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Demaria, Christina. The Performative Body of Marina Abramović Rerelating (in) Time and Space
2004, The European Journal of Women's Studies 1(3): 295-307.
Categories: Aesthetics, Body Aesthetics, Feminist Aesthetics, Philosophy of Gender Race and Sexuality, Value Theory
Keywords: Marina Abramovic, body, energy, gender, identity, performance, subjectivity, textual practices, translation
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Added by: Rossen Ventzislavov
Abstract: Can a performance be analysed as a textual practice? Starting from this question, the article tries to describe the effets du sens (meaning effects) of some of the work of Marina Abramović, a Serbian performer and visual artist. From the 1970s, when the so-called body art emerged as a visual genre, offering the artist's body as a naked site of inscription, up to the present, when performing has become a more playful and direct transmission of energy between the doer and the viewer, the work of Abramović represents an effective and powerful example of the body-as-a-text in which subjectivity can be re-expressed and reinvented through the transformations of the relation between time and space. In the strong relationship created between the performer and the audience, what is enacted is a translation–transduction of material and cognitive meanings that results in a redefinition of a subjective and, simultaneously, collective experience of identity.
Comment: This is a prime example of feminist aesthetics and its treatment of the human body. Demaria's main contention is that performance art can be understood textually and representationally even if it does not lay an explicit claim to either type of content. She agrees with Judith Butler's notion of citationality as a perpetual re-inscription of power norms and codes onto the human body. Since bodily presence plays such an important part in most performance art, the question of the possibility of embodied meaning arises naturally. Demaria uses the art of Marina Abramović to show that the question should be answered in the affirmative. Abramović's body exercises discursive transgressions (of language and code) in ways that, according to Demaria, establish a new language of dissent.
Difficulty: Intermediate
Recommended use: Specialised reading
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