Beyond Romance

When Marina Abramovic and her partner, Ulay began to collaborate on performance art works in the late 1970’s, their shows were often violent.  In Relation in Space, performed at the ’76 Venice Biennale, they repeatedly ran towards each other naked, smashing their bodies with increasing intensity for 58 minutes. In Light and Dark, they slapped each other in the face rhythmically for 20 minutes at the International Art Fair in Cologne, Germany. Similarly, AAA-AAA shows the couple, face to face, yelling long loud angry sounds with their mouths wide open for 10 solid minutes. There were also longer, more excruciating performances. Relation in Time (1977), was a 16 hour ordeal in which they sat in chairs, back to back, tied together by a combined rope of their identical dark brown hair. They were both silent and immobile the entire time.

Some initially reviewed their work as masochistic - assuming that the artists were getting a sense of pleasure from the physical pain they were enduring. This was a misreading of their intention. According to James Wescott’s detailed biography of Abramović, entitled, When Marina Abramovic Dies, U and M “used pain as a tool, to reach a different kind of consciousness where they wouldn’t feel pain” (p.105). In order to get beyond pain, they cultivated the discipline and control that allowed them to endure long hours of discomfort in order to break through to a heightened state of awareness that comes when pain is accepted and thereby transcended.  Marina and Ulay were not indulging in masochism, but rather, “ a perfected sadism inflicted on a maniacally discipled self”.

They clearly shared a motivation to experience an “addictive thrill at mastering the body’s sensitivity to weakness.” (p.108). This is an experience that we perceive much more commonly through the world of sports and athletic achievement. To have it expressed through art is compelling and curious. Marina and Ulay claimed that their performances were a process of releasing the pent up anger and pain in order to reach “the sharpened state of awareness and control that came beyond pain” (Westcott, p.154)  Abramović’s astute biographer, Westcott, points out that “Mastering pain in their performance was a way of purging the legacy of their parents” (p.123) Both Marina and Ulay had suffered in childhood, both from socio-political factors as well as inadequate nurturing.

When asked recently to reflect on the “masochism of her earlier works” M responds, “I never saw it that way. I was inspired by the shamanic rituals of ancient cultures that go through physical pain to achieve another state of mind. I wanted to free myself from the fear of pain. To me, those pieces were a tool in order to change myself.”