I recently went to check out the Marina Abramović exhibition in the Trois Gallery of the SCAD library. I had not really heard much about her work until Holly gave a journal presentation in class on an article that featured Abramović's work “The Artist Is Present”. Although I really didn’t understand the point, I had a lot of questions and was interested in having them answered. After seeing her work in Trois Gallery I have even more questions. There is no artist statement, but there are brief explanations of what occurred in each performance along with a photograph from each performance. With several of the works, such as “Rhythm 0”, I was really interested in knowing how people reacted and what people did to her. In this performance Abramović placed objects, which she lists below the photograph, in front of her and invited people to use them on her body in whatever way they wished. My first thought is: Why would anyone want to do this with objects like a pocketknife out there? I know there are a lot of crazy people out in the world and it would definitely make me wary. It also gave me a chill to read on the description at the end “I take full responsibility “. Wow, so if someone cuts her with that pocketknife, she takes full responsibility. This blows my mind as to why anyone would want to put themselves in this kind of position. Maybe her purpose in this particular performance is to comment on humans and how they behave. I still don’t really understand the work and maybe without ever seeing the actual performance I never will. This brings me to comment on how a majority of the performances are presented only with a description and a photograph of a piece of the performance. I wondered if Abramović intended for these photographs themselves to be viewed as pieces of artwork or if they were only taken as a means of documenting the art. Then maybe some photographs are only documentary evidence and should not be viewed as art. I believe this is one of the most interesting aspects of photography, considering that no other art medium can function as something other than a means to create art.
It's really hard to put yourself in that position. I remember the first time I read about "The artist is present"... the kind of perseverance and endurance it must take to sit there for days on end and have people look into your soul is astonishing.
ReplyDeleteI got a lot more from that project than from the one at Trois, though. So I can definitely see a progression that I'm starting to like in her work.
"Then maybe some photographs are only documentary evidence and should not be viewed as art" I like this notion of evidence, Sontag talks about it in her book and so far I think that is the best chapter. I have photographed "things, subject", people for documentary evidence and didn't mean to shoot it to be art or artistic.
ReplyDeleteYour thoughts are really interesting. Especially when you write that "no other art medium can function as something other than a means to create art". I've never really given thought to this, but I think you are right. Well, unless you consider cinematography a form of art, of course.
ReplyDeleteThank you for inspiring this week's blog.
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