36. MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ - A SPACE BETWEEN WAITING AND RESPONSE.
Marina Abramović - The Royal Academy - LONDON. Notes from an exhibition.
Marina Abramović - A photograph of ‘The Artist Is Present’, 2012, performance piece, New York.
Marina Abramović - A photograph of ‘The Artist Is Present’, 2012, performance piece, New York.
Faced with focus - interconnected gazes, lines of sight, inside the eyes and out,
empathy - across a room - digitally re created - re-lived from a live recording.
- invisible like a laser, the signal - the sight detected at either end of the invisible.
'The Artist Is Present'.
The artist appears to be searching, studying the face of the viewer, one at a time - zeroing in - whose collective expression seems 'open' to those eyes.
Seen en masse from an inexhaustible camera recording every blink, looking down while the viewer looks ahead - focused and unaware of the constant documentation. the sitter is zeroing out, the camera focused in.
The artist's face - a Madonna, eyes wet exhausted glazed gaze - a line sustained from room to room, looking out looking in - as the flickering images change the atmosphere retains and remains - spaces that occupy an all-encompassing conceptual consideration.
The pencil sharpener of the father presented in the debris of life validations - of images and medals, placed, status with stationery. Stationary status. Stationary stationery.
the sense of waiting -
waiting on a white horse, with the white flag, without charge.
the fashioning of an artistic identity
the fashioning of heroism
the fashioning of martyrdom
created chaos
a sense of distance - the construction of a point
presence of body and without a body
Silhouette impressions of jars - enormous vessels - black mirrored, glazed, inverting a room in their reflection, meeting in the middle of the Great Wall of China - to conclude - a closing ceremony.
A crystal portal - mineral projections - to pass through a needle. a doorway to another space.
Mathew 19:23-24 … it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
Faithful furniture - heeled in crystal - to touch the floor en pointe.
A church room, the threat of penance, the ladders of knives.
impossible realism.
the elongated limbs of the simple - seemingly humble, and yet architecturally conducted - churches without spires.
Minimalist yet maximal - contradictory in impression - the crystals positioned like talismans to protect - and yet - protection is exposed like the weapons of surreal function - ladders to climb to sever and to return to prevent - the function of prevention.
Searching for personal order within the created chaos of control.
The invisible collaborators of a studio, an orchestra of parts - the technician, the filmmaker - the carpenter - akin to the untraceable line of eye contact in 'The Artist Is Present'- the support of the maker allows for the work to function outside of a room set for the mass - the fashioning of such illusions.
The space left within the simplicity of presentation allows for the discomfort of sophistication which provokes a certain nothingness that is neither acknowledged nor defended. To accept like a religion - which the artist actively engages within and uses to stabilise - a Madonna whose presence is felt - even feared - we do not know the values of this world order - of processing - as the faintly heard throaty yells blur with the electrical whirrs of mechanised projections.
A retrospective of retrospection.
Marina Abramović Royal Academy Until 1 January 2024.
Special Thanks: Jessica Armbrister at The Royal Academy, London.