You Again, Again

These chairs are not on speaking terms

I noticed that an old post from 2014 – You Again, about Marina Abramović – has attracted a few readers in past weeks, so I thought I'd revisit it myself. In it there is a link to a video of an encounter between Abramović and her ex-partner Ulay, and I was surprised to find that I was more moved by it now than I had been back then. A decade more of living, a few more "absent friends", plus some near misses and general physical and emotional wear and tear will do that, I suppose.

Marina Abramović had a substantial show recently at the Royal Academy (September 2023 - January 2024) that attracted a lot of attention, not least for the dubious prospect of having to squeeze through a doorway between two naked bodies. But although I had booked a ticket in the end I cancelled for some reason or other. TBH, these days, the prospect of travel to London and back can be disincentive enough (see The Next Village).

So here is that post again, as usual in a new, improved! version.

You Again

Marina Abramović is back in the news. She is the ne plus ultra of performance art, the test case, working on the borderline where narcissism, obsession, insanity, sheer daftness, and that nebulous thing called "art" ebb and flow. She is the self-styled "grandmother of performance art", with the stories and the scars to prove it.

I'm not much interested in her work, as such, but the story of her relationship with fellow nutter-cum-artist Ulay is deeply fascinating to me. They met in 1976, and formed an intense folie à deux that found expression in some (now) famous performance pieces: breathing mouth-to-mouth until they both passed out from lack of oxygen; alternately slapping each other in the face until one or the other was unable to continue; bellowing incoherently at each other for hours... Heh... Just the usual stuff of any over-intense relationship, no? "Don't worry, children, Mummy's just suffocating Daddy!" Some of us will have been there from time to time, I expect, although not generally before an appreciative public audience.

But:

In 1988, after several years of tense relations, Abramović and Ulay decided to make a spiritual journey which would end their relationship. Each of them walked the Great Wall of China, starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. As Abramović described it: “That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi Desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye". Abramović conceived this walk in a dream, and it provided what she thought was an appropriate, romantic ending to a relationship full of mysticism, energy, and attraction. She later described the process: “We needed a certain form of ending, after this huge distance walking towards each other. It is very human. It is in a way more dramatic, more like a film ending … Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do.”
(from Wikipedia's Abramović article)

The thing is, having decided to end their relationship as a grandiose piece of performance art, they never met again.

Until... In 2010 Abramović gave what is probably her most famous recent performance, "The Artist is Present", at New York's MOMA, in which she shared a period of silence with each of an endless queue of visitors to the gallery, sitting opposite them at a small table with a composed, blank expression. Then one day, remarkably, Ulay himself simply turned up and sat down, after those 22 years of separation. You can witness what happened next here on YouTube.

Despite the fact that some of those present clearly understood what was happening – which might suggest it was not quite as spontaneous an event as it seemed – it is nevertheless a very moving encounter, and in a spirit quite different from the studiedly inscrutable mask of the main performance. It's an undeniable moment of humanity, disrupting an art-form which usually seems little more than histrionic indulgence in a sterile narcissism, onto which we are free to project whatever we care to or need to. Which may, of course, have been the whole point of the intervention, a sort of reverse Emperor's New Clothes: Look! Beneath all that nakedness she was fully clothed all along!

There is a spoiler update, though: in 2015 Ulay would go on to sue Marina Abramović for breach of contract, alleging that she was declaring herself to be the sole author of works created jointly, and basically owed him loadsamoney. In the event he won, scoring €250K plus legal fees off his ex. Now that's what I call a performance! Although you do have to wonder whether it will ever figure in the catalogue raisonné of their joint projects...

These chairs are being friendly