The Body perceived
Written by Sophie Marx
Photography taken by Camille Ela
The conjunction between woman and artist has a dark, complex history besotted with rejection, infantilisation and confinement. If a woman made it to be a painter, she was expected to be pure and feminine in her art as she was expected to be in life. “For much of art history, female artists had to reconcile the conflict between what society expected of women and what it expected of artists” wrote Lauren Elkin. Only in the last century were women able to break down the walls separating the female artist from the artist, venturing beyond aesthetics men had dictated to define art’s contemporary landscapes and creating their own.
Most notable changes are born by controversy, drawing from extremes, and breaking down barriers with demanding force. Or in modern terms – shock value. And what is more shocking than a woman reclaiming her own body, presenting it in its natural form and equating it with art.
Judith Butler stated that it is the dry act of performing gender that constitutes who we are. How will people react, and how will our understanding of our own bodies change when we question its limits, challenge its use, its perception and its very place in the world?
When I set out to write this article, I wanted to talk about human nature, Rhythm 10 to be precise. But there is more to the performance than what it revealed about human capability in six hours. What it reveals has to be talked about in the context of the woman who procured it – Marina Ambramović – for us to truly understand the thought-provoking impulses of her work and how it relates back to the female body performed.
Marina Ambramović was born in 1946 in Communist Belgrade under Tito’s reign to two war heroes. She may have been spared the torment of partisan poverty, but the roots of her suffering flourished in the luxurious apartment she grew up in. Militant communist ideologies were fanning the flames of her abuse, isolating the young girl; her only escape in her mind, in the world of art.
“Human beings are afraid of very simple things: we fear suffering, we fear mortality” wrote Abramović. Instead of giving in to them, she used and converted these fears to liberate herself and push her body as far as possible. Through this she became the mirror of possibility for the audience.
Her work is not specific to the female body and its experiences. Rather, it is used as an androgynous medium that happens to have breasts and a vagina. She didn’t undress to protest the banishment of her sex from the public’s eyes, but only staged her naked body when it served the performance of her art.
Women’s bodies have historically been banished to the private sphere, policed and punished by the body politik. Stuck between the dichotomy of Madonna/Virgin, Goddess/disfigured man. In a recent bold protest Ahoo Daryaei, a young Iranian woman and student at Tehrans Azad university, removed her clothes stripping to her underwear publicly in an act of defiance against Iran’s mandatory hijab laws. She had reportedly been harassed by members of Iran’s Basij militia on university grounds. Instead of staying silent in the misogynistic objectification against her fully covered body, she reclaimed its power and her autonomy over it.
Video footage shows the student being escorted to an unmarked vehicle by men in plain clothes. Since the arrest, her whereabouts remain unknown. According to her university, a mental disorder was the cause of her defiance.
A mental disorder. Crazy. Hysteric. Terms women are all too familiar with. A woman could not possibly be in her right mind as she is publicly standing up to the people policing her body and reclaiming the narrative. The act of protesting, of challenging the “as it is” too often is viewed under the label of insanity.
But there is nothing crazy about a woman reclaiming her body and autonomy. “Art is a matter of life and death,” said Bruce Nauman. While I doubt that the unknown woman’s act of protest was intended as performance art, it was a performance piece. A political performance. Performance art. Politics is a matter of life and death, as is art. Both are invariably intertwined, beating to the sound of a conjoined heart.
In this context, the difference between Daryaei’s political performance and Abramović’s performance art is that one was done in the safety of galleries, Marina in control over her actions and the potential consequences, while Daryaei’s defiance was done in a politically dangerous climate with a high certainty of physical punishment, imprisonment or death.
Both performers came from a place of suppression and suffering and the subsequent, craving of freedom, a body without boundaries. In her performances Abramović superseded the confines of the body, using it as her sole medium in her early work. With an invitation to an Edinburgh at festival thus, began the Rhythm series.
In the first, Rhythm 10, she played the perfect Slavic game. She spread out her fingers on the floor and stabbed down a sharp knife, fast, in the spaces between her fingers. She had ten knives spread out on a white paper. Every time she cut herself, hitting down the knife as fast as she could, she groaned out in pain. Her tape recorder would pick up the sound and she switched to the next knife. When she put down the tenth knife, the white paper underneath her hand stained with blood, she switched the first tape recorder to playback, turned on a second tape recorder and began the game again. This time the two lines of sound, the knives rhythmically podding down, she aligned her new groans with the old, attempting to cut herself at the same time the sound occurred.
She later described the experience as exceeding herself, feeling as if she was operating through a higher self. An energy source that morphed her and the audience into a single organism.
Ambramović staged the body under assault. In Rhythm 10 by her own hand, in Rhythm 0 the audience went from being onlookers, merged with her, existing in the same field of energy, to her abusers.
Rhythm 0 was to go as followed:
Instructions: there are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
Performance: I am the object / During this period I take full responsibility / duration: 6 hours / 1974 / Studio Morra, Naples
In Virginia Woolf’s words she was showing the “truth of our experience as bodies.” Particularly female bodies. Like a statue Marina stood still in the room surrounded for the most part by members of the Italian art establishment and their wives.
“If someone wanted to put the bullet into the pistol and use it, I was ready for the consequences,” she said to herself, “okay, let’s see what happens.”
It started out moderately, the wives telling the men what to do with Marina, draping a shawl around her shoulders, putting a rose in her hand, kissing her. After three hours the energy in the room shifted, turned sexual against her when a man cut apart her shirt and took it off. People began moving her into various poses, carried her around the room and sat her on a table, her legs spread apart, sticking a knife into the wood close to her crotch. The acts of violence continued and increased, as people stuck pins in her, and one man cut into her neck sucking her blood from the wound. Another man just stood very close to her, breathing heavily. He was also the one that loaded the bullet into the pistol. He was the only person during the performance that genuinely caused her fear. Let’s see what happens. He put the pistol into her hand and moved its mound to point at her neck. Then he touched the trigger. It was at that point that people intervened. Public opinion was split, some wanted the performance to stop, others for it to run its course.
At two in the morning, after the six-hour performance was over and the doll came back to life, the remaining participants rushed in embarrassment and fear out of the room unable to face her. In her memoir she later wrote that she believed the only reason she wasn’t raped that day was due to the presence of the wives.
What her performance revealed is how easy it is for people to forget about their morals and to disregard humanity when the person across from them is powerless or is perceived to be less than fully human. The female body since the writing of the Old Testament until now has been viewed as an abnormality, for sexual desire, the embodiment of deviance, a weapon, punishment.
The aesthetic and the political, in Lauren Elkin’s words occupy the same body. Whether intended as a performance or rebellious protests art or political, the structural abuse of the female body joins them all into one – a struggle against the harsh realities of bodies constantly at war.
And yet, we have witnessed a redemption arc in both cases: the audience stopped the man from pulling the trigger and potentially taking Ambramović’s life, showing albeit weakly, a sense for righteousness and humanity.In the case of Daryaei, despite her university’s claim of her insanity, young Iranians across social media see the act as a protest against the country’s strict dress code for woman and celebrate her bravery.
The body perceived, especially a female body inevitably connected to abuse, is a reclamation of its power. Women like Ambramović and Daryaei are changing the narrative from what patriarchal society deemed to be its place to shaping their own space in which their bodies are not only theirs to decide over, but a powerful tool exceeding sexual association.