For Seven Easy Pieces
Marina Abramovic reenacted five seminal performance works by her peers,
dating from the 1960’s and 70’s, and two of her own, interpreting them
as one would a musical score. The project confronted the fact that
little documentation exists from this critical early period and one
often has to rely upon testimony from witnesses or photographs that
show only portions of any given performance.
The seven works were performed for seven hours each, over the course of seven consecutive days, November 9 –15, 2005
at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York City. Seven Easy Pieces examines
the possibilities of representing and preserving an art form that is,
by nature, ephemeral.
Babette
Mangolte is an experimental filmmaker living in New York City who also
has an extensive archive of performance and dance photographs that she
shot mostly in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. Lately
she has turned to writings to reflect on her film and photo practice
and the interaction between aesthetics and technologies. She is working
on an essay on Robert Bresson.
Filmmaker’s Original Statement written in February 2006
The
film of Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic is about the performing
body and how it affects viscerally the people who confronts it, looks
at it and participates in the transcendental experience that is its
primary affect. The ceremonial and meditative are the common responses
to the weeklong series of performances that took place in November 2005
in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. From an art event to a social
phenomenon, the seven performances became the talk of the town because
it created among the visitors a sense of sublimation like prayer. The
film attempts to reveal the mechanisms of this transcendental
experience by just showing the performer’s body living the events
inscribed in each pieces with details that outline the body fragility,
versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance.
The
fascination comes from the revelation of the physical transformation of
Marina Abramović’s exposed body due to the rigorous discipline of being
there on display each day for seven hours without any restrictive
boundaries. The relentless progress of time is revealed each day by the
acoustic of the building with its waves of crowd that roll like an
ocean and marvel at the performer’s steadfastness with respectful
silence. That the performer’s required discipline had to be so
different from one piece to the next is one of the mysteries. How the
attentive audience feed into the art and Marina’s aesthetics is what is
explored. It is as if a monastic urge attracted the mystic among us
viewers that were there to participate. And the film, by focusing on
Marina’s minute changes and strains along the long seven hours of each
piece, explores in a systematic way a body without limit and increases
the awareness of how participatory body art is.
The
film will be 90 minutes long and follows the linearity inscribed in the
week event, from body pressure, audience participation and
confrontation in the first three pieces to the ceremonial in the last
four pieces as mapped out by Marina Abramović. It is only after the
fact that the film viewer will realize how much the project concept
enlightens us on aesthetics that privileged physical experience over
reason, process over iconography and testifies to the power of audience
participation over passive spectatorship.
