What the Marina Abramović Exhibition Taught Me About Connection and Ambition
Or, I squeezed myself between two naked people and had a revelation
"Marina Abramović. The Cleaner" by Humans Of Tukulti is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
A woman sits at a table. A man sits down in front of her and they look at each other in silence. They smile, tears start to form in their eyes and still they say nothing. Eventually the woman reaches her hands across the table and with delight, the man does the same. They sit their holding hands and crying.
You might have seen a video clip of the scene I’m describing. It went viral a few years ago during artist Marina Abramović’s last live performance at the Museum of Modern Art. The piece saw Abramović sitting in silence at a table while members of the public came and sat opposite her for a minute. I saw the clip of her being joined by her former lover, Ulay, who she hadn’t seen in person for nearly two decades, when it went viral last year but it was only when I went to an exhibition of her work at the Royal Academy this week that I realised the power of the full piece and the woman herself.
Have you ever been to an exhibition where within the first 30 seconds you feel the hairs across your body stand to attention? Where the further into the exhibition you go the more seen you feel, rather than the exhibits themselves? Or where when you leave you feel changed in some way but you can’t quite put a finger on how? That was me on Wednesday afternoon as I wandered through the galleries of the Royal Academy marvelling at the creations around me.
The current exhibition has been getting a lot of press for its more sensationalist pieces. There is the entryway from one gallery to the next, where a young man and woman stand on each side, completely naked, forcing you to squeeze between their flesh if you want to pass through. For a beat I found myself stuck between strength and softness, feeling three heartbeats reverberating through my body and keenly aware both of my desire to regress to babyhood and just stay there, held in place by someone else’s breath, and a shameful panic that I really shouldn’t be lingering next to a strange man’s penis that he only has out for the sake of art.
Then there are the pieces that Abramović is most famous for. Photos of her naked, covered in blood and crying after she’d allowed an audience to use her body in any way they wished as part of a performance. Images from “The Artist is Present” as she held the gaze of the person in front of them, and the impact it had on them to be seen. And then a woman living in the gallery, repeating Abramović’s performance from 2002, moving between open rooms on a platform, staring down at the audience below, trapped there by ladders where the steps are knives.
I remembered this final piece from its inclusion in the final series of Sex and the City. The Russian takes Carrie on a date to see it and she laughs at it, convinced that the artist must sneak out at night because why would she want to put herself through that? I’m sure I would have sneered alongside Carrie back then but seeing it now it seemed as honest as SATC was contrived. There were no Manolos here, no trips to Paris or overblown ballgowns, just a woman stripped back to the basics of her humanity and more deeply connected to the people around her because of it.
The theme of connection runs through all of Abramović’s work. In the early years she seeks connection through her body, trying to find the explanation of what it means to be human in the physical representation of it. I was struck by how the work that features both her and her then lover, Ulay, lights her so brightly while putting him in the shadows. As though the exploration of the human body is something to be curious about in women and shameful about in men. You see the two of them pushing each other to extremes, each asking more and more of their bodies and of the trust that connects them.
In later years, she finds connection through nature and then through spirituality. I fell in love with a part of the exhibition which features sculptures made from rock and crystals, designed for a person to lean or lie on them. In Abramović’s world, we find connection when we’re physically in touch with nature - when we use it to support us or hold us in the way that we once used other humans.
It is this understanding of connection that makes her work so powerful. When she sits across a table from a stranger and looks them straight in the eye, she’s asking them to be with her in the stillness. She’s asking them to let her see them - without judgement or agenda. The woman currently living in the Royal Academy did the same. As she looked down from her suite at the voyeurs staring up at them, I could see her visibly sending them love. She chose to love their humanity without knowing anything about them or requiring anything of them. I watched that exchange and felt healed by it.
We make a lot of effort to connect with others, particularly at this time of year. We buy gifts and plan outings. We host elaborate meals and talk about being able to spend quality time together. But if I learned anything from that hour in Abramović’s world, it was that connection is so much simpler than that. Connection is about choosing to see someone from a place of love, nothing more is required.
I left that exhibition lit up, filled with a joy and an enthusiasm for life. The braveness and ambition in Abramović’s work inspired me. Where could I bring that level of commitment - that trust in the power of art - to my own work, to my own life? What do I want to explore, which shadows do I want to expose, and what would it like to play all out in those areas? These are questions that I have no answers to but the fact that I’m asking them is proof of the change that she affected in me. I went to that exhibition exhausted and lost. I left reconnected.
A reminder that on January 20th / 21st I will be running a two day mini-retreat to help you find purpose and abundance in 2024. Will it be featuring some of my learnings from The Abramović Method? I’m sure it will! Find out more here.
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