material bodies, spatially distant with reciprocal projections.





In other words the voices and gestures of the performers are captured by a series of microphones and sensors that are positioned on their bodies, and this data is transferred simultaneously into the space of the performance and on the net to form what could be defined a long distance duo. It’s as if the two performers generate and exchange sound and images in real time, which come from the composition of movements producing a sort of net-like persistence of their image in the spectator. We can therefore see and hear every performer, present in the space of the other. This process is an invitation to a reconfiguration of the perception of the performer in relation to action and creates an overlapping and confusion of real dimensions.


In order to create this aspect of the performance, the two dancers have captors capable of capturing the sound qualities of gestures that are executed and attribute an equivalent to these on a sound level through a synthesizer.


In order to create this, the choreographer had to develop a series of particular sensors to be applied to the body. The need was to elaborate captors that restored the possibility of composing and capturing a movement in a decisively more subtle and slow way, and at the same time allowed to intervene on the opposite diametrical quality, in other words according to a dynamic of acceleration or fragmentation of the flux of movement, so as to compose – in the space of the scene – a real auditory space that interrogated the perceptive asset of the performer in action and the audience’s method of perception.


The resounding body that transpires from this is something that comes from the real body, but is not a double of the body, but rather a manifestation of it, a new sensorial organisation of the perception developed from a technological integration. Technology becomes a way to interrogate the potential of the body in this work, to develop a kind of depth of perception of physical knowledge in order to act on it so as to modify the score of movement constantly (and it’s sound declination). It’s evident that, in this case, we are beyond the pure instrumental use of technology. Technology becomes a way to investigate the body and expand its potential (1). Thanks to this particular use of technology – where technology becomes a way of thinking about the body – the choreographer works by integrating the sound dimension.





III. Placement of the resounding body


By pushing this process of work connected to sound, it is in the Meat Paradoxe (2008/10) project that Isabelle Choinière developed a concrete and radical vision of the concept of the resounding body. Thanks to the collaboration with the French composer Dominique Besson – among the figures who generated software of sound specialisation of movement called Ring – the choreographer developed an organised system around the capturing of the sound of five different dancers that – composing their movement in the space of action like a real sound mass – produced what we could define a collective resounding body, inside which the dancers could feel a shared sensorial experience, on the level of movement and on the level of sound production in real time. The elaboration of a soundscape responds to the mass-movement of the performer on stage, of an intense graininess that seems like a cloud of sound, a dense and articulated atmosphere of sound particles.


In this sense the “resounding body” recalls a dimension of the body (or of movement) that originates in real time starting from the movement of the dancers on the scene and it is inscribed in a context of broadened choreography that the choreographer has been developing for some years now. The “resounding body” is, in other words, an emanation, a dilation of the real body into the shape of sound; it is a vibration. The body becomes an eardrum, a resonator of sensorial dimensions that becomes scenic sonority. Therefore the body is almost molecularised, subdivided into elementary particles and recomposed in the shape of sound. Once again we are outside a purely logical formality of gazing at the body; the intensities – its articulation in movement-particles – are at the same time part of the choreographic and research work on sound thanks to the alteration and modification of different frequencies.


What is extremely interesting, in this perspective, is that by working on the resounding body it is possible to intervene – to renovate it – on sensorial aspects and the perceptive arrangement of the performer. This leads to the abandonment of ways of composition that have already been experimented with and opens up to a gesture that is in continuous transformation and, therefore, to a scenic sonority enriched and redefined each time. It is here that the sensorial aspect is reorganised and the internal part of the body becomes a medium. It’s as if sound, in this project, plays the role of an added dancer: it participates in the organisation of the “collective resounding body”. Just as Dominique Besson underlined when speaking of Ring software used in this process of the work: “The Ring is oriented toward a direction of open system of specialisation in real time of functions of gradual memorisation of the signal and its trajectory. Interfaced as entries in the Ring system, the sources of sound generated from the dancers become manipulable in space and time”(2).





Thanks to the placement of sound obtained via a device consisting of 8 speakers in the hall, the spectator is projected inside the body of the performer, and at the same time, is induced into a radical rethinking of his or her sensorial arrangement. In other words the spectator is very close to the body of the performer, in a proximity that induces him or her to a “tactile vision” of their bodies in movement. The spectator is immersed in this living form. He or she is inside the form, in contact with the intensities that animate and sustain it; inside the flesh thanks to the sound that moves around him or her, that crosses and ploughs through the space. Therefore there are two forms that his or her perception is not used to and that must be redefined.


IV. Toward an auditory-tactile perception of reception


We can speak therefore of a tactile aspect of the working of sound. The sound elaborated according to the strategy of moleculerisation and spatial disposition operates with very high and very low frequencies and tends to articulate itself through a continuous wavelength that installs a constant relationship with the bodies that are listening. This proximity between the body of the performer (visibly or auditorily) does not however take the audience into a situation of extreme sound: the communication passes because of the different chromatic levels of sound, different levels of vibration. The spectator is therefore immersed in the continuous vibration, of a segment of sound as a gesture, and it is on this scale of variations that the attention must fall. What is being affirmed is that the parameters that the spectator must put into action are not simply optical-visual or auditory-sound, but the process of composition of the choreographer Isabelle Choinière requires a synaesthetic glance and mode of listening, an active and contemporary relationship of the senses. It’s necessary to configure the bodies in another way in order to receive these signals. It isn’t enough to have eyes to see the invisible or to have ears to ear the inaudible.







http://www.corpsindice.com/



Notes:

1 - Si veda su questo aspetto anche L. Boisclair, Isabelle Choinière de Corps Indice ; Autour des Demoiselles d’Avignon, dans « Inter, art actuel », no 98, hiver 2007, p. 52-56.

2 - Si veda in tal senso il contributo di Dominique Besson come testimonianza della fase di lavoro cui si fa riferimento: D. Besson, Le corps sonore, entre écriture chorégraphique et écriture musicale, Actes de Colloque Journée d’informatique Musicale – JIM’09, Ecole Phelma – Minatec di Grenoble. Edition AFIM-ACROE-Phelma, 2009 http://acroe.imag.fr/jim09/index.php/descrip/conf/schedConf/actes

above copied from: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1703

DEHUMANIZING THE BODY AS MEDIA a transmedia essay, Ana Rifa!

media history and theory [dehumanizing the body as media]

"Human experience is, unfortunately, butter stimulatingly, thee experience of nothing and thee only reality it knows is thee inability to interpret itself and its mythically inherited structure.
After thee accumulation of too much history we have lost our innocence, we cannot easily believe in any explanations. We describe rather than feel, we touch rather than explore, we lust rather than adore. So there you are...or were... " -Genesis P-Orridge

DEHUMANIZING THE BODY AS MEDIA
a transmedia essay by Ana Rifa!

I’ve always believed the human body is an extraordinary machine. We are perfectly designed from the inside out. We are a mix of balance, grace and biological perfection.

As humans we are not only blessed with this overwhelming container that we carry ourselves in everyday, but also given the gift of expressing our inner self into the world; we think, we feel, we desire making the human being a restless hunter of satisfaction and pleasure.
The fact that mankind can provoke this type of needs makes society an evolving organ for consumer growth which lingers from consuming thoughts, objects and even intangible things such as belief and faith. The need to move information around through diverse types of media not only shows the human genious of moving bodies to where they want to, but how the media influences bodies to be transformed: humans penetrate the mind through the eyes, ears, mouth, nose and touch.
What happens though, when we take the body itself not only seen as a bio-container but a way to signify what we want and tell others what they need? What happens when the body becomes the medium itself? What is the result of distorting what we usually know as “the human body”?
The purpose of this essay is to explore the unlimited boundaries of the human body as media, how the dehumanization and manipulation of the body is used as a channel to flux ideas, movements, politics and patterns of beauty. The body is power. Media is power. Both certainly, make a very strong combination.

Man has distinguished itself since the old times in many ways. We have been conscious of our very special physique, we do not have large claws to defend ourselves, heavy coat to survive extreme weather, deadly teeth to hunt our prey.
Being a clear skinned covered mammal, the urge to distinguish ourselves amongst us and other species that cohabit in the same planet is almost mandatory. That is the reason why we look for human ornamentation, to invade our physique is not only a matter of decoration but of spiritual exploration and expression as well.
It is the cultural context that has put constraints in the way people adorn themselves but throuought time, technological determinism and globalization have fused to give as a result an infinite amount of body interventions.
In The Imagination of Disaster by Susan Sontag she opens her essay with the following line: “ Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and invonceivable terror”. Eventhough this essay talks about science fiction in contemporary cinema, this line catches the essence of my interest on the body and its dehumanization from the outside into our insides, the influence of our external beings overpowering the inside. (mind). This era of mass accesible and visual information leads mankind to find ultimate ways to portray ones thoughts (and inner thoughts) into the body.

In 2006 the exhibit Into Me/Out of Me was presented for the first time in PS1 at Moma in New York city. This show visualizes many relationships of function and physicality as well as ideological and political of the human body. We can appreciate an intersection of all kinds of experimental interactions and and contexts on using the body as a transgressor medium, a tool of power.

Orlan, a french based artist, is one of the pieces of this exhibit. Orlan’s work in general is completely tied to using the human body as media. It was in her early stages where she used her body as a measurement device of scale and reaction. This stages though evolved into a much more complex ideology which gave birth to the Carnal Art Manifesto, in which Carnal Art becomes a technique of using the body to produce classical work. This technique embodies disfiguration as the prime resource, the body becomes an object that strips it’s meaning of hedonistic praise to a simple ready-made container. A literal body of work.
In her pursuit of transgression the body looses its importance as a sexual object and it becomes a useless carrier of the mind, Orlan preaches that the body is a medium of pain, constraint and interference to reach into the real human soul.
The re-encarnation of St Orlan comprehends a series of surgerys into which she gets attributes from classic masterpieces into her face but using the body as the ultimate medium of production: she gets anestesia to get her through the operation but not enough to knock her out, so she paints with her blood. She records the process as well. By incorporating these masterpieces into her face she creates new meaning corresponding to each specific feature taken from the original work, turning the body not only into a canvas but as storytelling media.

In the piece “Black Cross, White Cross and Artificial Food” (1990) Orlan exposes her body making a metaphor of the Christian cult holding two crosses, one black and one white, waving them in the surgery room. She also had a plate of fake and real fruit where she would eat and come on to the surgeon at the same time, feeding and seducting at the same time. Orlan states that her pieces are against god, the physical apprerance and genetics. Why is it a still image? Although it is a process of change and transformation, the piece ends when the surgery is over like any other photograph or painting the fixed outcome that in the future will be reshaped and re elaborated to carry on with a new meaning. At the end, she is the final piece, the photography and video are her immortal witnesses. “In showing you these images, I propose an exercise which you probably enact when you watch the news on TV: not to be fooled by the images but to keep thinking about what is behind them,” she says. Her storytelling is completely immersed onto her face, her body. Her human being transforms automatically into media of exploration, understanding and evolving. Her body is not to be praised but used. Cosmetic surgery is just a way for empty headed people to please the carnality of sex and Orlan proudly uses her own flesh to show and support her manifesto.
Orlan makes me think of Haraway’s text of a Cyborg manifesto in terms of Orlan and her perception of science, technology and feminism. Orlan lingers in a thin line of feminism and anti-feminism, while feminists oppose the use of plastic surgery, Orlan uses it to enhance her point about making the body and ephimerous entity: beauty is merely a characteristic of shallowness, of feeding the pain of complying to a cannon of beauty, having a body brings only pain, transformation hurts, the body must be improved.
On the other hand there are other “manifestos” that relate to Haraway and Orlan concerning the female figure and aesthetic: Pandrogeny. Genesis P-Orridge and his current partner Breyer P-Orridge have been put under the knife in several ocassions to become a being without genre, a new being that is not male or female, mimetism of the sexes into an evolving version of themselves. Genesis P-Orridge claims that due to the change of technology and the world we live in, the body must be put into a transformation process that pars up with the evolution of mankind ( in this case the environment, technology and modern life). That makes me think that maybe technological determinism not only applies to artificial objects but to us that are immersed into the artificial culture, us that recurr to it for our modern way of living. We are the ones that set the boundaries for technological determinism, in this case, the body becomes a piece of technology itself when matched to other tools for innovative ways of art and expression.
Are we playing god or transforming our beings into cyborgs?
Is becoming a cyborg the medium for our minds to express themselves?

Maybe it is not technology that defines the new body, but the body itself put through a series of changes with the help of technology that actually produces the new generation of cyborgs in the world.
Orlan’s work which fuses the use of traditional surveillance (cameras that record her performance in the surgery room) makes the body the true witness and final recording piece of the work (making it also a recording device). Sir Walter Benjamin talks about the use of these technologies as sometimes diminishing the “aura” of the work, but what happens when the body itself becomes the media and the technology at the same time? Then we can ask ourselves if the aura gone, changed or has it evolved into a new paradigm of what a human being is.
Culture and technology do dictate then how we must carry on with our bodies, but is also the reason for people to modifiy, elaborate, ornament and dehumanize it. In that way, it seems that not even technology has the same power as the body does when it comes to using it as media.

In Susan Sontag’s text about the human body and science fiction, the body is also mutated and transformed to create a new breed of storytelling. Strange modifications in a body can tell a things about that person or carry a new meaning with them (similar to what happens to Orlan and the body profaned directly).
Chris Cunningham, a video-media artist, develops a series of charachters that show strange deformations creating dehumanized people or humanized freaks. The body evokes feelings of curiousity, disgust, fear and awkwardness. His piece “Rubber Johnny” certainly exudes all af these.
“Rubber Johnny” is an avant-garde short film that combines cut-mashed sounds by Aphex Twin portraying a mutant teenager in a basement (played by Chris Cunningham himself). The story unfolds when Johnny is given somekind of sedative by a doctor and then shows in a basement with his pet chihuahua. Johnny, a dehumanized character (or humanized creature) dances and poses in different and disturbing ways to the broken beat of the music. Stiff and cold but alive and real at the same time, Johnny creates an ambiance of rejection, disconcern and pity, for the human side that is perceived lingers on to the viewer.
The viewer gets immersed in a form of scopophilia and voyeurism since the video is shot in a basement with a nightshot light.
Technological determinism has allowed him to create a new visual style of this dehumanization, making his creations a new breed of “humans” and new terms of perception.

The original work of “Rubber Johnny” was from the beginning designed to be a multimedia project. Starting from the main object which is Johnny and his disfigured being, going through dimmed lights in a basement, broken ambient music and editing. The work is also supported by a series of pictures and a book that shows the infinite positions that Johnny asumes in order to get amused in the dark. The piece originally was going to have a series of sculptures as well that would support the aesthetic of the artwork, but the artist decided that the edition and the pictures where enough for the time.

“Rubber Johnny” creates then a line of storytelling that resides in a combination of small dialogue, simple light, extreme editing and image content. The transgression that Cunningham achieves between his fascination of the human body and the qualities of a shapeshifting organism is succesful and depicts the idea of using human parts to create new bodies contained within the same body (and making it the main medium of the work).
Somehow our minds are drawn to this kind of work where the body is no longer the body we know but a new element of admiration, a thin line between strange beauty and morbid stare. That reminds me of Nietzsche's principles of Apollonian and Dyonisian roles: We try to keep our balance in society by adopting a norm of culture, moral and restraint. But as humans we have a side that gives and unleashes that desire of power that drives us to excess and irrationality. Is dehumanizing then, the point of balance of the human mind? Makes me think then that the body is the ultimate medium for balancing the human personae.

It is sometimes the equilibrium in the body that makes us find the beauty in it or even in the person, blinded by our Dyonisian passion. Beauty as an attribute (and as we know it) is a “positive” trait related to the human body. Patterns of how the body must look and be presented have existed for many years. Sometimes beauty is implicit literally according to fads and culture, sometimes is hidden in mysterious balance within bodies that are exotic and different to what we have seen. For example, in Rubber Johnny we find weird attributes in the body that may seem repulsive but there is a certain balance in the image that makes it beautiful in a strange way. Or in the case of Orlan, beauty is disposable, silly and mundane. The real beauty lies in transformation, trangression and evolution. Maybe an unconscious equilibrium in change.
Etcoff says " Although the object of beauty is debated, the experience of beauty is not. Beauty can stir up a snarl of emotions but pleasure must always be one (tortured longings and envy are not incompatible with pleasure). Our body responds to it viscerally and our names for beauty are synonymous with physical cataclysms and bodily obliteration- breathtaking, femme fatale, knockout drop-dead gorgeous, bombshell, stunner, and ravishing. We experience beauty not as rational contemplation but a as a response to physical urgency". Physical beauty then is what we may think of a mainstream agreement of one's look but it seems that nowadays it goes much further than that the reaction towards the countless types of bodies is what really defines what beautiful is.
It is very interesting to find there are all this connotations of beauty and how we find them in the many bodies we see everyday, mankind in the western civilization has made the pattern of beauty and the worship of it a must in everyday life, a boost of human ego, countless support in specific sectors of the economy and social status. Mass media inflicts it’s beauty cannon into the many bodies that are immersed in the culture, making them the media to transform media (that is, show bodies, to transform your body according to the body of media).
So you buy a magazine and you see a certain type of body that is supposed to be beautiful, the mind reacts thinking that it wants to be that body and becomes a media target. Many bodies follow the same pattern and make the change of the body a system of mass media: plastic surgery.

In the earliest civilizations, the body has embraced several different types of artifice and natural ornamentation. Enhancement of one’s own features created a temple of significance, cultural charge and spiritual meaning. The color, the jewelry, scaring and piercings had different things to say about the culure, the place and history. Throughout time, media and technology have opened an overwhelming amount of information saturating the minds of those exposed to it to comply to the dictatorship of mass media and justify it as cultural continuity.
It is kind of funny though to think of what real beauty is: Susan Sontag’s text of the Science Fiction reminds me of our endless fascination of the human body, I think humans have created a “real” state of Science Fiction through plastic surgery. The ultimate medium being the body as a signifier of shallow content (for the body, in this case, speaks for the mind).
How does dehumanization fit in all this? Accoding to Michel Focault and his terms of transgression, to dehumanize the body (in this case the system of dehumanization is plastic surgery) gives us power. Unlike the common knowledge that being human actually sets us free, in some strange way like Orlan, is just a constraint.
To dehumanize is to create a desire for power, to have a hold on it.
In the case of plastic surgery there is a way that I can agree with Focault. Plastic surgery, also a consequence of technological determinism, has found to be the "access" of "universal" beauty. All cultures are exposed to the various indicators of what beauty is, not as a culturally charged change (which it is, but not seen that way) but as a commodity, status and asset of adoration. It is plastic surgery that dehumanizes humans (making others more powerful) and turns them into objects to sell (brands, models, sex), possess (trophy wives) and just basically capitalize (health and medicine).

It seems like we have reach a point where we keep on challenging were to bend our minds, and take our body along with it. It makes me think sometimes that is the body that in such a banal era, empowers the mind. But in the end the body IS just a container: it lies within our wit and intelligence to make the most out of the ultimate medium we possess that I still believe firmly, is the body, the carrier of our heart and soul. To dehumanize is just a tool to express what is in our heads, we have the responsability of making dehumanization a process that becomes a resource to be better humans, find and understand ourselves better.
I agree then with Focault that dehumanization is power. But I also believe that knowing our body and understanding it from the inside out is one of the greatest powers one can have.


above copied from: http://www.anarifa.com/363802/media-history-and-theory-dehumanizing-the-body-as-media

MARINA ABRAMOVIC, Laurie Anderson

BOMB 84/Summer 2003, ART

In the middle of March Marina Abramovic and I sat around in my studio and talked—or riffed, since it was more like making music than talking. We went jumping from subject to subject: the future of objects, falling apart, teachers, picking up threads, audiences, nonattachment. Marina’s voice is breathless. She purrs, rolls a lot of syllables, leaves out articles. Laughs a lot. Talking with her is as intimate as being in a steam room.

I first met Marina in 1977 when she and Ulay, her then partner in art and life, had wedged themselves into a doorway at the entrance to the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bologna during its performance festival. If you wanted to enter the exhibition you had to squeeze between them, pressing against their nude bodies. Each visitor had to choose whether to face him or her. I loved it! To me it was by far the most challenging performance in the exhibition. I hung around the entrance, and after the police put a stop to their piece I got the chance to meet them.

Since then I have seen many of Marina’s performances. In the late ‘70s I ran into Marina and Ulay here and there in Europe on the art circuit. I remember trotting around after them while they drove their car in endless circles in front of a museum in Paris in a 16-hour performance titled Relation in Movement. Around that time Marina and I became friends, and although there were sometimes long gaps between our meetings, we could always quickly reconnect.

I’ve always loved Marina’s sense of adventure. She also has the rare ability to be in the present and to pay perfect attention to her surroundings. In 1980 we spent some time together in the South Pacific on the island of Ponape. We were part of a group of artists—among them John Cage, Chris Burden, Brice Marden, Bryan Hunt and Joan Jonas—invited to make a record there called Word of Mouth. The day we arrived, a shocking thing happened: the island’s first murder. For some reason the local chief invited us to the funeral. Marina and I were the only ones from our group who attended the ceremony, and it was then that I realized we also shared a fascination with death and strange customs, the stranger the better.

Recently I saw the truly transformative House with the Ocean View at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. The spirituality that has driven much of Marina’s work was now central. Confrontation with the audience no longer had any props. For 12 days she lived in full view on a shelf in the gallery. She showered, drank water, sat on a toilet, brushed her hair, but mostly sat and looked at the people who came to see the show. It was about as direct as it gets. She was fasting for the duration and said later that this increased her sensitivity and connection to the audience. When I went to see her there I had a very powerful wordless encounter. I also was able to experience the passage of time in a unique way—at a tempo somewhere between music and meditation.

The House with the Ocean View reminded me that Marina can actually transform and direct thoughts. She understands and uses the ecstatic. And she creates transformation out of the simplest materials, featuring her own body. An intensely physical person, she combines it with the spiritual in a completely unique way.

Laurie Anderson I’ve been trying to find a picture I took of you floating in the ocean in 1980. It was a beautiful thing.

Marina Abramoviæ Was it the ocean or was I under a waterfall?

LA It was the ocean, with beaches that go slowly down to the water. There is no cliff, so I don’t know how I got up in the air looking down at you. Maybe when I find the photograph you can tell me.

MA Okay, if I can remember. So let’s start with simple questions and then we’ll come to art. When you were a child, did you have some experiences that you can’t explain rationally?

LA I made them up. I tried to invent situations that were irrational, that had never happened before.

MA Such as?

LA A man is walking down the road. A Canadian goose falls right on his head; at the same moment there’s a triple rainbow and the guy has a heart attack.

MA That’s a fantastic image. Have you ever done something with it?

LA Occasionally I use it to snap myself out of trances. What about you?

MA I have very strange dreams now from which I wake up in complete horror. They repeat during different periods of my life. I can’t explain them. They have something to do with the disturbance of an order that is not supposed to be disturbed. I come from a military family—maybe that’s why I have these sorts of dreams. I have one where I’m in front of a huge army of five thousand soldiers in perfectly pressed uniforms. I’m inspecting them, and I go up to every soldier and take one button from each uniform and throw it away. I destroy the symmetry, and that is not allowed. Then I wake up in a panic.

LA It’s interesting that you use symmetry as an example of order, because to me symmetry is both dangerous and dull. It’s rhyming pictures. Maybe it’s because the two sides of our brains need things to match. In your dream, did you take a different button from each person?

MA No, always the same.

LA So weren’t you creating just another orderly situation?

MA (laughter) The thing is, I’m interested in this idea that we organize everything and then at the last minute, everything changes, takes a different turn. I like that so much. I learned about that from the Tibetans.

LA Remember the mandala the monks created in the Museum of Natural History in the late ‘80s? It took them six weeks to make it, dropping the colored sand grain by grain. I was there when two kids came by and scuffed the whole thing up.

MA And then?

LA The monks laughed.

MA Of course.

LA Because it’s about changing. It didn’t matter how much work they had put into it—they were going to destroy it in the end anyway.

MA To me this is so fascinating about the Tibetans. Did I ever tell you the story about the pyramid? The Dalai Lama wanted to have a concert, with sacred music from the five different Buddhist traditions around the world, all on one stage, singing one song, which had never happened before. It was to take place in the music center in Bangalore, in southern India. They do this deep chanting. It’s fantastic. I was invited to choreograph them. So I went to the monastery with a megaphone. There were 106 monks.

LA When was this?

MA This was exactly four years ago. So I was thinking that the form could be a human pyramid. It took five weeks to build these steps of wood on wheels—it had to roll on and off the stage, and they had one minute and 10 seconds to get all 106 monks standing in position onstage. We had to rehearse a lot; they weren’t used to this kind of stage presence. And when it was finished—I had been in the monastery for more than a month—the chief monk came and said, “It’s so nice, but we can’t use this pyramid.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Because in the Buddhist tradition there is no hierarchy.”

LA I was wondering who would be on top.

MA You know, I couldn’t understand how they could let me work all this time, every single day, for five weeks and not tell me it wouldn’t do. They told me that they hadn’t wanted to offend me. I was crying. And they said this simple thing: “Let it go.” Then at the concert they sat anywhere they wanted to and sang and it was perfect.

In the performance you have to be in control. Maria Callas once said, “When you perform, half of the brain has to be in complete control and the other half of the brain has to be at a complete loss.” That is the essence of what I want to say. You have to balance these two. How is it with you when you perform?

LA Exactly the same. But let’s talk about the audience for a minute. How do you see the audience? When I was working with actors I learned about the audience through them. They would ask about the motivations of their characters and this really drove me crazy. I kept thinking of that great series of essays called “True and False” that David Mamet wrote about talking to actors. He said that directors should just tell the actors to speak loudly and clearly and forget about their motivations, forget about their “pasts.” They don’t have any pasts! Anyway, there was one actor I was working with who kept asking me, “Who are you when you perform? Who is your audience?” And I kept saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Then I realized—I had never put this into words before because it seemed too stupid—I’m talking to a sadder version of myself, sitting in the middle of the theater. I’m trying to cheer her up, or say something inspiring or funny or sad. That sounds narcissistic, but I don’t know who other people are, and I don’t like it when they assume they know who I am. It’s a very tricky thing when you’re giving somebody something; how open are you to them and how open are they to you?

MA It’s such an important question, because the relation to the audience is the essence of performance. In my case, the need to be completely open and vulnerable, to give everything I can, 100 percent, is extremely strong. Every single person in the audience is important. I don’t have this kind of feeling in real life, but in performance I have this enormous love, this heart that literally hurts me with how much I love them. In the last performance, when I lived for 12 days, totally exposed, in the Sean Kelly Gallery, almost nothing happened. But just being there, with this openness—there is just skin and bones; there’s nothing else but being there for them. I was there to be projected on. The whole thing has to be almost an invisible exchange. You asked what the connection was like in that performance. I really looked at the people in the gallery. To me the eyes are a door for something else, and whatever is happening in their lives, I pick it up. You can’t imagine how much I cried in that piece. This sadness comes because they project their own sadness onto me and I reflect it back. And I cry out in the saddest way, so they are free. People would come like drunks—instead of a shot of vodka they came to have a shot of this connection with the eyes. They came in the morning; at quarter to nine they were there waiting, in business suits. The gallery would open at nine, and they would come in, look at me for 20 minutes and go away. A lot of them told me later that they are not even connected to art. I was thinking that people usually don’t look at them in this intimate way, so maybe they just needed to be looked at in that way before going to work.

LA It reminds me how much of a defense language is. And how distancing it is—it’s called communicating, but often it’s not. Sometimes it’s just these clever things that we set up, and often they actually get in the way of what we mean.

MA But it’s different when you have dialogue. In performance, it’s a monologue, and in this monologue you create so many spaces that we can project onto, so many images, one after another. What’s also special is that the sound of the voice will create certain vibrations. Sometimes it’s not even the word but the space in between the words, a long pause that works magic. A monologue becomes something beyond language; it becomes so strong. The moment it becomes a conversation, I think, we try to be clever, we try to construct things, and then everything falls apart again. But with the monologue, emotions come in a different way. There are two people whose voices that I can listen to for a long time, you and Acconci.

LA Oh, Vito!

MA It has to do with the vibration. You have to be in a certain state to have such a vibration. You can’t just learn it. In performance you get into the state of mind that generates that voice. With Vito it was in his home movies, when he was alone, with just the camera. I think he is shy in public.

LA I wrote a film script once, just for fun, when I was stuck at an airport. Vito was the star. For the first 15 minutes you see him from the back.

MA The script was written for Vito?

LA Yeah, it was one of those art films. I was writing stuff for him to say. He’s so mysterious. He is very open, but I feel like he is always turning away.

MA That’s very funny, because I also have Vito in one of my scripts. Tell me about yours, and I’ll tell you about mine.

LA Mine was a mystery story, Neuewelt 2000, about a European performance festival that was happening on a train going through the former East Germany. The promoter of this festival was a toy-train fanatic named Rolf. It was going to star Vito and Arto Lindsay. I made up other characters, performance artists who were also on the train. A very pale brother and sister from Norway who sing Nordic folk songs together. Michel Waisvisz had a role in it too.

MA But what was Vito doing? It sounds very mysterious, to see him only from the back.

LA Well, Rolf—Vito—couldn’t get a ticket to fly directly from New York because of the East German government. So he had to be routed through Cuba and then through Poland and then take a train into East Germany. It ends almost like Rolf’s toy-train fetish—with Vito on a train that was literally going nowhere—like in a loop around a Christmas tree, a child’s toy train that won’t stop. Vito’s going through the renamed towns of the former East Germany and they can’t be found on the map anymore because of their new names. He has no idea where he is. He is getting more and more lost.

MA My story is a Beckett short story that was not meant to be a play, called Mal Vi/Mal Di (Bad Seen/Bad Said). The story is about an old woman—I would play her—sitting on a chair in a completely empty space. There is a little window and a ray of light coming in just in front of her feet, but not touching them. In Beckett stories, a monologue goes on in the character’s head and as a consequence, in your head, constantly. She is thinking about things; it’s words and words and words. She wants to stand up, to take the chair and put it in front of the light and sit again, so that the sunlight will reach her. This takes about 45 minutes because she is very old and very sick and can’t walk. And all this time she is talking of what’s in her head, about her life, past and future, and old conflicts. She takes the chair very slowly, very slowly, very slowly away and she is lifting the chair, almost putting it in the sun, when she changes her mind and takes another 45 minutes to go back. I wanted to play this woman, but I wanted the voice in my head to be Vito’s voice. I like this idea very much.

LA Why don’t you do that? It’s a great idea.

MA I’ve never done it.

LA So do it!

When you talk to yourself, do you hear a voice or do you just think thoughts?

MA I think it’s a voice.

LA What does it sound like? Is it like, “You should really go get that done.” Or “I’m running out of time, I should get a cab.” Does it have a texture or a sound? I’m using accusatory examples because my voice, when I hear it, is always nagging me.

MA I don’t hear much of my voice. I heard it clearly after I didn’t talk for 12 days, when I came down from The House with the Ocean View and gave a talk for the public. This was the first time I really heard my voice clearly, and it was so strange to me because I had this distance from it, and could really hear it.

Tell me, is it important for you to go to some geographical place—I call them power places—where you feel there is a certain energy you can use? Volcanoes, waterfalls, the sea—

LA They don’t have to be dramatic, but one place that I really enjoyed going to a few weeks ago was Green Gulch in California. It’s a monastery with a group of artists, people from museums and places like that, who have an interest in Buddhism. I was giving a paper called “Time and Beauty.” A modest title. I wrote it when I was in Athens. It keeps going back to belief and beauty and aesthetics.

MA I find that beauty hurts.

LA For me sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. One of my favorite baffling quotes comes from Lenin: “Ethics is the aesthetics of the future.” I guess it means that sometime in the future we’ll all be good to each other and communicate so clearly that we won’t need those things that we put in the beauty category. They’ll just be fetishes, relics. In my paper I talked about how belief and beauty rub up against each other to make something, and how uneasily they rest together. I used the Parthenon as an example. When the Parthenon was a place of worship, everybody brought their beautiful statues to dedicate to the gods, their kouri, to celebrate their victories, their dedications and their prayers. They propped them up all around the Parthenon, which quickly came to look like a museum, there was so much stuff there. So they all went back to the caves and the woods and the rivers where they could find the gods, because they couldn’t find them in the Parthenon anymore.

MA You know, there was a very interesting breakfast in the ‘70s, which a friend of mine, Lutz Becker, invited me to. This old man was sitting there, and I didn’t realize for half of the breakfast that he was Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. He was just out of prison and he was helping with the maquettes for a movie about Hitler that Lutz was making, called Double Headed Eagle.

LA Lots of symmetry in that, by the way.

MA And I asked Speer a question: “Why did you use concrete for all those buildings?” I’ll never forget his answer. He said, “When they get destroyed, they still look good.” The concrete collapse looks better than bricks: there is more momentum; they fall into big pieces. That an architect, who builds his stuff for forever, was thinking of destruction as part of the process! The other funny thing about worshipping—I was in Thailand, in one of their fantastic old temples where you can go outside and buy a little piece of gold leaf to put on a sculpture. I was looking through this huge place, and in a dusty corner was a big fuse box with all the electrical wires, which somebody had covered in gold leaf. I loved the idea of worshipping electricity as a mystery. And why not?

LA I wonder what happens with gold and copper—you know, as a conductor.

MA The fuse box didn’t work—it was broken.

Laurie, what is emptiness for you? That’s such a heavy word.

LA To me it’s an ecstatic term. Emptiness is as ecstatic as I can imagine being. Emptiness to me is expansive. And I don’t have to be there. I can’t exist in it. I like imagining places where I don’t exist.

MA I don’t. (laughter) But at the same time, like with Buddhism—

LA Do you have a practice?

MA I am unable to do anything regularly. I always do things as part of a project. If I have in my mind that I have to do something, then I generate an enormous discipline and willpower and I get into the space I have to enter to make the performance. But it is impossible for me to do something like wake up every morning at six to run, as people do. I like to make rules and change them all the time. Even when I buy the milk in Amsterdam, I find new ways to go around the canal. The idea of habits, of discipline—there is something within me that can’t function that way.

LA That’s a wonderful thing, to do it differently every time.

MA I like unpredictability. I tell my students, “Go to the train and don’t look to see where it’s going, just sit inside and find yourself in a new situation, and then from this situation see what’s going to happen.” Put yourself in unpredictable situations. If it is not a possibility in life, then I try to do it in performance. I set up rules and I have no idea how difficult this will be or how I will manage, but then it happens. When you make a performance, do you know exactly how it is going to happen? Or is it always open?

LA Oh, it’s always open. The last performance I did, Happiness, was about expectation. I had gotten bored with my own style, my way of doing things. I was just experiencing what I expected. So I put myself in situations in which I didn’t know what to do, what to say or how to act, just to see what would happen. But you know, no matter how hard you try to escape your style, it still looks an awful lot like what you’ve made before. That’s okay, I guess, that there are threads going through everything.

MA It is so difficult to change. Radical change can only happen with some kind of tragedy that totally shakes your life. The only changes I can expect are from my own performance. I don’t learn in life otherwise.

LA Who are your teachers?

MA Not really anybody. I don’t see it that way. There was only one person in my life who I thought could be my teacher, but he died. Just when I found him, he died.

LA Who was this?

MA This was in ‘82 in Bodhgaya, a pilgrimage site, with the Bohdi tree. I arrived on a full-moon night. It was the most auspicious moment. And they said to me, in our town is a very important Lama who is the teacher of the Dalai Lama. I didn’t know at the time anything of Buddhism, nothing. I went because everybody was going to see this special teacher. He was sitting in a Tibetan monastery. He looked like the full moon, a big baby, with a wonderfully shiny bald head, aged somewhere between 80 and 100. You couldn’t tell. And I went to greet him, and he took his little finger and just flicked his finger at my head. And that was it. I looked into his eyes and then I went back to sit. Five minutes later I had a temperature of 102. I was red like a strawberry. I started crying and crying and I had to leave the monastery. I cried for about four hours, just enormously. And I was thinking, Why am I crying? Nothing happened to me; I am not sad. I was just touched by his innocence in the way of the old man and the child at the same time. Something opened to me. If he had told me to jump out the window, I would have done it. I had never felt this before, what must be close to how one feels about a great teacher, the ideal of complete trust. And then one month later he died.

But then I found him again. It was three years later, I was going again to India, to another monastery for a retreat. And in the forest I lost the way and found myself in front of a house, with an old Lama sitting outside washing some dishes. It was dark, and he said, “Come in, come in, have a tea.” I went into the room and there he was, embalmed this time. He was sitting in the room, embalmed in salt. Now he is in the Dalai Lama’s living room in Dharmsala. His name is Ling Rinpoche. The Dalai Lama wanted to have him all to himself.

LA In salt? Can you see him?

MA They put him in a special preparation and he looks completely alive. He’s dressed and sitting; monks die in a sitting position. It was incredible. This is exactly what we have to do, it is so important, losing roads, it’s how you find something else. When I was a really young artist, I was getting ideas for different works. And I was thinking, God, how should I do this, this has nothing to do with what I’ve done before. I don’t see any line, there is no continuation. I was obsessed with the idea of continuation, that one work had to lead to another and another, that you have to make a body of work. But after 20 years you see that the continuation is so logical. You couldn’t have done anything else, and there is a thread in it, everything is connected. We are the connections.

LA Can you imagine being embalmed and sitting in somebody’s house?

MA I like it so much. I am all for this eternity. I’d hate to be burned. I wouldn’t like to be eaten by worms. Maybe a tree can grow out of me. That’s it. But embalming is a very nice idea. I like this forever thing. You?

LA I would like to be burned. (laughter)

MA So this is a big difference!

LA I don’t like the idea of flames so much as particles. I’d like to become many, many particles.

MA I want to live a very long time. This is my obsession. I want to live to be over 100. My grandmother died at 103 and the mother of my grandmother was 116 when she died. I have this idea that after 100 something else happens. When we are young and even now, though I am not that young, there is this idea of emotions and always some kind of suffering involved. I’d like so much to reach the point of nonattachment, of nonsuffering, when you really know things are happening because they have already happened to you hundreds of times before. You can laugh about it all. To have this wisdom and distance and peace!

LA How do you think you can get there?

MA Oh—lots of goat yogurt!

LA (laughter) I mean to detachment?

MA You don’t take things personally. Even if you love someone, you let them be. And if they leave you, still you love them, because attachment creates such a suffering. This is basic.

LA Buddhism 101.

MA Theoretically we can deal with it, but when it comes to your own life, it is so hurtful. Attachment in my case is always about people. I really don’t care about things. I can leave them, change them.

LA You had a partner-lover and art collaborator in Ulay. Have you seen him since you split up 10 years ago?

MA Yes, for seven years we didn’t talk at all, not one word, and then I decided that I’d invite his wife and kids over, give them all presents and lunch. We did that, and it’s fine now.

LA Where does he live?

MA He lives in Amsterdam. He invites me over sometimes, grills a little steak for me, but there is still a lot of pain from my side. It didn’t really finish well. When he left he took all the artwork we did together. I had to buy back from him old negatives, images, everything.

LA You had to buy things back from him?

MA Yes. Actually, I’m still paying. (laughter)

LA Why did he decide that he owned what you had done together?

MA It was very difficult. I found out so many things. Like he was being unfaithful at a time when I thought we were happy. I don’t know, I got disappointed. And now I haven’t talked to my brother for the last two years. After the bombing of Belgrade he came and stayed with me in Amsterdam for two years. So many things happened, it’s complicated, but for him, not talking to me is not having to admit his failure to stay in the Western world. He has completely another state of mind. It is so difficult for him to function in this world.

LA Why is that?

MA In the Balkans, the relation of the mother to the son is very different from that to the female child. Female children have to work. The male will stay home and the mother does everything for him—she irons his shirts, cooks for him, for all his life. When my brother came to Amsterdam, it didn’t even cross his mind that he could do something. For two years he was watching CNN, complaining about Yugoslavia, writing his philosophical text and complaining that I work too much. His little daughter went to school in Amsterdam, and I took care of both of them for two years. I’d had it.

LA And where’s his wife?

MA She was in Belgrade. She is the director of the Nikola Tesla Museum there, Marija Sesic. She showed me the guest book, with your signature.

LA I was very proud to be there.

MA They are trying to rebuild the museum. I told them, “Please don’t, it’s so good as it is.”

LA It makes a good ruin.

MA They should really not do anything. It’s old and it’s falling apart. But it has a special feeling about it. Oh, by the way, she was asking if you or I have any idea, before they rebuild, if we want to do something there.

LA Great!

MA Any of this experimental work, she can make it possible.

LA How about if you sit in a chair reading a book, waiting for the ray of electricity to shoot out from the Tesla Coil. With the Vito Acconci voice. We could combine the whole thing.

MA But then you have to do something. What do you do?

LA Um…I can make the shoes that will protect you from being electrocuted. (laughter) You’d have to trust me.

MA We could put Vito somewhere else. What if we use your voice, and I’m sitting there.

LA That would be great! Wouldn’t it be fun to do something together!

MA The Nikola Tesla Museum would be fantastic.

LA Tesla died in New York, I think on 23rd Street; there’s no marker though.

MA There’s a Tesla Society in New York. Marija showed me all of Tesla’s clothes, a complete wardrobe. He was such a dandy—he wore all these wonderful old suits, crocodile shoes and things like that.

LA Maybe we could just borrow some of his suits.

MA And walk around pretending to be Tesla! (laughter) That could really be something. You know, I’m supposed to have quite a big show in 2005, in Belgrade.

LA It’s the perfect opportunity then.

MA Why do you like Tesla? Because I love him.

LA He wanted to plug into the ground. Free electricity for all. He really believed that would work. Anybody who thinks that, I want to be his disciple.

MA He had mental pictures of his inventions. He was so sure they would work that he didn’t need to try them.

LA I love confidence.

MA And they said he was an alien. And he was in love with a pigeon, a female pigeon. This was his love affair. When the pigeon died, she released some strange sort of light from her eyes, in front of him.

What kind of image could we use for our piece?

LA How about the picture of you floating, if I can find it. And maybe a picture of Tesla? And one of Vito?

MA Where is that image of you standing on an ice cube? It’s one of my favorites—it’s like the beginning of everything. You have the image of ice, which is water. And I have the image of floating, which is water. Then we have the image of Tesla, which is electricity. We are fine.

LA Perfect. Fire and water.

above copied fro: http://bombsite.com/issues/84/articles/2561