Marina Abramovic has been particularly influential towards my creative process of developing my Site Specific performance.
Watching the video ‘The Artist is Present’, documenting Marina’s approach to her performances and how she justifies the reasoning behind her pieces, I was particularly struck by how boldly she uses her body to make statements. Often through performance, an audience is fed what they are supposed to believe and feel towards a piece, however the way Marina performs, challenges an audience over often very controversial topics.
I took inspiration from Marina in the sense that I knew I didn’t want to use any speech in my performance, or if it be necessary, I’d use the absolute minimum amount of dialogue. I decided that for my performance I wanted to write invitations to hand to members of the public visiting the Usher Gallery, which they could read in their own time, and then decide whether to come and share a moment with me or not.
“Performance is all about state of mind”. (Akers and Dupre, 2012)
(Therman, 2o12)
This quote said directly by Marina Abramovic claims that to perform a successful piece of Site Specific performance, you need to be determined and have a clear understanding and commitment to what you are portraying and why you feel it is necessary. Site Specific performances often entail an emotional or physically draining concept, therefore your state of mind during a performance needs to be at a considerable level of focus and strength. If the performer wants to portray something to a spectator, the artist themselves needs to be completely involved and enthused in what they are doing in order to attract an audience and achieve what they aim to achieve through their work.
The artwork from the Usher Gallery that I decided to use as my stimulus for my final performance is a piece called ‘Never Leave Home Without It’ by Mark Woods. It features a black heart, resting on a clear stand next to an open black box with pink velvet material inside. It appears as though the box has been unlocked to let the heart out, and that something that is usually not visible to us, is now being displayed for us to acknowledge.
My first thoughts towards creating a performance around this piece were to focus on the idea of hidden feelings of depression, grief or heartbreak that are being masked everyday through the deceiving first glances we take at people.
Works Cited:
- Akers, M. And Dupre, J. (dirs.) (2012) Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present. [film] HBO Documentary Films.
- Therman, J. (2012) Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Once Again Present [online] Available from: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/06/matthew-akers-the-artist-is-present-movie.html [Accessed on 20 March 2014].