Marina Abramović's Video Diary.

Art Marina Abramović's latest show is a 512 hour long performance piece at the Serpentine Galleries in London, where across the opening hours of seventy-two days, she's inviting a maximum of a hundred and sixty people into an almost completely empty gallery space (the whole gallery space is empty in fact) and asking them to share that space with her and now and then following her whispered orders to stand in various places including facing a wall. The Guardian's reviews of the piece are pretty vivid and speak of near religious experiences.

As well as a tumblr posting visitor's experiences, Abramović is also posting a nightly video diary, the latest of which from yesterday is embedded below, in which she describes the notable events of the day and what artistic discoveries she's made as a way to give an audience who can't make it to the gallery some sense of what it must be like to be in her presence.  The result has all the nerviness of a hostage appeal coupled with the openness of a haul video, but instead of telling us about the latest Rimmel lipstick she's bought at Boots, the artist is offering us her emotional turmoil.

New videos will be posted at the Arts Council's thepace.org which is back up and running in a form which is focused so far in aligning itself with museums and art galleries and at The Serpantine's own website where they're piled up one on top of the other so that you can see even more clearly how the artist changes across the length of the project. The latest is pretty raw actually as she describes something happening for the first time and actually taking the whole thing pretty well.  Some artists would be furious ...

No comments: