High Performance Art

Andrew Leci discovers that the much-maligned medium can be absolute torture. For both the artist and the viewer.

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Performance art is Marmite. It polarises opinions. You either love it or you hate it, and there are few who fall in the middle ground. To some it is pretentious claptrap. To others it is innovative genius; potentially life-changing for protagonist and observer alike.

The scene is Studio Morra in Naples, Italy. The year is 1974. Performance artist, Marina Abramović, has placed 72 objects on a table in an open space, and then stood in the middle of that space, inviting members of the audience to do whatever they wanted. With the objects; and with her.

“What is the public about?” Abramovic wanted to ask, and “what are they going to do in this kind of situation?”

Objects included honey, bread, grapes; a rose, a feather, scissors; a scalpel, a metal bar, nails and a gun loaded with one bullet. What was going to happen? What was meant to happen? No one knew.

The six-hour performance art piece began innocuously enough – a member of the audience fed her a grape, while another daubed her with some perfume. Someone tickled her with the feather, and another person gave her a gentle kiss.

And then, things went horribly wrong/right, depending on the motivation and, indeed, the purpose of the exercise. The scissors were used to remove much of Abramovi’s clothing, and one individual used the scalpel to slit her throat and drink her blood. At one point, an audience member put the gun to her head.