“If you are not passionate in life, you can’t be passionate in art.”

Marina Abramović

Performance is the art of the body and so is love. When two artists are in love, they can’t do anything other than create. Mastermind and masterpiece becoming one for the first time.

Love as a creative act

Marina Abramović, knows this very well; at 77 years old she now receives a catchy nickname, “the grandmother of performance,” and retains a magnetic presence, accentuated by her deep gaze and her strong Serbian accent.

Interesting, intelligent and impressive, all of her early works show her to be brave and for that very reason also vulnerable; challenging the notion of the artist as a character:

subject or object?

Marina herself became aware of this condition and the consumerist selfishness of a public that had become an audience, spectator and active participant in Rhythm 0, where she gave them 6 hours and 72 objects to do whatever they wanted to her body. The result was atrocious: cuts, blood, humiliation and pain turned into one side pleasure.

“Pain is a door. A secret door into a different state. Without these doors you can’t reach it. Afterwards, you no longer fear pain.”

Marina Abramović

That was Marina’s sort of mantra.

What can one feel after pain? Love, of course.

Frank Uwe Laysipen a.k.a.Ulay was a photographer known by her work with polaroid, exploring self and gender and pushing boundaries with scandalous results.

They met in Amsterdam, on a November 30th, which was his and hers birthday. A colapse one might imagine it, but Marina recalled that rendezvous as a mutual recognition. An encounter of both female and masculine energy.

A relationship between two artists cannot be anything other than beautiful.

Briseida Alcalá

They called their union as glue and started, of course, to perform together, creating pieces that expressed what they were together, the collaboration that makes two voices resound as one one in the work, message and form.

They were together from 1976 to 1988, leaving a deep mark with their search of bonding, connection; expressing universal couple struggles, modern and classic and exploring their own limits:

• trough screaming at each other as a metaphorical fight for domination, who is the beta and who is the alfa? in AAAA-AAAA;
• Kissing for 17 minutes until they passed out in Death self,
• and turning themselves into their own cupids in Rest energy, a favorite of mine, placing an arch between them, Ulay holding the string, pointing directly at Marina’s heart.

All of this pieces are and feel dangerous, beautiful, familiar.

The lovers: the great wall walk, ended their creative collaboration and relationship with a final performance. Each one began to walk, at opposite ends, of the Great Wall of China. She did it from the Yellow Sea, and he started from the Gobi Desert. They walked for three months and traveled two thousand five hundred kilometers, until they met in the middle, only to separate with a beautiful and painful act. The great wall and the great walk, a poetic, long goodbye to their twelve years relationship.

It took them 8 years to execute that performance since China was a closed state at the time, and getting the legal permissions was nearly impossible, ironically the piece had another ending at the beginning: their marriage.

Another 20 years would pass before they were reunited again, in the retrospective that the MoMA offered for Marina’s career and which included a performance act, “The artist is present”, in which she sat in silence, in front of an empty chair that the attendees occupied one by ones. Marina pitched the idea because she suspected people nowadays craved emotions and the sense of union. The curator found the idea ridiculous, but Marina proved to be absolutely right.

1,400 people took turns of approximately 1 minute to establish an incredible connection, based only on a shared gaze. Including Björk, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright and Isabella Rossellini.Marina prepared herself by closing her eyes between one assistant and another, the camera captures her expression when she opens them to find Ulay, sitting in front of her.

A Monalisa smile appeared on her face, brief, yet sweet, making it visible that urge to utter the words that did not come out, so the eyes had to speak. Ulay felt uncomfortable, fixing his posture and repeatedly blinking, visible emotional.

Her face felt sad, lonely, longing.

He let out a sight, as fighting for air, shacking his head and shrugging.

Unable to hold the emotion Marina turned her teary eyes into weeping until she finally extended her arms, as if to reaching out to hold hands, Ulay says something that is inaudible, in a foreign language. Marina was forbidden to speak, due to the performance, so she kept silence.

The crowd cheered up, sharing the emotion, since

one is always at awe in the radiant presence of beauty, one of the names of true love.

Confronting our emotions through his, hers, theirs with love and trust as the ultimate weapons, the ones that can shatter any heart, but also lift it up.

Passion, desire, tenderness, connection, is there anything more powerful and beautiful? Hardly.

True art. True life.

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present | Entre Arte y Silencio

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