The Scream Importance of Art for People Over 65 Legacy Program
Two months earlier the opening of her first solo exhibition since 1975 in her native Belgrade, Marina Abramović published a letter to the Serbian people in the news weekly Nedeljnik. She professed her love for the city of Belgrade, explained the principles of her art, reached out to young people, and implored readers to be open to her work: "Without an audition, my fine art does non exist."
"The Cleaner," equally the retrospective was titled, opened at Stockholm'southward Moderna Museet in 2017 and concluded its bout of European institutions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU) in Belgrade in Jan 2020. Past Serbian standards, the exhibition was uncommonly well funded. The federal government supplied half a million dollars, equivalent to the state-run museum'south annual budget, to indicate national pride in showcasing a native girl as ane of the world's most important living artists. The generous support for the show elicited polemics in the local media and skepticism in the art scene. MSU reopened in 2017 after renovations that took a decade due to lack of funds, which means Abramović got the hometown retrospective that her contemporaries who live and work in Serbia could only dream of. Her return carried boosted political weight because prime minister Ana Brnabić—an openly lesbian member of Serbia'southward ruling heart-correct party—publicly invited the artist to bring "The Cleaner" to Belgrade. Brnabić is the right mitt of president Aleksandar Vučić, whose nationalist policies and media censorship have prompted mass protests. To resist the inroad of authoritarianism in the cultural sphere, artists protested the 2017 reopening of MSU wearing black-and-white masks with Vučić's face. The conservative government's control of the museum continues to provoke gossip and resentment.
This context intensified the fraught relationship Abramović has had with her homeland since her departure in 1975. In interviews she has repeatedly characterized Yugoslav socialism as artistically repressive and by and large bleak—narratives that have been debunked past fine art historians and critics from the region, and that obscure her privileged origins as the kid of powerful, politically agile parents. At the 1997 Venice Biennale Abramović won the Golden Lion accolade for her performance and installation Balkan Baroque, presented in the primal pavilion's international grouping bear witness. She had been invited to exhibit in the Yugoslav pavilion (then administered by Serbia and Montenegro), only her proposal was rejected in office because it did not adhere to the nationalist mood of the time. Abramović had been gone too long to be a representative. Furthermore, the explicit references to the genocidal violence of the Yugoslav Wars, the ethnic conflicts within and among the former constituent republics of Yugoslavia, made it besides provocative for government support. Balkan Bizarre has also been critiqued for exploiting negative ethnic stereotypes of the Balkans as an inherently violent backwater. The aforementioned charge was leveled even more aggressively at the video Balkan Erotic Epic (2005), which shows naked men fornicating with clay, women in traditional dresses offer their bare breasts to the heavens while spreading their naked legs toward the earth, and men, besides in traditional garb, flaunting erections.
Equally viewers entered MSU through a glass-walled lobby, they heard the rapid blasts of machine guns. The audio work Sound Corridor (1971) had been presented at MSU before, in the 1972 exhibition "Immature Artists, Young Critics '71," which featured works past Abramović and the other members of the grouping of half dozen artists, an informal commonage based at Belgrade'southward Pupil Cultural Center (SKC): Zoran Popović, Raša Todosijević, Neša Paripović, Gergelj Urkom, and Era Milivojević. The year 1972 was an important i for Yugoslav performance art, as Scottish impresario Richard Demarco visited Belgrade and invited artists from the SKC to show their work in an exhibition called "Viii Yugoslav Artists" in Edinburgh in 1973. At that place, Abramović presented the outset version of her piece of work Rhythm ten, aslope pieces by Urkom and Todosijević, performed simultaneously. Kneeling on the floor, she stabbed the flesh between her fingers with a gear up of knives and used a tape recorder to capture and replay the sound of the cuts. "The Cleaner" included big black-and-white photographs of Abramović doing this functioning at the National Gallery of Mod and Contemporary Art in Rome in 1973, rather than at the Yugoslav grouping bear witness in Edinburgh.
The Belgrade installation of Sound Corridor missed an opportunity to connect Abramović'due south work to that of her contemporaries. Just it was notwithstanding a startling introduction to an exhibition with a haunting soundscape, evocative of melancholy, death, and nostalgic enchantment. Moving from the corridor of recorded gunfire into the anteroom, i could hear Abramović'south screams from the video Freeing the Vocalisation (1975) on the 2nd floor. For that performance at the SKC, the artist lay on her dorsum screaming for iii hours, until she lost her vocalisation. On the outset flooring, a large but serenity black-box installation featured video footage from The Creative person Is Present (2010), the performance staged during her retrospective at New York'southward Museum of Modernistic Fine art. Opposite this installation stood Private Archaeology (1997–2015), a set of wooden cabinets holding a collection of sketches, collages, artifacts, and ephemera from Abramović'due south archive, a deeply self-mythologizing installation that surprisingly did not include whatsoever reference to her SKC involvement. At the top of the stairs, large projections showed black-and-white footage of some of Abramović's best-known works: Freeing the Phonation, mentioned above; Freeing the Body (1976), in which she wrapped her head in a blackness scarf and danced for 8 hours, until she collapsed; and several of her performances made in collaboration with German language creative person Ulay, including ane where they slam their bodies together, and some other where they sit opposite each other and scream. The volume of these videos was high, making a strenuous soundtrack for the viewing of Abramović'southward early on painting and sculpture, exhibited on the aforementioned floor, and the sounds echoed on the upper floors.
The striking soundscape on the tertiary floor juxtaposed a Hungarian Romani folk song performed by vocalist Apollónia Kovács (used without credit in Balkan Baroque) with the celestial voices of children in Count on Us (2004). The latter work is an emotional 1 for local and diasporic viewers. The children clothing black uniforms and stand against stunning red backgrounds that evoke Yugoslavia's socialist, peaceful past. On ii channels, projected on opposite screens, a boy and a daughter sing ballads alone, while on a third channel projected between them, Abramović, with a skeleton on her back, directs a children's choir in a operation of the United Nations anthem in Serbo-Croatian. In her essay for the traveling retrospective's catalogue, art historian and curator Bojana Pejić notes Yugoslavia'southward status as a founding member of the United nations while also charting the nation'south denigration by the West as "the Balkans." Her approach to Abramović'due south work is generous simply disquisitional, with a strong implication that the artist perpetuates and exacerbates Western biases.
Abramović's troubled relationship with her birthplace is expressed in what Pejić calls the "diasporic self," a flexible identity that lets her assume different personas. This is almost prominent in Balkan Baroque. The artist commencement appears in a white glaze as a zoologist explaining how rats are tortured and trained to kill one some other, a caricature of Western views of the Yugoslav Wars. At the end Abramović removes her lab coat, pulls a red scarf from her décolletage, and dances frantically to Kovács'southward recording of the Romani folk song. Viewers familiar with these traditional dances could run across that Abramović performs them clumsily, and conclude that, given her upbringing in an elite Yugoslav family (and her nowadays affluent life in New York), she has never danced them among the lower classes of Southeastern Europe, who practice them as part of their civilization. The awkward, messy, yet libidinal dance embodies the distressed connection to Balkan identity that makes Abramović's return to Belgrade so strong and chaotic.
The museum'due south peak two floors hosted documentation of quieter works, such as The House with the Ocean View (2002), a durational performance for which Abramović lived and fasted in Sean Kelly gallery in New York for twelve days, and Vii Piece of cake Pieces (2005), a series of reenactments of radical and painful performance works by other artists from the 1960s and '70s at the Guggenheim Museum. "Transitory Objects for Human Use" (2015), on the top floor, invited visitors to remainder on article of furniture made of woods and quartz. In these tranquil galleries, if non before, one felt that MSU had been transformed into a infinite of feminine vulnerability and pain, a rejoinder to the macho bravado associated with the Balkans and an expression of mourning for the loss of socialism. It is a paradoxical result for an exhibition by an artist who has time and once again proclaimed her antifeminist and anticommunist stances. Perhaps it is these contradictions that express Abramović's remarkable singularity. In every inch of the museum, the artist is present—as the diasporic cocky, the one who left. She is never seen in the context of the Belgrade artists who were crucial to her grooming. It was no surprise that her letter to Serbia was addressed to the youth. Abramović looks frontward to a new generation of artists who await her leadership.
What Abramović's call to young artists misses is that many of them draw on the Yugoslav legacy of collective resistance rather than hagiographies of individual artists. From December v to March i, the grouping exhibition "The Nineties: A Glossary of Migrations" was on view at the newly renovated May 25 Museum, part of the Museum of Yugoslavia (which holds Tito'due south grave and artifacts from the Yugoslav period). It was a research-driven testify nigh performance and protestation, with works by nearly thirty artists, activists, and collectives. "The Nineties" was organized in conjunction with New Mappings of Europe, a articulation undertaking by museums and institutions across the continent to present diverse accounts of migration to and from Europe: the stories of refugees, aviary seekers, guest workers, and other migrants fleeing climatic, economical, and political crises. "The Nineties" was structured around key terms related to migration, such as Law and Safe State. Information technology was a labyrinthine, crowded exhibition packed with moving narratives. It highlighted the violence of nationalism and neoliberal capitalism, while demonstrating the rich history of Yugoslav feminism and anti-fascist resistance.
Tanja Ostojić exhibited her piece Looking for a Husband with Eu Passport (2000–05), a participatory web and functioning project in which she advertised herself for marriage and found a hubby. The documentation of the work, presented at the May 25 Museum in the Law section, consists of a large poster of the artist's shaved and naked body and blown-up prints of her passport pages with various restricted German visas. Ostojić's radical functioning speaks directly to stereotypes of mail-club brides and the precarity of Yugoslav women in the 1990s, while exposing the European union's discriminatory clearing processes, which stigmatize unmarried women and make them dependent on men for mobility. The familiar passport pages carry a charge for viewers who escaped to Germany during the Yugoslav Wars simply were deported back to Serbia subsequently.
The section titled Dignity/Solidarity/Internationalism highlighted the of import piece of work of Belgrade-based feminist and activist collectives such equally škart and Women in Black, besides as US-based digital-media artist Vesna Pavlović. Reproductions of drawings and texts from I Remember, a 1995 anthology of women's art and writing, were shown along with photographs of actions staged by Women in Black, one of the beginning and virtually important anti-state of war groups of the 1990s, where they used posters and banners designed by škart. Some of those texts from the volume are read aloud in a video by Pavlović featuring protagonists from Women in Black, each delivering heart-wrenching testimonies of loss, honey, and hurting. While this installation is nearly personal stories and loss, the core of the piece of work is solidarity among women survivors and activists, whose focus on internationalism to a higher place ethnic departure was and remains essential to undermining patriarchal violence in Southeastern Europe.
The glossary of migrations also highlighted the struggle of other ethnic minorities in the region. Rena Rädle and Vladan Jeremić point out the racism against indigenous Roma in Serbia, as well as the Eu's continued discriminatory policies confronting Roma from the Balkans. The latter are deported en masse to countries like Serbia and Kosovo, which Germany deems "prophylactic," even though Roma face up particularly intense bigotry there. In an installation in the form of a makeshift firm, Rädle and Jeremić—using wall drawings, texts, and videos—share their research into police violence and housing inequalities, revealing the Eu's displacement policies to be irresponsible and racist. Milena Maksimović's installation One-Way Ticket (2004) examines Chinese clearing to Serbia in the 1990s. This population motility was spurred by Communist-solidarity propaganda that Slobodan Milošević and his wife, Mira Marković, based on political alliances rather than cultural unity. While images of Chinese immigrants working the markets in Belgrade, sleeping within the booths where they work, and eating in segregated groups are indicative of the discrimination and exclusions such migrants have experienced for decades, they also point to ongoing economical upheaval and inequality in Belgrade.
While the spectacle (and budget) of Abramović'southward long overdue return to Belgrade will overshadow "The Nineties," these ii exhibitions exemplified the vibrant if divided contemporary forces at play in the urban center. Just if we are to take Abramović's call for participation by the audience seriously, so we must face the ways in which art is validated through wide publics: not simply past habitual viewers, but by the everyday communities that enable art scenes—and the stars that emerge from them—to thrive. Indebted to the type of performance work Abramović did in the 1970s, the artists featured in "The Nineties" favor larger frames of reference than the-self-and-the-body or even artistic experimentation in general. These artists and collectives look for points of political accountability, solidarity, and collaboration. Their futurity builds on their multinational and multiethnic past: the anti-fascist foundation of socialist Yugoslavia, badly relevant then and at present.
This commodity appears nether the championship "Solo and Ensemble " in the March 2020 issue, pp. 60–65.
Source: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/marina-abramovic-belgrade-retrospective-yugoslav-art-1202681285/
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