Marina Abramović presents ...
Manchester International Festival
Whitworth Art Gallery
3 - 19 July 2009
Marina Abramović, Nikhil Chopra, Ivan Civic, Amanda Coogan, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, Yingmei Duan, Eunhye Hwang, Jamie Isenstein, Terence Koh, Alastair MacLennan, Kira O'Reilly, Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich, Melati Suryodarmo, Nico Vascellari, and Yang Fudong.


I was at Whitworth Gallery Manchester on the final day of fourteen.

We were given white lab coats upon entry and shown to a large room towards the front side of the gallery (where later we would be fed tea, water and biscuits throughout the length of the performances). As part of the ticketing process, each audience member was contracted to spend the entire four hours with the performances/installations.

Abramović presented The Drill (mentioning a brief hierarchy of art with music on top, and performance art a close second, and noting how great we looked in our white coats) with various exercises to tune our senses to alternate ways of noticing. The tasks were familiar (looking at a fellow audience member's eyes without blinking, drinking a glass of water over 10 minutes with eyes closed, measured walking in time (the clumsiest—and last—of the exercises as we entered the rest of the gallery)) yet it was a provocative way to support our access to the works. I was excited by the care we were given, and the way in which this simple device stretched my initial engagements.

Of the fourteen performances filling the Whitworth (Abramović remarked that this was the first time that an entire gallery's collection has been removed in order to enable performance artists to fully inhabit a space), I'd like to talk to the two that have stayed with me strongest.

Closest to the main entrance was Terence Koh, in a delicate white costume (with cheap pearls sewn onto it) and legs painted white, shunting every so slowly across the room. His face was dug deep into the floor, and his physical actions were worm-like, drawing his legs slightly towards his centre then shifting his head and torso towards his (unknown) objective. As I left I noticed that two or three pearls had broken off his costume, and later still noticed that these had been (accidentally?) kicked by other audience members, erasing his trail. The white from his legs had marked the floor, and conversely the floor had dirtied his costume (on the upper side) from previous performances. I felt Koh's travels acutely, the strength and gentility of his presence, the passing of his body through the space.

Nico Vascellari was located at the bottom of the stairwell just to the left of the main entrance, yet the noise he was making was present throughout the entire space. He sat on the floor, covered in the dust of the rock that he was banging with a dented (yet shaped) lump of metal. There were two microphones close to his work, and a speaker at the very top of the two flights of stairs. He simply tapped the bell onto his rock, varying the weight and rhythm of the strikes, obsessively breaking and shaping the rock. At full force, my body felt shocked by the cacophony. It was at once violent, transcendent and beautiful, and I am shaking in memory as I write this (10 days later). It was a deeply affecting work: mysterious, simple, and 'readable' on a profoundly visceral level, and I feel changed by it ... as if the pelting of my body with this sound has somehow penetrated my skin.

Links:
http://www.mif.co.uk/events/marina-abramovi-presents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Koh

In the BBC documentary, The Time of Their Lives, 102 yo Rose Hacker says (initially talking about the Iraq war):

"... I mean the awful thing is that we pretend we know. We know best so you do what I believe in, otherwise I'll kill you. What sort of life ... I mean really clever people are saying that, believing it, I don't know how they can. See, Keats wrote you have to live in the ... negative capability. That means to be able to say, 'I don't know, and I never will know.' There are mysteries, there are wonders, there are beauties, all kinds of things ... how can we with our silly little ant brains understand? I mean, everything's a mystery isn't it, and love is the biggest mystery of all."

Here's the wiki entry on negative capability.

I am not sure about why I am posting this. There is something about the texture of the leather and the look on his face. It's grim, dour, tough and utterly filled with resolve. [Mind you, they did name a tank after him].

Image of Nat Cursio from initial development of "Recovery" (involving Shannon Bott and Nat). Image by Dianne Reid I think.

Reblogged from Kristian Larsen at http://throwdisposablechoreography.blogspot.com/2009/07/oh-em-gee.html

I just don't know what to say.

A bit more about Feldenkrais.

Last Tuesday I was in another Awareness Through Movement class with Rainer Knupp in East London. We started sitting doing some very simple spinal rolls, drawing our attention to the possibilities in both flexion and extension. Rainer then asked us to lie down (on our individual mats), and then said, "Notice what part of your body your attention is drawn to first". But, I'd already starting scanning my body, not settling on a particular part or aspect of my attention, but scanning, hovering across a multitude of points of contact, of sensation, or tightness, or even absence.

I smiled at the time, thinking just how habitual this process of scanning (or channel surfing) the body is for many dancers (perhaps in particular improvisers?). It is undoubtedly an important part of attempting to tune into the body's entirety or wholeness, and yet at the same time it felt as if I had missed out on something. A simple chance to direct my attention to a specific part of my body for a longer period of time, to cease the need to try and notice everything! That's not quite right, but it was a gentle reminder to be aware of the ways and possibilities of noticing the state (or states) of parts of the body, and that these parts might become portals to an alternate kind of corporeal clarity.

Feldenkrais rocks.

This is from Eammon Forde's article in the July issue of Word magazine. He is talking about the black hole created by U2 when they "sucked the life out of Irish music" in the 1980s.

A glut of 'U-Me-2s' naturally followed, such as Aslan, An Emotional Fish, The Adventures and Energy Orchard. What they all had in common was the swapping of intention and emotion for bluster and the husk-like 'grand statement'. Bono is complicit in delivering us a generation of singers who over-emoted and painted in broad, grey, meaningless brush strokes about, you know, life and politics. He was also a massively conservative force, genuflecting to the past despite being forged in the furnace of iconoclastic punk. His reverence, too, for the blues and gospel was less about treating them as living, breathing, evolving, passionate genres and more about proffering them as signifiers of a romanticised 'realness', 'honesty' and 'earthiness' that he would absorb through the osmosis of false emotion. He took the organic and made it synthetic, all plastic words and polyurethane statements.

In my early teens I was swept up by the sound of Bono's voice, his earnestness, the sense I got that he cared, and that what he and the band were doing was important, or that it mattered. But Forde's writing about Bono's appropriation of the blues and gospel strikes a very real chord with me.

It reminds me of the desire for spectacle in art works - in the synthesisation of 'emotion' and 'big ideas' at any cost. I feel myself stepping further and further back from any sort of scale whatsoever. But negotiating personal integrity (whatever that might be, and however one feels it) with the lure of 'exposure' is demanding  ... in carefully working through ideas, gently questioning their worth, their value, and then imagining and playing with the possibilities of their representation, and the ways in which they provoke other thoughts and actions.

And at the risk of ruining this entire post, I still listen to U2. The Unforgettable Fire album remains one of my all-time faves.

 

 

Here is Roger Federer, at the post-match press conference, following his remarkable victory at Roland Garros:

But it was very hard mentally for me to stay within the match during the match, because my mind was always wondering, 'What if? What if I win this tournament? What does that mean? What will I possibly say?'

I don't know.

You can't help it, but to tell yourself, you know, once you win you'll get all the time to think about all these things, but they keep on coming back.

Federer states the problem of performing so elegantly. In my mind it is not about the absence of doubt, or the absence of distraction, it is what one does with those distractions or doubts that is critical. I feel inspired hearing Federer's words—the words of perhaps the most remarkable tennis player ever—because they ground his extraordinary psychological power in the everday.

On Monday I went to a group Feldenkrais session run by Rainer Knupp in East London. It has been some time since I did any Feldenkrais (the last was with Julia Scoglio in Melbourne). For those of you not familiar with Feldenkrais, it's a somatic practice that asks you (and your body) to resolve certain 'problems' or questions. For example, in the session on Monday the task—whilst sitting on the edge of a chair—was to reach down and use your arm to pick up your opposite leg. It sounds banal and easy, but is neither of these things.

There are no 'right' answers to how you generate bodily answers to the problems, just a growing awareness through the physical movements (it is known as Awareness through movement). The actions are done very slowly, and quite a remarkable amount is revealed about one's own movements and body throughout the course of the work/session.

What drew me to writing about the work was simply how wonderful it was to be engaged in this practice. To be involved in gently finding various unprescribed solutions, to be freed from a 'right way' or competitiveness. It was as if Feldenkrais, in this simple 90 minutes, was able to undermine the undeniable egocentrism of our cultural epoch.

It just seemed to matter.

And yet there were no KPIs, no mesurable outcomes, no critical responses, no audits or redundancies.

All this for a measly £8.

Not too shabby at all.

 

 

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Eat your heart out Ms Huffington.