Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic born November 30, 1946 is a New York-based Yugoslavian performance artist. She began her career in the early 1970s. Since she has been performing for over three decades, she has recently started describing herself as the “grandmother of performance art.”What is interesting about Abramovic's work is that it explores the relationship between performer and audience.She does a lot of things that show the limits of the human body, and the possibilities of the mind.

One of her first pieces was done in in 1973. This piece is called "Rhythm 10" in this piece she placed out twenty knives and played the Russian game where she aims in between her split fingers and continues to do this until she cuts herself. After she cuts herself she places that knife down, and picks up another one and repeats the process util she has cut herself twenty times. All of this is being recorded in an audio recorder, and when she finished with all twenty knives she plays back the audio and tries to recreate the same scene. She tries to make the same mistakes she did before at the same time. She sees this as a way of bringing together the past and the present. She also does this as a form of pushing the body to its limit. She says that once you are in the moment of a performance your body can do things you couldn't imagine it doing.

      Rhythm 10
This video was just a recreation of her performance.

Another one of her pieces that pushed her to her own limits was "Rhythm 5." In this piece she lit a giant star on the ground on fire and stood on the outside of it. While she stood on the outside of the burning star she began to cut her nails and hair.She then began throwing her hair and nails into the flames causing a flash of light every time. towards the finally of her performance she jumped into the center of the star. There she began loosing conciseness because of the lack of oxygen. People in the audience didn't realize it until the flames began to get really close and she wasn't reacting to them. A doctor and audeince members pulled her out of the star and may have saved her life. After the performance she expressed her experiance. She was actually angry that the performance took out and showed her limitation. She was angry because her body was limited to perform only in consciousness.  

Rhythm 5

After her Rhythm 5 performance she wanted to further explore the ability of the mind. She was angry about her rhythm 5 performance because she was unable to continue her performance because she became unconscious. So her next performance that explored wether or not consciousness was a limitation of performing and if it could be combined into the performance. She performed Rhythm 2. This was a two part piece where in the first part she took a pill prescribed to people with catatonia. Catatonia is a condition where the person's muscles seize up and become immobilized for hour at a time. Since she was healthy and didn't have this condition she had really drastic reactions to the pill. She began to have seizures and uncontrollable body movements for the first half of her performance. Although she had no controll over her body her mind was lucid and she was just observing what was occurring. After the effects of the pill wore off she took a second pill prescribed to people who are violent and depressed. This caused her to become completely immobilized. Although bodily she was there, her mind was completely removed. In fact she has no memory of the end half of her performance. This is some of her early work which was all about exploring the bouduries and limitations of the human body and mind.

Rhythm 0