Her body has been mutilated, she has undressed, she has remained still while a person pointed a loaded pistol at her and has sat for hundreds of hours watching strangers. Marina Abramovic has been exploring the limits of performance for half a century, and with this she has become a reference artist. This Wednesday she was awarded the 2021 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts.
Abramovic, who today has been awarded the 2021 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts for her career, has been experimenting with the body and mind for half a century and reflecting on her relationship with the public. First with blood, violence and fluids; and, in the last stage, focused on meditation.
Her work has made her a benchmark for the general public, a category rarely reserved for a contemporary artist. Although she assures that being a woman has never been an obstacle because “art does not have sex, it can be good or bad, nothing more.”
In the past she liked to refer to herself as “the grandmother of performance art”, and of course she was one of the pioneers of this genre by right, but recently she recognized that she no longer likes the name: “I said it when I was young, now I’m older ”.
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Abramovic now prefers the word “warrior”, and of course, his ability to reinvent himself over time lives up to the word. Her work has made her an artist with so many followers among the general public, as well as suspicions among contemporary critics.
His beginnings were more than modest, he grew up in Belgrade and his childhood was not easy. Her parents were communist Yugoslav guerrillas and her religious grandparents, the combination was explosive for this young Yugoslav who went to the Academy of Fine Arts and who recognizes that at first they wanted to lock her up for crazy.
In one of her first performances, in 1974 in a gallery in Belgrade (Serbia), she placed a hundred things on a table and invited the public to use them with her in any way they wanted. There were feathers and roses, but also a gun with bullets and a knife. Six hours later, she left the place bloody and in a flood of tears.
At first people were friendly, then not so much anymore. That was exactly what Abramovic was looking for, who has tirelessly explored the relationship with the public and continues to do so today, at 75 years old.
This type of work would earn her a place in history as a pioneer of the genre and a certain fame in the small circles of contemporary art. Years later, the works with Ulay, his then partner, would arrive, with which he explored the ego and identity.
The performance they did for their separation remains from that time: “The Lovers” (1988). Both walked to meet each other from two points on the Great Wall 2,500 km apart, walked for months and met in the middle to say goodbye. There is no limit between life and art for Abramovic.
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Solo gained more notoriety. The final cover letter for the general public was the 2010 performance at MoMA, “The artist is present”. She sat eight hours a day for three months in front of the public: people queued for hours to sit in front of her and just look her in the eye.
The exhibition attracted 850,000 visitors, something not inconsiderable so far for a genre traditionally considered ridiculous by the general public.
The exhibition that the New York museum dedicated to him reviewed his career, among the objects gathered was a truck in which he lived for most of the ten years that he lived with Ulay. The vehicle made her shudder just looking at it, she acknowledged.
That vehicle proves how far its beginnings, difficult, poor and sometimes dark, are from the Marina Abramovic with the international recognition and fame of now, who lives in a star-shaped house in the New York countryside and whose figure has acquired over time a mystical, almost religious aura.
The artist has reached stardom and works as such: she dresses in haute couture clothes, rubs shoulders with great pop stars like Jay Z and Lady Gaga – she is a pop star in a way – and stars on the covers of Vogue. All this is not without controversy.
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“I have been criticized by my generation, artists of the 70s, and there is nothing more tragic than the artists of the 70s who continue to make art from the 70s (…) I love fashion. Who says that if you have red lipstick and nail polish, you are not a good artist? ”He said a few years ago in an interview with The Guardian .
Some consider her a simple provocateur, others one of the best artists of her generation. History will decide her place, although she already has a place in art history books.
