Self-proclaimed “grandmother of performance art” Marina Abramovic is currently preparing for a major exhibition that will be open to the public for 65 days, six days a week, eight hours a day at London’s Serpentine Gallery this summer.
The exhibition will entail…nothing.
“Nothing. There is nothing,” Abramovic said to BBC’s Will Gompertz during an April 5 episode of “Zeitgeisters.”
Abramovic elaborated a bit further by saying that the public would be her material and added, “It is the most radical, the most pure I can do.”
Radical? I think I speak for most when I say, “Are you kidding?”
Abramovic was one of the first artists to use performance as a visual art form, using her own body as her primary tool in exploring the limits of the emotional and physical, and has been active for over three decades.
Her first performance, in 1973, was titled Rhythm 10 and in it Abramovic records herself stabbing between the fingers of her left hand, switching knives every time she cut herself. She rewinds the tape recorder once all knives have been used and repeats the process, following the same rhythm, with her right hand. According to Phaidon, “The mistakes of time past and time present are synchronized in this piece.”
Or something.
Call me a philistine, but that just isn’t what I would readily call art — it’s more of a spectacle, and the two are not synonymous. I applaud anyone who pushes boundaries and takes risks, and I admire people who try to redefine traditional beliefs, particularly those about what constitutes art, but I also can’t keep my eyes from rolling into my skull when “ambitious artistic endeavor” are used to describe a woman’s plans to do nothing for 65 days. Equally as aneurysm-inducing is the fact that people will show up, and probably pay, to witness nothingness.
This summer’s exhibit at Serpentine will hardly be Abromovic’s first foray into the nothing realm. She did some nothing with some staring in 2010 with “The Artist Is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She sat in a chair and, one at a time, somebody sat across from her. People lined up for hours. It was, as far as I’m concerned, a glorified staring contest.
I dare to question whether the artist was even all that present. If Abromovic is in any way, shape or form normal, she was staring at strangers while consumed by wet dreams of going to a chiropractor and soaking in epsom salt. That reality renders this exhibit, which elicited real, human tears from numerous spectators, basically meaningless.
Therefore my question for those who are more enlightened and cultured than I is the following: if nothing can be art is anything art?
Is the only thing keeping my next outing to a public space, such as Turlington Plaza, from being a performance art piece just delusions of grandeur and pseudo-words from the mouth of an art expert?
Whether the answer to those questions is yes, no or a resounding shrug, I can safely arrive at the conclusion that I don’t get art, either.
For all we know, Abromovic’s entire career is a Joaquin Phoenix-esque hoax. She certainly isn’t lacking the sense of humor for it (Abromovic asks “How many hours does it take a performance artist to change a lightbulb?”)
So here’s a joke: How long does it take one woman to fool the world?
Give or take three decades.
