Marina Abramovic: MONA exhibition puts performance art centre stage

Marina Abramovic is the queen of performance art but has her work lost its potency?

Marina Abramovic: In Residence at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney. Picture: Peter Greig.

Flying down to Hobart on the opening day of the Marina Abramovic exhibition at the Museum of Old and New Art, the plane was filled with art world personalities. At the museum, a crowd of what seemed mostly older members of the art establishment lined up for a luncheon with the artist, who looked rather like a duchess on her way to a charity garden party.

Celebrity seems to flatten everyone into the same mould today, even if Abramovic enjoys celebrity status only within a very narrow ­stratum of society. And a similar flattening is the fate of art itself, when it becomes reified and turned into a signifier of cultural status or affiliation. The work ceases to be readable and responsive to our encounter with it, and becomes instead opaque and rigid; meaning is evacuated and replaced by meta-meaning. Such a fate is particularly ironic for an art form designed to escape the status of a commodity, to be an experience but not an object, investment or symbol of something else.

This was, after all, the original intention of performance art, whose heyday was in the 1960s and 70s, when contemporary art was genuinely oppositional and alternative, and had not yet become an adjunct or promotional vehicle of the corporate world. In an interview video included in the exhibition, Abramovic even speaks of wishing that art could be a direct communication from the mind of the artist to that of the audience. At any rate, performance art was originally as immediate and intimate an experience as possible. The performer was physically close to the audience, often in an exposed, uncomfortable and vulnerable position, and above all was engaged in a real action, not a simulated one. And because they were not acting, performers had no mask or persona to protect them; they were literally present as themselves.

Performance art was originally, in its pure form, ephemeral, but it soon mutated into video art, which allowed works to be produced and preserved as short films. In the process, something of the immediacy of pure performance is inevitably lost; one can see the same thing again and again, pause or fast forward as one wishes. More subtly, the performer does not seem quite so spontaneous in front of the camera as in front of real people: it is hard to resist the temptation of representation, and one can always shoot the scene again or alter it at the editing stage. Inevitably, truth and immediacy drift towards artifice and fiction.

The exhibition at MONA is in effect a retrospective of Abramovic’s work, although she does not like the term, probably because she wants to put the emphasis on the work that she continues to do and which requires, to varying degrees, the participation of the audience.

We begin in a room surrounded by three screens with early works, one a close-up of a kiss that turns into a grim death struggle, and the most memorable a colour video in which she and her collaborator Ulay lean away from each other, drawing a bow between them; more exactly, she holds the bow itself while Ulay holds the stretched bowstring, armed with an arrow. The implication is that she will be transfixed by the arrow if he loses his grip.

After these silent works, the second room presents three very loud videos, each of figures shouting. The best known and most effective is one in which she and Ulay, facing each other in profile, roar in each other’s faces like lions. They inhale and roar again, the volume increases, the tension rises and we realise that this too is a kind of contest to the death, like two animals competing for territory; at last Ulay weakens and then disappears from the screen altogether, leaving Abramovic bellowing triumphantly.

In the following room, whose main video records a silent encounter between the artist and a donkey, there are display cabinets with drawers full of notes, memorabilia and tributes to fellow performance artists. Here and elsewhere in the exhibition one can see that her influences and inspirations are eclectic, to say the least; there is an interest in the spiritual teachings of Buddhism, for example, but there is also a willingness to embrace magic, shamanism and other less evolved forms of belief.

The following room is a large dark hall full of videos. The overall effect is impressive at first glance but its shortcomings are almost immediately apparent on more serious consideration. There are things that are repeated for a collective effect, detracting from the authenticity of the single work, and the repeated images of the artist’s face in a relentless array produce an unfortunate effect of narcissism. Worst of all, important performances like the one in which she brushes her hair in a state of neurotic agitation while repeating “art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful”, are lost in the collective presentation. This is not a small objection, for the very essence of performance art was to be a real action, taking place in real time. Even on video, it needs to be experienced in its proper duration.

Here, though — and to a lesser extent even in the rooms showing three videos at a time — the performance aesthetic has been subordinated to the new viewing habits of a broader but lazy public that is accustomed to looking at contemporary art for seconds rather than minutes, and even expects video works to be sensational experiences that can be sampled for a minute or so at most.

The exhibition clearly makes spectacular design a higher priority than sympathetic display suited to the intrinsic nature of the works. It is not Abramovic but meta-Abramovic, a perfect version for the so-called creative class to consume culture as a lifestyle experience without exposing themselves to any deeper or more disturbing ­im­pact. If you really want to watch the hair-brushing video, meanwhile, you can see it properly on YouTube. This reification of her performance videos is all the more surprising when Abramovic professes, in her more recent work, to be concerned with consciousness, slowness and presence. If the central space with the cabinets gives on to the dark hall filled with videos in one direction, on the other side it gives on to an empty room filled with deckchairs where we are invited simply to contemplate the view of trees, water and a remarkably symmetrical mountain peak.

The following large hall is filled with multiple heads of Tibetan monks, again with deckchairs, but the acoustic effect is unfortunately more raucous than contemplative. Then we enter a section of the exhibition where visitors are invited to rest their bodies against polished blocks of minerals or to stand under huge geodes filled with amethyst crystals.

In the final room there is the option to enter another space and take part in a kind of spiritual exercise, sorting and counting a mixture of lentils and rice. You are not allowed to go into this room unless you intend to complete the task and no photographs may be taken, so the emphasis is meant to be on serious engagement. But the spectacle of the room itself, with a massive table stretching into the distance, is at odds with the implicit humility of the task; why this ostentatious extravagance, this theatricalisation of authenticity?

The Abramovic event at Pier 2/3 in Sydney, which was meant to represent more of the artist’s current work, and in which she is ostensibly withdrawing from the scene to let the audience do the performing, starts a little unconvincingly with a giant poster of the artist’s face. Big Sister is watching you. The approaches to the event itself were peculiarly officious and humourless. First there was a queue to enter the building, then a queue to the reception desk; then another line to receive solemn instruction about using the lavatory and putting phones and watches in a locker; then yet another to be informed about a series of warm-up exercises; finally there was the wait to be issued with noise-cancelling ear muffs.

Inside, there were people sorting rice and beans, although few of them were actually following the instructions to count. Then there was a space where people stood on little podiums or sat on chairs, another where you could sit in a booth opposite a stranger, and finally a space to lie on camp beds covered with a blanket. Down the length of the wharf, others were walking as slowly as they could, as though in a kind of walking meditation. But it all felt somehow self-conscious rather than spontaneous, brittle rather than truly peaceful or serene.

Slowing down and dwelling in the present moment are admirable objectives, but they need to be pursued through a coherent practice, like yoga or meditation, which in turn demand a real and long-term commitment. They cannot be suddenly acquired, like a lifestyle accessory, through an eclectic and inconsistent mixture of exercises, even under the aegis of art.

To take a single example: lying quietly at the end of a yoga practice (savasana) is a powerful experience both as the conclusion to physical exertion and as a time of silence shared with a group of people who have formed a bond through the preceding class. Lying in a room full of strangers constantly coming and going, looking at each other, is entirely different. The noise-cancelling ear muffs are emblematic of the dubiousness of the experience. They are meant to be a shortcut into silence, but such aids are not used in true meditation. Perhaps they are a superficial help to those people who have never experienced inner quiet; but anyone who has is more likely to find that the ear muffs produce a solipsistic introversion that is the opposite of presence.

Taking mine off after a time, I was struck by the contrast: a whole texture of sounds from the harbour, distant traffic, boats, trains, and soft footsteps around me invited the mind to be in this time and place and accept the ebb and flow of life as it was. Almost at once, however, a staff member came up to me, looking quite disturbed, and gestured to me to put it back on. It was oddly sinister, like something out of a dystopian science fiction film.

Others followed as I walked around the space, alarmed that an inmate had disconnected from Abramovic’s matrix. And I could see why. In the solipsism of the artificial silence, you could have the illusion of participating in a real experience. When you took the ear muffs off and reconnected to real time and place, the falseness of the whole thing became irresistibly apparent. You could see people self-consciously trying to perform stillness, pretending to be present. Performance art had come full circle and the mask of the actor had returned, this time worn by the audience.

Marina Abramovic: Private Archaeology

Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart. Until October 5.

Marina Abramovic: In Residence

Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney. June 24-July 5.