Date: 28 October 2007 | Season: London Film Festival 2007 | Tags: London Film Festival
SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio
Babette Mangolte, Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic, USA, 2007, 93 min
For one week in November 2005, Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramovic gave seven consecutive performances in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, presenting her own works alongside interpretations of what are now regarded as seminal performance pieces by artists such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman. Actions that were once performed to select audiences in studios or small galleries were transformed into public spectacle. The artist’s own ‘Lips of Thomas’ is an intense ritual that repeatedly subjects the body to physical pain, being clearly related to her country’s war torn past. Other uncompromising works address sexuality (Vito Acconci, ‘Seedbed’), confrontation (Valie Export, ‘Genital Panic’) and suffering (Gina Pane, ‘The Conditioning’). The performances, executed with extraordinary discipline and composure, test the thresholds of endurance and determination. Babette Mangolte’s mesmerising document of this event condenses the entire series into 90 minutes. The camera, cool and detached, rarely strays from the artists’ body, detailing mental and physical tension with the sharp clarity of high definition video. Live art, best experienced in the moment, has rarely been captured with such atmosphere.
Also Screening: Tuesday 30 October 2007, at 7:30pm, BFI Southbank Studio
PROGRAMME NOTES
SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVI?
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio
SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVI?
Babette Mangolte, USA, 2007, HD video, colour, sound, 93 min
Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure, 1974
Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972
Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969
Gina Pane, The Conditioning, the first action of Self-Portrait(s), 1973
Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965
Marina Abramovi?, Lips of Thomas, 1975
Marina Abramovi?, Entering the Other Side, 2005
In Seven Easy Pieces Abramovi? re-enacted seminal performance works from the 1960s and 70s by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and herself, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The film is a reflection on performance art and body art outlining physical fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance as seen in the work of Marina Abramovi?. The film of Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovi? is about the performing body and how it affects viscerally the people who confront it, look at it and participate in the transcendental experience that is its primary effect. The ceremonial and meditative are the common responses to the week-long series of performances that took place in November 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. From an art event to a social phenomenon, the seven performances became the talk of the town because they created among the visitors a sense of sublimation, like prayer. The film attempts to reveal the mechanisms of this transcendental experience by simply showing the performer’s body living the events inscribed in each piece with details that outline the body’s fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance. The fascination comes from the revelation of the physical transformation of Marina Abramovi?’s exposed body due to the rigorous discipline of being there on display each day for seven hours without any restrictive boundaries. The relentless progress of time is revealed each day by the acoustics of the building with its waves of crowds that roll like an ocean and marvel at the performer’s steadfastness with respectful silence. That the performer’s required discipline had to be so different from one piece to the next is one of the mysteries. How the attentive audience fed into the art and Marina’s aesthetics is what is explored. It is as if a monastic urge attracted the mystical among us viewers who were there to participate. And the film, by focusing on Marina’s minute changes and strain during the long seven hours of each piece, explores in a systematic way a body without limit and increases the awareness of how participatory body art is. The film follows the linearity inscribed in the weeklong event, from body pressure, audience participation and confrontation in the first three pieces to the ceremonial in the last four pieces as mapped out by Marina Abramovi?. It is only after the fact that the film viewer will realize how much the project’s concept enlightens us on aesthetics that place physical experience over reason, process over iconography and testify to the power of audience participation over passive spectatorship. (Babette Mangolte)
www.babettemangolte.com
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