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Marina Abramovic’s Count On Us – a work replete
with spooky, haunted house imagery of skeletons, blackness, and the United
Nations – is straight-up Abramovic. A dark, multi-paneled room at
the 2004 Whitney Biennial displays a series of unnerving and sardonic
videos that evoke the kind of weird chuckle one discharges when simultaneously
being in on a joke and made fun of. On one wall, an unenthusiastic and
black-clad children’s choir sings the praises of United Nations
aid (directed with gusto by the artist in a skeleton costume). The choir
sounds more like a mechanical hum than anything else. Another wall shows
a close-up of a young girl and boy gazing upwards with stolid pride, or
perhaps longing. And there is a human Soviet star comprised of (yep) children,
in black, as the artist (still in her skeleton get-up) stands in the mush-pot.
What is going on here? It’s clear that the death
of something is being portrayed – communism? hope? innocence? children?
– and that the substance of that thing is somehow related to politics.
Images implying death and drama have long become familiar in artworks
dealing with political subject matter. Yet, though these images are bold
in Count On Us, it is unclear at first glance what political statement
is being made and what, exactly, is dead. Is the work a critique of the
United States’ role in foreign politics, its 1999 bombing of Belgrade
(the artist’s place of origin) and its always-tenuous relationship
to the UN? Perhaps it is a pro-interventionist work, a chiding of the
UN for not being active enough in the Balkans. The title – knowing
Abramovic’s (and the Whitney’s) penchant for irony –
would seem to suggest the artist’s disappointment with the amount
of aid the UN delivered during and following the Balkan wars. More controversially,
Abramovic’s Serbian origins suggest the possibility that the piece
is a work of Serbian nationalism, and is thus to be read as a critique
of international intervention in the former Yugoslavia.
Marina Abramovic was born in Belgrade in 1946, the product
of a Serbian and Montenegrin union. Her parents were leaders of the Yugoslavian
Partisans during WWII, her father a national hero, her mother a major
in the army and the director of the Museum of Art and Revolution. She
spent her formative years in Tito’s oppressive communist regime
and began her career there as an adult. From her earliest works, the themes
of purification and freedom through ritual and pain are apparent. Those
familiar with Abramovic’s art are used to seeing her engulfed in
flames, or nude, or bloody, or covered in puncture wounds. Abramovic is
a master of anticipation and ‘shock ‘n awe’. It’s
not simply that you never know what she will do next, but that she manages
in so many of her pieces to focus your attention precisely on what comes
next; in other words, on the shock itself, and less on the specific content
of the shock. At the same time, the political imagery in many of Abramovic’s
pieces – like Count On Us – is undeniable. Asked about this
explicitly, she has stated that her work is not political in and of itself.
At most, she asserts, it might be considered an emotional response to
political events.
At the 1997 Venice Biennale, Abramovic presented a work
called Balkan Baroque, a “play” that included video and an
ongoing performance with the artist sitting in a pile of bloody animal
bones and manically trying to scrub them clean. In an interview, she said
of the piece:
I'm only interested in an art which can
change the ideology of society...Art which is only committed to aesthetic
values is incomplete...I don't defend anyone, neither the Serbs nor the
Bosnians nor the Croats...I'm trying to deal with my own emotions, for
example with this tremendous feeling of shame which I have about this
war. As an artist, you can only deal with what there is inside you. I'm
making this play because it is the only way to react emotionally to the
war.
Putting aside the fact that this kind of rhetoric somewhat
mirrors that of Serbian apologists who condemn “nationalism in general”
and claim that “we’re all to blame”, Abramovic’s
“tremendous feeling of shame” (for what it is unclear) underlines
again her interest in the personal over the political. Artists can only
hash out their angst publicly in a sea of paint or bones; they may be
deeply affected by politics but (according to Abramovic) are in no position
to make public their own political ideas or opinions.
And yet, because of or in spite of this kind of assertion,
the most interesting and also queer image in Count On Us, entitled Count
On Us (Tesla), shows Ms. Abramovic holding what looks like an office-grade
fluorescent light-stick to a sci-fi Tesla coil, an image that is part
Planetarium laser light show and part 1930’s Frankenstein. In a
work pregnant with political imagery, Count On Us (Tesla) is suddenly
giving us something else—science and technology, displayed as art,
the former almost ‘charging up’ the latter.
Nicola Tesla, “Master of Lightning,” the
man who put the AC in the DC, was a Serbian engineer who moved to New
York at the age of 28, where he died, penniless and alone, in 1943. Lauded
for the alternating current and the ‘Tesla coil’, a transformer
for receiving and generating radio waves that would be used in radio and
television communications, Tesla was one of those fabled visionaries who
produces both world-changing inventions and a whole lot of crazy crap.
He was obsessed with the idea that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly
and looked forward to a world system created and connected by wireless
technology. He described a means of tapping the sun's energy with an antenna,
thought that the weather could be controlled with electrical energy, and
gave Mark Twain spontaneous diarrhea with his ‘healing machine’.
He had to prove to Edison that alternating currents were safe, only to
be accused later of having contributing to the invention of the electric
chair (for which he has achieved a near-cult status).
Tesla had strongly pacifist views and sought throughout
his life to develop a technological means of making war impossible. In
the 1930s he was working on a charged-particle ray The New York Times
referred to as a Death Beam, which would be so powerful as to “bring
down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles..."
Should every country have one of these ‘peace beams’, war
would prove impossible. Powered by a series of plants along each country’s
coasts, these antiwar machines would also have had peacetime applications,
most notably in their ability to transmit power over long distances, wirelessly.
Despite some funding from the USSR, Tesla’s peace
beam idea never came to pass, though his dream of wireless technologies
is becoming more real all the time. In an article in Electric Experimenter
magazine in 1919, Tesla wrote,
War cannot be avoided until the physical
cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is
the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only through annihilation
of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport
of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions
be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations.
What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals
and communities all over the earth... Peace can only come as a natural
consequence of universal enlightenment...
Add a little dose of ‘transgression through pain’
and it’s easy to see why Marina Abramovic is interested in Tesla.
In fact, the reference to Tesla in Count On Us seems to elucidate her
intentions in general. Those seeking an explicit political statement in
this or any of her works are missing the point entirely. Abramovic, like
Tesla, not only wants to change the world but seeks to do so through transcending
the political altogether. She has often claimed in interviews that she
feels herself to be a bridge between the East and the West. Tesla, however,
is not talking about bridges; he’s talking about eliminating that
distance between people and nations completely, ‘annihilating’
it and the objects which maintain it. Still, Abramovic has her own version
of the complete annihilation of distance.
In a 1990 interview with Louwrien Wijers and Johan Pijnappel,
Abramovic discussed her thoughts about the future of the artist and the
artwork:
I believe the 21st century will be a world
without art in the sense that we have it now. It will be a world without
objects, where the human being can be on such a high level of consciousness
and has such a strong mental state that he or she can transmit thoughts
and energy to other people, without needing objects in between…
[The public and artist] will just sit or stand, like the Samurai in old
Japan, looking at each other and transmitting energy. This is the future
world I see as an artist: a non-objective world.
Universal enlightenment and transcendence; that’s
the real meaning and focus of her work and Count On Us is no exception.
Marina Abramovic has spent much of her career using politically charged
images while claiming to be uninterested in politics per se, at least
as an artist, usually obscuring the specifics of her own politics. This
is because Abramovic uses political themes mainly as tools for ‘consciousness-raising’.
Art – good art anyway – is enlightenment; this is the artist’s
special role in society. The artist is meant to transcend the everyday
and change society’s thinking. In the future envisioned by Abramovic,
good artists (and scientists) will have already done their job: to eliminate
the ‘objects’ through which we now communicate, like phones
and art and maybe even language. This ‘transmission of energy’
can certainly be likened to Tesla’s ‘annihilation of distance’
and certainly opens up some wild possibilities for the world of 21st Century
art. Just imagine: Artists could transmit their work to the public without
even moving, much less wielding a brush, delivering pure artistic inspiration
through a kind of Vulcan mind meld simply by looking at their audience.
Gallery owners would be obsolete, of course, or perhaps they would just
buy shares of the artist’s psyche. We could dismantle stages, destroy
costumes, smash galleries. In fact, art itself, as we now know it, would
be but a memory, and the artist, nude and radiating heat and light, would
finally be free from the chains of the art object.
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