Tag: performance art

Star (from the portfolio ‘Dear Stieglitz’)

Marina Abramović

This photograph relates to a performance called ‘Lips of Thomas’ from 1973, in which the artist tested her physical endurance. In the manner of offering herself as a ritual sacrifice, Abramović ate a kilogram of honey, drank a litre of red wine, and cut a five-pointed star into her stomach with a razor blade. She then whipped herself until she could no longer feel any pain and finally lay on a cross made of ice. The photograph is from a portfolio called ‘Dear Stieglitz,’ named in homage to Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallery owner who published the art-photography journal ‘Camera Work’ in the early Twentieth century. 

Lottie Consalvo, ‘I mouthed I love you’ (Part 2 ‘If I could change this time’ series), 2014, Lake Macquarie Gallery

“The artist mouths ‘I love you’ backwards, silently and repetitively. Through this simple action this performance attempts to relive a moment prior to a great loss.There is a broken chair and table and a flight of butterflies lay upon the table unmoving, dead.The butterfly has an average lifespan of two weeks. The experience of witnessing a butterfly in flight is akin to its very existence; beautiful yet fleeting.In this work the artist is recalling a temporal fragment of a private tragedy.Contemplating regret and the futility of a moment now passed. There are some actions that cannot be undone. Longing and failure are present within this performance as splinters and fractures of something that is too difficult to comprehend.“

Source: lottieconsalvo.wordpress.com

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. As their work had often employed ritualized actions, mythology and Eastern thought, ‘The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk’ has to be considered the perfect end of the common oeuvre – also due to the Wall’s mythological and philosophical connotations. The performance was recorded by Murray Grigor for the BBC (16mm film, transferred to video), which resulted in the documentary ‘The Great Wall: Lovers at the Brink’, of which there exist a long screening-version and a shorter VHS-version

rudygodinez:

“’Eros/ion’ investigates the relationship between social signs and body, the relationship between culture and body, material and body. First I roll about in broken glass, body cutting by screen, and then on the glass plate, finally on a paper screen. The marks produced on my skin-screen by the splinters of glass leave informal, painterly traces on the paper screen. The splinters are transformed into signs by this reduction into traces of an aesthetic process on the body. Identity of signs and carrier material. The art context as a condition of reality. The socially prescribed significance of the material – meaning and image as material – is transformed and overcome.”