The Artist Is Not Present Anymore – or is she?

This double review also anticipates something that is still to come to Berlin: as part of the Performing Arts Season, the stage version will be shown from October at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele on the main stage, running roughly three hours, billed as the German premiere. At least that is what the Berliner Festspiele website claims. To what extent it will differ from the performance at the Ruhrtriennale remains to be seen. I would strongly assume it is a shortened, compressed version of what can currently be seen at the Ruhrtriennale. But we shall see.

This text, then, is an attempt at a double review: of the exhibition in Berlin at the Gropius Bau, and of the performance of the same title, Balkan Erotic Epic, from the pen of Marina Abramović. Anyone who has had the pleasure of taking in both formats will know that it makes sense to discuss them together. Because in principle, the performance currently taking place as part of the Ruhrtriennale in the Landschaftspark Duisburg is a scenic development and expansion of what one saw at the Gropius Bau.

It is therefore genuinely worth attempting, at this point, to describe as precisely as possible what one saw there, what took place, what one was able to experience, and to make visible through that just how closely this staging and the exhibition are connected.

The very first identical component is, of course, the title: Balkan Erotic Epic. And that is exactly what Marina Abramović has created with this project, which has now been going on for more than a decade. The starting point was her video work of the same name from 2005. She called it that herself: an epic. Which of course fits very well into a present in which the Odyssey is being worked through anew, and in which ancient, above all tragic material dealing with social conditions and political posturing is once again being taken up as a form today.

It also makes sense because both the exhibition and the performance are essentially organised like an epic. In the exhibition, the division of the second floor of the Gropius Bau produces a structure a priori. But Marina Abramović embraced that once more and, in the first room, where one was welcomed, built a psychedelic phallus garden. One moves through a jungle of dicks.
In this room you see illustrations and animations by Sonia Alcón. These tell of rituals and practices from the realm of the mystical and the alchemical, describing various customs from the wider Balkan region in both image and word.

There is, for example, a love potion from Serbia, from the South Banat district, from the sixteenth century. These are, incidentally, all pieces of information conveyed both through the exhibition and through the performance, in an almost textbook-like manner. The love potion works in such a way that a man never stops loving the woman who wants to bewitch him with it. For this she must pull hairs from her eyebrows, her eyelashes, her armpits, her nipples and her vulva, then boil these with menstrual blood, strain the mixture and, mixed with wine, slip it to the man of her dreams. Other customs, too, are seen in scenic form, in both the exhibition and the performance.

In the entrance room of the exhibition one was also received by a video projection. In it, the performer Elke Luyten, as a Flemish scholar, speaks about precisely these practices and provides information on them. In the performance this same scholar also appeared as a component, somewhat later, positioned in space in such a way that you definitely encounter her only later, though there of course as a physically present performer.

Back to the exhibition: in another room there was a large video installation of a further custom. In it Marina Abramović assembled performers and had them carry out another custom in pouring rain. It comes from Turkey, from the province of Tekirdağ, from the eleventh century: when it rains heavily for days on end, the harvest is in danger and the village has nothing to eat, all the women of every age run out into the fields, lift their skirts and show their vulvas to the sky in order to frighten the gods and stop the rain. It was believed that this act would bring the rain to a complete halt.

That is exactly what one saw in the video installation, and that is exactly what one saw in the stage version too. In the stage version, three to four performers, in changing numbers, carried out on rolled-out artificial turf what one knew from the video installation.

With that, one of the most important components is already palpable in two places, but bear with me, it becomes even more. Oh, to be Marina Abramović and to have this kind of means and contacts.

My observation is that she was offered a playground here on which she makes the transition of her art really rather visible. Her art moves, after all, in an intersection of performance, happening and transience, but also exhibition, white cube and bodily limits. And it is difficult, because so many of her older works today exist only as video works, as documentation of the performance, if you like. Then it is of course hard to pin an artist down to one medium. Particularly someone like Marina Abramović, who has even staged an opera production, a truly dreadful one admittedly, but on a gigantic scale nevertheless, with a full ensemble, and various films.

Yes, this woman has become pop culture. Since her MoMA performance The Artist Is Present was cited in Sex and the City at the latest, she has become an icon, whether one likes it or not. And with her entire œuvre she manages to make the relevance of bodily presence visible. Perhaps that is why an artist like Marina Abramović is as important in our present moment as she was in the seventies and eighties. Her last major solo exhibition in Berlin, incidentally, was in the nineties.

At this point I would like to insert a small intermediate thought on what I have just described: that she has the opportunity to present us with one and the same narrative, the same epic, on two such gigantomaniacal scales, but in two different spaces: the space of the theatre and the space of the museum. And thereby to let us feel more strongly than ever before what importance physical presence holds for us as human beings. Physical presence not in the form of an object, not in the form of a code that supplies you with all the answers, but in the form of the human counterpart.

And to see how strongly those components, which one could previously experience through the video installation, which already carried weight there and already had an intense effect, how much harder they land in bodily presence. That is an energy, a form of vibration in a shared space, that no medium can replace.

I must confess, and I would like to make this personal at this point, that I first visited the exhibition in Berlin with a certain bias. Out of concern that I would see nothing new here. Marina Abramović has had one major retrospective after another, most recently in Germany in Bonn, at the Bundeskunsthalle. I saw that one too at the time. And the Marina Abramović best-ofs, one has now had them all together after several decades.

She has, however, spent the past years working on this intensively, and describes the work herself as “the most ambitious work of my career”.

Actually, I even have to concede that I was fairly right with my concern about this exhibition: one really did not see anything new. In this Wikipedia kind of art, in which folk customs and rituals from the Balkans are presented to you, you get to know them, impressively so. But at the same time the individual elements, the way it is all brought together, whether that is the engagement with custom and archaic history in order to contextualise the role of women, or indeed to explore the history of women further, and to set this model of an egalitarian society against patriarchy, which is also great and should keep happening, so this is not a criticism in the sense that it should not take place, it is merely the realisation that in itself, this is nothing new to begin with.

Yes, or whether it is naked performers, exposed genitals: the whole visual language, all the components, are not in themselves new. And the outrage too, assuming this still provokes outrage in anyone at all, in which case welcome to the 21st century, even the outrage is not a new component. There are even those who, faced with Marina Abramović’s art, are simply gagging for the outrage.

But what else is this woman supposed to do that is new? She has practically done everything already. What new thing is one still meant to expect from her?

But the way in which she gathers all these components together and then presents them in an exhibition: I was positively surprised by the exhibition. Because I expected another continuation of the Marina Abramović legacy, whereas it is in fact simply a very sensitive composition, ultimately very informative but nonetheless researched and assembled with great feeling.

And then to be able to experience the whole thing once again as a literal epic in the form of thirteen images, in a scenic translation, was deeply moving. Not least because this performance lasted four hours in total, to which one was not, however, slavishly bound. You can perfectly well walk out for a while, take a look around the beautiful Landschaftspark Duisburg and have a look at the Emscherkunstweg. There is, for example, a fantastic work by Julius von Bismarck called Neustadt. In principle you can assemble these four hours however you like. But there were also plenty of candidates who stayed inside for the entire four hours of the performance.

The thirteen images are called: Tito’s Funeral. Love Potions. Fucking the Ground, Fertility Rites. Scaring the Gods to Stop the Rain. Bathing the Corpse in the Sun. Dance of the Ancestors. Breast Massage Orgy. Knife Dance. The Kafana Complex. Pigeon Dance. Black Wedding. Wedding Rituals. Slavic Soul.

They have cyclically recurring elements, scenic moments that repeat. But at the same time there is also a temporal linearity running through these thirteen images, partly connecting them, at the very least placing them in relation to one another, and partly transforming them as well. In some cases performers who belonged to one scene switched to another. There are certainly enough elements, and it really is an orgasmic firework of impressions, and of details in which you can fall in love and lose yourself.

A personal highlight of mine is also the Black Wedding, a ritual from the Vlach community in eastern Serbia. It goes like this: if a young man died before he was married, then before he was sent off to the realm of the dead, a wedding was staged for him. For this the dead man lay laid out on the church forecourt, and on the church tower stood a bride assigned to him, in a luminous red dress. And for four hours she looked down at dancers and performers who performed dances on the forecourt for the wedding couple. In this scene the opera singer Dragana Jovanović also sings, though she is not the mourning bride in red, but is dressed in a strikingly blue dress.

What we have here is a de-tabooing of subject areas that are connected with one another: eroticism, and of course also women’s self-determination through erotic potential. There is, after all, such a thing as erotic capital, the British sociologist Catherine Hakim, for instance, speaks of erotic or sexual capital. And this is brought into a stage form here, and into an exhibition form as well. Marina Abramović connects eroticism, physicality and intimacy with the otherwise taboo context of death, corpses and the afterlife, because she wants to overcome this old separation of the spiritual and the corporeal.

That is why there are also such disturbing images as in the performance section Breast Massage/Orgy, where performers massage their breasts over gravestones, dance with skeletons, and the whole thing really does turn into something resembling an orgy.

And at the same time you notice that none of this is designed for shock. Even if Marina Abramović’s earlier works, precisely because of political necessity, worked a great deal with shock, these works are in fact shot through with a deep sensitivity and a deep delicacy of feeling.

And nonetheless, in keeping with the title of an earlier work, she has proved once again how important it is that the artist is present. Only that by now Marina Abramović is not necessarily the artist in question, because she essentially stands behind the whole thing as its planner. Nor was she present at the Ruhrtriennale during the performance. Rather, the performers are, so to speak, the physical representations it takes to make this idea of Marina Abramović’s present here. And so the artist is present can indeed be conveyed in the form of a spirit, in the form of an aura.