Tag: performance art

Marina Abramovic invented conscious uncoupling way before that dude from Coldplay.

Marina Abramovic, The Lovers (Two Vases), 1966, C-print

“In 1988, Ulay and Abramovic decided to end their relationship and to mark this with a performance, which became the legendary endpoint of their collaboration. After years of negotiations with the Chinese authorities, the artists got the permission to carry out ‘The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk’, in which they started to walk from different ends of the Chinese Wall in order to meet in the middle and say good-bye to each other. Abramovic started walking at the eastern end of the Wall, at Shan Hai Guan, on the shores of the Yellow Sea, Gulf of Bohai, walking westward. Ulay started at the western end of the Wall, at Jai Yu Guan, the south-western periphery of the Gobi Desert, walking eastward. After they both continuously walked for 90 says, they met at Er Lang Shn, in Shen Mu, Shaanxi province. Here, they embraced each other to go on with their life and work separately from then on.”

Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan
© All photographs by Agnes Denes

“Two acres of wheat planted and harvested by the artist on the Battery Park landfill, Manhattan, Summer 1982.

After months of preparations, in May 1982, a 2-acre wheat field was planted on a landfill in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty. Two hundred truckload of dirt were brought in and 285 furrows were dug by hand and cleared of rocks and garbage. The seeds were sown by hand adn the furrows covered with soil. the field was maintained for four months, cleared of wheat smut, weeded, fertilized and sprayed against mildew fungus, and an irrigation system set up. the crop was harvested on August 16 and yielded over 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat.

Planting and harvesting a field of wheat on land worth $4.5 billion created a powerful paradox. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. It called attention to our misplaced priorities. The harvested grain traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger”, organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (1987-90). The seeds were carried away by people who planted them in many parts of the globe.

The questionnaire was composed of existential questions concerning human values, the quality of life, and the future of humanity. The responses were primarily from university students in various countries where I spoke or had exhibitions of my work. Within the context of the time capsule the questionnaire functioned as an open system of communication, allowing our descendants to evaluate us not so much by the objects we created—as is customary in time capsules—but by the questions we asked and how we responded to them.

The microfilm was desiccated and placed in a steel capsule inside a heavy lead box in nine feet of concrete. A plaque marks the spot: at the edge of the Indian forest, surrounded by blackberry bushes. The time capsule is to be opened in 2979, in the 30th century, a thousand years from the time of the burial.

There are, still within the framework of this project, several time capsules planned on earth and in space, aimed at various time frames in the future.

Postscript: The above text that was written in 1982 has now added poignancy and relevance after 9/11/01″

—Agnes Dene 

PATTY CHANG

In Love , 2001

2 Color Videos on DVDs, (diptych), 3 min. 28 sec.
Courtesy of Jack Tilton/Anna Kustera Gallery, New York

“Chang examines the territory of the primal, parental connection in her work In Love (2001). In this dual-channel video, two separate scenes of the artist with a parent are juxtaposed. Chang faces her mother and, in the adjacent frame, appears face–to–face with her father. Simultaneously both images show the artist’s and respective parent’s faces pressed together in what at first appears to be a deep kiss. Gradually it becomes evident that the video is running in reverse time, and that they share not a kiss but rather an onion from which they both eat. They bite into it slowly, pausing as they take turns offering it to each other, as if it suggests the proverbial, forbidden fruit. Parent and child swallow before they take additional bites, blinking hard to hold back tears from the onion’s sharpness and pungency. However, in the video’s reversal of time, the onion is reconstituted and the tears disappear—wholeness is thus regained.”

–Guggenheim