Crossing the Walls. About the autobiography of Marina Abramović.

Life as a journey is a collection of moments, some of which are full of joy and are remembered with pleasure, others are painful and, being more difficult to forget, are actually the very ones that allow one to develop great strength. We are born as empty containers and allow ourselves to be filled with words and images by the world around us, so that our way of reacting is sometimes equal to a response mechanism to which we have simply become accustomed; thus that initial innocence, that state of original immanence, in the course of existence is lost, and we suddenly become victims of ourselves: this is how words like fear or like pain find their origin; they are concepts, emotions that arise the moment we cross the threshold of a limit. But who creates the limits? What is pain really? Can fear be overcome? These are some of the issues Marina Abramović addresses in her new autobiography Crossing the Walls (2016) written with the help of James Kaplan. Marina Abramović, the Serbian artist known in the art world as the grand mother of performance art, tells her story in her new book with an open heart. The reader finds himself leafing through the pages of an artist’s life marked by a great sense of inadequacy and dissatisfaction, feelings that, however, over time meet determination, stubbornness and creativity. The tireless search for a higher Self a thirdness that can only be reached through an energy relationship the necessary balance between mind and body, the overcoming of the latter to access an Other reality and the power of Nature are some of the key elements that characterize the artist’s path. His artistic training first follows a painterly vein, in fact attending the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts, but developing an attraction more to the production process than to the final product, and soon realizing how two-dimensionality is not enough to tell the story of itself: the logic of the Barthian punctum is not enough, it is necessary to extend the initial shock and involve the viewer in the first person trying to keep him anchored to the opera darte for as long as necessary. Arthur Danto, a famous art critic, has repeatedly argued in this regard that in a museum one moves from one artwork to another with extreme rapidity, one stops to stare at a painting for a few minutes while Marina Abramović is looked at throughout the performance, remaining until the last moment(The Artist Is Present, Akers and Dupre, 2012).

Art is synonymous with freedom for Abramović, the freedom to work with any element or object, so the idea of using the lastration of sound by associating it with a defined space and then moving on to the carnalization of the sound itself through the use of the body takes shape. The artistic-cultural context of those years certainly influenced the Serbian artist’s choices: Body Art already in the 1950s had given a strong shake to the modernist artistic field, the transcendental and depersonalized dimension of art as well as an aesthetics that rejects any implication or historical cultural reference making use only of a criterion of beauty is challenged by a return to subjectivity and the use of the body as a tool to reclaim one’s right to be or, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, by a return to the social through the body as an antidote to the pan-capitalism of the commodification of the subject(The Artist’s Body, Phaidon, 2011). Performance Art is among the subcategories of Body Art and developed between the 1970s and the 1980s with the prerogative of a spatio-temporal hic et nunc and the presence of an audience, the body thus becoming a working tool in full swing to discover and experiment.

Crossing the Walls recounts all of Abramović’s artistic experiences starting from the early pictorial and sound works Three Secrets (1965), War or Sound Environment White of the 1970s and then moving on to the production dedicated to the carnality of the body with extreme and radical performances including the series Rhythm (1972-1975), Thomas Lips (1975), Art must be beautiful/Artist must be beautiful (1975) or the series Freeing (1976) and, following this, the performances aimed at essaying the relationship between bodies and the transmission of energy in space such as the series In Space (1976). Abramović’s work necessarily involves the recognition of the link between body and mind, between flesh and spirit, and performances such as Rest Energy (1980) or Nightsea Crossing (1981) belonging to the period of her collaboration with Ulay serve as a conduit for the reversal of relationships: if at first it is the body that enslaves the mind later it is the mind that serves the body. The intent of her performative journey culminates in a return to solo production and a return to Nature as an attempt to find herself in that original state of immanence, trips to Brazil the first in 1989, the second in 2015, from which the documentary The Space In Between is inspired: Marina Abramović and Brazil (2016) give rise to a series of installations with so-called Transitory Object s (Power Objects): rose quartz, amethyst, obsidian and rock crystal become mediums of an energy exchange that goes from minerals to the human body and vicerversa, through specially created structures made of wood or metal lenergy is transmitted and flows. A process, that of Abramović, that from the presence of the artist in a literal sense think of The Artist Is Present (2012) the biographical documentary dedicated to the retrospective of the artist at the MoMa in New York arrives at the disappearance of the artist herself so that the viewer becomes a performer and can thus understand the value of Performance Art. The personal events of Abramović are at one with her artistic history, and her biography recounts, between performances, her troubled love affair with Frank Uwe Laysiepen better known as Ulay of the various fleeting relationships and complicated marriage with the artist Paolo Canevari, of her difficult relationship with her father, who would even go so far as to disinherit her, and of her controversial relationship with her mother, who like Marina’s father was among the ranks of Tito’s militants in the 1940s and inevitably reflected the military forma mentis, steeped in rigor and discipline, within the walls of her home. Lartista recounts herself amidst joys and sorrows while also talking about how the lack of attention and affection in her adolescence led her to throw herself headlong into her relationships, both love and friendships, trying to feel fulfilled and appreciated.

An expertly and accurately written text, moreover, enriched by precious color photographic spaces in which some important moments in Marina Abramović’s life are reported, her theatrical production with Bob Wilson The life and the death of Marina Abramović (2011) or some workshops made in collaboration with MAI (Marina Abramović Institute) born in 2010, Balcan Baroque the performance with which she won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1997, and finally images from other significant performances or spiritual journeys to India, China and Brazil. Marina Abramović is a well-rounded artist, life and art for her coincide and it is thanks to the occurrence of art that every performance implies a transformation, just like a ritual so also the performance makes the artist Other-than-self and everything changes, forever.

Marina Abramović with James Kaplan
Crossing the Walls
Bompiani, 2016
416 pages
19 euro

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