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From Artist’s Body to Distributed Bodies:

Marina Abramović in Residence

Jacqueline Millner
Eyeline 85
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Introduction

Looking back on those practices that attempted to evade the reification of art, Lucy Lippard—who coined the term ‘dematerialisation of art’ in 1967—summed them up by saying that they ‘invented ways for art to act as an invisible frame for seeing and thinking, rather than as an object of delectation or connoisseurship’.1 Yet art history suggests that those manoeuvres that sought to redefine art away from the object quite quickly fell short of their objectives. Ideas and actions—like objects—could be commoditised, privileged, and consumed as art. Moreover, the other political aspirations of such ‘dematerialising’ practices, that included the democratisation of art, were cancelled out by their ‘neutral elitist content and patronising approach’ that remained incomprehensible and alienating to the broader public, as Lippard observed in the late 1970s.2

At the same time as the limitations of the political project inherent to performance, among other practices, were hitting home, post-humanist critiques in philosophy and art theory profoundly de-stabilised received ideas about the human subject—its ability to know itself, to speak its own truth, to have a grounded identity. This dealt another blow to performance, whose appeal had in large part been on account of its authenticity, its raw access to the material truth of embodied human experience through its supposed evasion of mediation, and its associated accountability: the live body of the artist, here in real time and real space, fronting up to the audience.

Since the late 1970s, partly on account of these challenges, performance art (with some notable exceptions) largely receded from the contemporary art spotlight. Yet it has re-emerged as a major form of contemporary practice in the last few years, privileged in zeitgeist-capturing biennales... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

The 30th Kaldor Public Art Project, Marina Abramović: In Residence, Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney. Photograph Peter Greig. Courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects.

The 30th Kaldor Public Art Project, Marina Abramović: In Residence, Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney. Photograph Peter Greig. Courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects.

The 30th Kaldor Public Art Project, Marina Abramović: In Residence, Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney. Photograph Peter Greig. Courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects.

The 30th Kaldor Public Art Project, Marina Abramović: In Residence, Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney. Photograph Peter Greig. Courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects.