Marina Abramovic Institute is on Kickstarter!

Marina Abramovic Institute is dedicated to the presentation and preservation of long durational work, including that of performance art, dance, theater, film, music, opera, and other forms that may develop in the future. MAI will foster collaboration between art, science, technology, and spirituality, bringing these fields into conversation with long durational work. MAI will provide an educational space to host workshops, lectures, residencies, and research.

The ask total of this Kickstarter covers the first phase of MAI's development: the design process. Given that MAI is the first of its kind, its early design phase demands an innovative approach. Your pledge will contribute to early MAI programming, office operations, and schematic designs of architectural elements, including building structure, lighting, acoustics, and AV. Leading this process are world-renowned architects Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), whose unique vision will help MAI to create new ways for audiences and performers to interact.

Current interior of 620 Columbia St., Hudson, NY

In total, $20 million is needed to complete renovations of the institute and begin operations. Marina has paid for phase zero of this development process. She purchased the building at 620 Columbia Street in Hudson, New York for $950,000 and donated it to the institute. She funded the budget of the MAI office for six months and commissioned the architectural concept. As of now, Marina has paid $1.5 million out of pocket towards the early stages of MAI. A single person, no matter how successful or passionate, cannot single-handedly fund and sustain a cultural institution of this size. She hopes that an equally passionate public will join her in contributing to phase one.
Contributions to this project are 80% tax deductible due to MAI's non-profit 501(c)3 status.

 

MAI 101: WHO IS MARINA ABRAMOVIC?

Marina Abramovic, born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, is one of the most enduring artists of our time. She began her career in the early 1970s when she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, and after formative explorations in painting, drawing, text, and sound art, she pioneered the use of performance as an art form.

As a vital member of the generation of seminal performance artists that includes Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and Chris Burden, Abramovic created some of the most well regarded early performance art pieces and is the only artist of her generation still making important works of long durational performance.

The body has always been both Abramovic’s subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being—from her earliest pieces such as Rhythm 5 (1974), where she lay in the center of a burning 5-point star to the point of losing consciousness, to The Artist Is Present (2010), where for three months she spent eight to ten hours per day sitting motionless, engaged in silent eye-contact with hundreds of strangers one by one — Marina Abramovic has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional transformation.

Abramovic’s primary concern is with creating works that ritualize the simple actions of everyday life: standing, lying down, sitting, dreaming, and thinking. These acts, when incorporated into long durational performance, manifest a unique mental state in both her and the audience.

This heightened state of consciousness, of being in the moment, is the legacy she wishes to leave to the public through the creation of Marina Abramovic Institute.

Early Performances

In 1974, Abramovic performed a series of pieces that marked her entrance into the live and visceral world of performance.

These performances married concept with physicality, endurance with empathy, complicity with loss of control, passivity with danger. They pushed the boundaries of self-discovery, both of herself and her audience. They also marked her first engagements with time, stillness, energy, pain, and the resulting heightened consciousness generated by long durational performance.

In Rhythm 0 (1974), her first long durational work, Abramovic offered herself as an object of experimentation for the audience, thereby including their actions in the performance itself.

Abramovic remained completely passive for six hours in front of a table containing 72 objects. Some, such as sugar, honey, and a rose contained the potential for pleasure. Others such as knives, whips, scissors, and a gun (with a single bullet) contained the potential for torment. The nature of the performance was completely in the audience’s hands.

During these six hours, she was alternately abused and defended by the participants, and eventually—after being drawn on, kissed, fed, soaked in water, stripped, and cut—a fight broke out after one participant loaded the pistol, placed it in her hand, and aimed it at her neck.

Abramovic kept her pledge, silently enduring both the best and worst the audience had to offer when confronted with the artist as blank canvas. When the performance was complete, she calmly broke her trance-like state and walked directly towards the crowd, which quickly dispersed.

This emotional work tested Abramovic’s faith, concentration, and willpower while simultaneously revealing the varying natures, both supportive and vindictive, hidden under the surface of a normally passive art audience.

In a trio of performances from the same time period, Abramovic sought to enact a physical and mental cleansing and rebirth by exhausting her three main faculties of expression: voice, language, and body.

In Freeing the Voice (1976), Abramovic lay on her back on a mattress, her head hanging slightly off its edge, and screamed with the full force of her will until her voice was completely broken. This act took 3 hours. In Freeing the Memory (1976), she spoke every isolated word she could summon, without repeating, until she ran out of words, her consciousness completely blank. This exhaustion of mind took one and a half hours. In Freeing the Body (1976), Abramovic danced nude, her face covered with a scarf, the rhythm dictated by a bongo drummer for six hours until her body collapsed.

The length of each of these works was determined by the limits of Abramovic’s physical and mental endurance. In this way, she further established long durational performance as a means of exploring the body and achieving new states of consciousness.

Works with Ulay

In 1975, Abramovic met Ulay, a like-minded German artist who would be her artistic, romantic, and spiritual collaborator for 13 years. From 1975 until 1988, she and Ulay performed together, challenging and exposing the limits of interpersonal relationships in the context of long durational works.

In Relation in Movement (1977), she and Ulay drove their van in circles around a small public square outside the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. With each revolution, Abramovic announced via megaphone the number of laps they had completed. There was no preconceived duration for the piece. Its length would be determined by one of two factors: the breaking down of the van, or the breaking down of the performers. In the end, they performed for 16 hours or 2,226 revolutions until the van finally broke down, leaving a circular stain of black oil on the pavement.

In the piece Relation in Time (1977), the pair sat alone in an art gallery, back-to-back with their long dark hair braided together in a symbiotic union. For 16 hours, they attempted to charge the gallery space with the energy generated by their collective willpower. In the seventeenth hour, the public was allowed to enter the space to experience the atmosphere generated by the exhausted duo.

In Nightsea Crossing (1981-1987), a series of 22 performances spanning 90 days, Abramovic and Ulay sat completely motionless, face-to-face on opposite sides of a long wooden table. For at least eight hours per performance, they did nothing but stare at each other, sustaining themselves only on meditative concentration.

In 1988, Abramovic and Ulay separated both as performers and as partners, but not before completing The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (1988), a 90-day performance in which they walked the length of the Great Wall of China, starting at opposite ends and meeting in the middle. Originally, they had intended to marry at the end of this journey, but in its final conception they chose instead to separate after the completion of their respective 2,500 kilometer treks.

1990s to the Present

From the 1990s to the present, Abramovic has continued to perform a significant and diverse range of long durational works.

In Balkan Baroque (1997), a multi-media piece incorporating video, sculpture, and performance, Abramovic spent seven hours a day, for four consecutive days, scrubbing 300 fresh, bloody cow bones with a bucket of water and a small brush. This piece served as a symbolic reckoning with the tragic brutality and suffering that had recently occurred during the civil war in her homeland, the former Republic of Yugoslavia.

In The House with the Ocean View (2002), Abramovic spent 12 days living on display at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. She did not allow herself to speak or eat for these 12 days, though singing was “possible but unpredictable.” Her residence for this period consisted of three elevated platforms, one with a bathroom, one with a small table and chair, and the third with a small bed and chair. She drank mineral water, showered three times a day, and allowed herself no more than sevenhttp://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7500952662618442710#editor/target=post;postID=5186730096733574349;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=10;src=link hours of sleep. The rungs of the ladders leading up to each platform were replaced with large steak knives, preventing descent. She drew her energy from her audience.

In Seven Easy Pieces (2005), Abramovic re-performed seven classic performance art works. For eight hours a day in the lobby of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, she performed these pieces, which included work by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valerie Export, Gina Paine, Joseph Beuys, and two early works of her own.

At her career retrospective The Artist Is Present (2010) at MoMA, Abramovic performed her most recent long durational work. During museum hours, for at least eight hours a day, six days a week, she was sitting motionless in the atrium. Museum visitors could sit in front of the artist, locked in an intimate gaze for as long as they wished. Over 750,000 visitors came to view The Artist Is Present, with hundreds choosing to personally engage with the artist. It was during this 736-hour performance that Abramovic became deeply aware of the public’s desire to engage with long durational works. This is when her vision of Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI) was born.

Bibliography and Suggested Reading

Print:

Abramovic, Marina and Bojana Pejic. Marina Abramovic: Artist Body.
Milano: Edizioni Charta, 1998.

Abramovic, Marina and Germano Celant.  Marina Abramovic: Public Body.
Milano: Edizioni Charta, 1998.

Biesenbach, Klaus. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present. New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 2010.

Westcott, James. When Marina Abramovic Dies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.

Web:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovic 

Neuroscience Experiment I: Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze

In her work The Artist is Present (2010), performed at The Museum of Modern Art, New York over a three-month period, Marina Abramović confronted a succession of individuals with whom she engaged in mutual gaze. During the performance, she exhibited feelings of pain, happiness and sadness which resonated with those of the person sitting opposite her. On average, people entertain mutual gaze for a maximum of seven to nine seconds; any longer suggests that an act of love or war is about to take place. As a result, scientists were led to wonder whether there was an eventual synchronicity between the artist and the sitters.

Inspired by The Artist is Present, Marina Abramović has collaborated with American and Russian scientists on an experimental performance installation that expands our understanding of non-verbal communication. Developing Abramović’s interest in the transfer of energy between performer and public, performer and participant, Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze (2011) crosses a frontier and makes visible the workings of the human brain – the organ that governs physical and mental activity.

Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze represents a unique, reciprocal collaboration between art and science. It is the first in a series of projects developed during the workshop Art and Science: Insights into Consciousness, hosted at The Watermill Center in New York in the summer of 2010 and supported by the Mortimer D. Sackler Family Foundation. This special debut re-stages the lengthy endurance conditions of the works Nightsea Crossing (1981-1987) and The Artist is Present(2010), in which Abramović engaged in mutual gaze with, respectively, fellow artist Ulay and successive participants. By applying science to these situations, the performance explores notions of the creative leap, evolutions of cognition and understanding, silent communication, and the moment when forms of chaos give birth to new opportunities and works of art.