Artworld: doing "covers" of famous performance pieces

Self-Mutilation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery – by Randy Kennedy

Marina Abramovic really had her heart set on being crucified.

It was supposed to be the showstopper, maybe literally, in seven consecutive nights of often harrowing performance art that she will stage beginning Wednesday in the rotunda at the Guggenheim Museum. The crucifixion would have been a re-enactment of a near-mythical event in the canon of performance art, when the artist Chris Burden, in the spring of 1973, had his hands nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen (the "people's car") and then had the car rolled out of a Venice, Calif., garage into the daylight while the engine screamed.

In many ways Ms. Abramovic's redux would have been the perfect illustration of the strange obsession, nurtured for more than a decade, that is bringing her to the Guggenheim: "covering" famous performance art pieces, much in the way one rock band covers another's hit, adoringly but in a different voice, with new riffs and rhythms.

In music, it's a time-honored tradition. It even happens occasionally in the visual arts with artists like Richard Pettibone, who has made a career of painting teeny copies of Warhols, Duchamps and Stellas. But in the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the best-known work from the 1960's and 70's, the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.

And so when Ms. Abramovic - herself a groundbreaking performance artist - started going around seeking permission from artists or their estates, even offering to pay for the privilege of re-enacting the works, she was not always well received. She recounted going to Düsseldorf with her sights on one of Joseph Beuys's seminal pieces from 1965 - "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" - but his widow, Eva, "opened the door and said: 'Frau Abramovic, I got letter from Guggenheim. My answer is no ... but you can have coffee.' " " 'Mrs. Beuys, but I don't drink coffee - can I have a tea?' " Ms. Abramovic replied, as she recalled in a recent interview, grinning slyly at her attempt to draw out the conversation. (It worked; the piece will be one of the seven at the Guggenheim.)

Mr. Burden - who long ago retired from performance but in his prime was almost drowned and once shot in the arm for the sake of art - was not so agreeable. "I don't even know the reasons why - he didn't answer," said Ms. Abramovic, who planned to replace the Volkswagen with a Chaika, a kind of Russian-made limousine she remembered from her youth in Yugoslavia.

"He only had a secretary answer in a letter saying, 'Mr. Burden is not talking publicly these days, and he doesn't give permission to repeat this piece or any other pieces.' I can't tell you how disappointed I was."

She could not claim to be surprised, though. In her early days of performing in Belgrade in the 1970's, Ms. Abramovic (pronounced ah-BRAH-moe-vitch) would have agreed with him. "It was supposed to be that event, in that moment, and that was it," she said. But, along with some other artists, she began to chafe at these strictures, feeling that a video of a performance or written instructions for how a performance should be undertaken could be works of art themselves. "Plus, I am Russian," she said. "We love archives."

By the 1980's, many of the pioneering performance artists of her generation began to burn out or change gears. Mr. Burden moved on to installation pieces and sculpture. Vito Acconci - one of whose more infamous pieces Ms. Abramovic will recreate at the Guggenheim - also stopped performing. But Ms. Abramovic, while also moving into making objects and films, continued to perform grueling pieces with her longtime partner in life and art, the German artist Ulay. After their split in 1988, she returned to performing alone.

As she grew older - she will be 60 next year - she says she felt the strong need to preserve the memory of performances that influenced her as an artist. "There's nobody to keep the history straight," she said. "I felt almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do it." And this sense only grew stronger when she began to see ideas behind many important performances borrowed with no credit given, or appropriated by advertising and fashion.

During the interview, she showed a photo from a 1998 issue of Italian Vogue taken by the fashion photographer Steven Meisel, in which a naked man and woman are spinning away from each other. Then she showed a photo of an almost identical image from a 1976 performance she did with Ulay. Asked whether Mr. Meisel had sought permission or made reference to their work, she laughed.

"Reference?" she said angrily. "Are you crazy? No reference, nothing." (She said she had a lawyer contact Mr. Meisel, who responded that he was very inspired by her work; Mr. Meisel declined to comment for this article.)

In music and the visual arts, copyright protections are well established. But federal copyright laws do not extend to live performance. Choreography, for example, has had clear copyright protection since 1978, when federal laws were updated, but only as a kind of written record. The live performance of a choreographic piece cannot be copyrighted, however. And so neither can, say, the performance of a woman screaming until she loses her voice or brushing and combing her hair until her scalp bleeds - both of which Ms. Abramovic did.

"Anybody can take anything, and we can't do a thing about it," she complained. This is why she insisted on getting permission from artists whose work she wanted to recreate or reinterpret. (She will not be paid for the Guggenheim performances, she said, and according to contracts drawn up with the artists or their estates, only they are eligible for profits from a book and film that will be made in conjunction with the performances.)

In person, Ms. Abramovic does not really convey a sense of being someone willing to carve a star into her stomach with a razor blade, as she will do at the Guggenheim, restaging one her own pieces from 1975. When a visitor arrived recently at her bright, roomy SoHo loft, furnished with nice midcentury tables and chairs, Chopin was playing on the stereo. She made mint tea and put out almonds and pieces of candied ginger. She laughs often, and loudly, and sometimes seems embarrassed when talking about her more extreme work.

For a while now, she has called herself the "grandmother of performance art," but she does not look very grandmotherly, with long, dark hair and a trim figure. She recently posed for a picture in Vogue and chose to dress up like Sofia Loren, in a tight sweater. Contrary to her reputation as a dark priestess of the avant-garde she also spoke with delight - and no apparent irony - about how an episode of "Sex and the City" recreated scenes from a 2002 performance in which she fasted for 12 days while living full-time on a shelf at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea.

"It's fantastic," she said, "the popular culture absorbing me."

Despite her years of pushing her body to its extremes, Ms. Abramovic does not seem to be much the worse for it, though she does bear some scars and pulled up her shirtsleeve to show a recently acquired one, long and straight, on her left upper arm.

"In normal life, if I cut myself I cry like a baby because I'm totally emotional and vulnerable, and I don't like pain," she said. But in a performance, much as in ancient religious endurance rites, "then the pain is not an issue."

"We are afraid of dying, and we are afraid of pain, so much," she said. "I like to get rid of the fear of pain by staging the pain in front of the audience, going through this pain and showing them that it's possible. It turns into something else. Then you have this energy to do it."

Partly to prove that she is as committed to these ideas as she was in her 20's, Ms. Abramovic had wanted to include not only Mr. Burden's crucifixion piece but also a re-creation of what she considers her most radical work, called "Rhythm 0." Performed only once in Naples in 1974, its premise was terrifyingly simple: She agreed to stand in a gallery for six hours while anyone who came in could choose any of 72 objects around her - including knives, scissors, a needle, a loaded gun - and do anything they wanted to her with the objects. It was her only work in which she essentially ceded control over her body, and over the pain to be inflicted, to her audience.

The participants became involved slowly at first, but after a while Ms. Abramovic's clothes were cut off, and her body marked, burned and cut. Finally, a man took the gun and made her put it up to her head, trying to force her to squeeze the trigger. She didn't resist, but a fight ensued as other spectators intervened. "This was the only performance where I was really ready to die," she said. Trying to explain why, she repeated a well-known quotation from the artist Bruce Nauman, one of whose performance pieces will also be recreated in her show: "Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true."

But she will not get the chance to demonstrate that proposition at the Guggenheim, at least in so stark a fashion. She and Nancy Spector, the museum's curator of contemporary art, had long discussions about the dangers involved in the piece, about the difficulty - or near impossibility - of getting permission for the gun and about whether the piece could be staged without it.

"The risks really outweighed anything else," Ms. Spector said, "and then it really came down to the legal questions. We just couldn't find a way to have a loaded gun in the museum. And she, being who she is, could not do something halfway. She really did want to perform a work that had that level of toughness that really confronted her audience and gave them a sense of this side of her work."

There is no question, even with the exclusion of the loaded guns and nails, that Guggenheim visitors will see tougher work than they have seen on Museum Mile in a long time. Each performance will last for seven hours, adding Ms. Abramovic's own twist on performances that were originally much shorter, stretching them out into her trademark endurance tests.

In the Beuys piece, she will cover her head in honey and gold leaf, cradling a dead rabbit and whispering to it about pictures on the wall (a meditation on rationality and language - and a kind of in-joke about art scholarship). In a cover of a Gina Pane performance from 1973, she will lie on a bed above lighted candles and make cuts around her fingernails and lips while slides of women painting their nails flash on the screen. Ms. Pane's work often focused, very painfully, on the objectification of women, a theme that Ms. Abramovic will also explore in a less grueling but more revealing way in a Valie Export performance from 1969: she will stalk around a stage with a large fake gun, wearing pants with the crotch removed. In recreating the piece by Mr. Acconci, she will not be seen at all, but like Mr. Acconci when he made it famous in 1972, she will be concealed beneath the stage, masturbating and speaking suggestively through a microphone to the visitors walking near her.

"The question is whether the piece will really work with her doing it, and not him," Ms. Spector said. "We don't know. This whole thing is about asking questions as much as it is about presenting finished work. I think it's starting a discussion that a lot of us really need to have."

She added: "Of course, there's also the practical question of how she is going to do this, physically, and I'm not even sure."

Occasionally, Ms. Abramovic is not quite sure herself.

"I am so afraid of this piece," she said, "but the moment the public is there, I'll go from a lower self to a kind of higher self. I don't know how. It just happens."

Plus, for the first time, she said, she has hired a personal trainer.

"I'll be O.K.," she said, laughing. "He is good. Very tough."