A Dish Best Served Intimate.

I've just discovered Marina Abramovic. Apparently she's the grandmother of performance art. MOMA is doing a retrospective of her work, and The New Yorker has a video slideshow on her work.

My previous attitude towards performance art was that it was bullshit. Most of the time. Sometimes it can be great fun, but I think most of it is mostly nonsense. I think if you took some of the strange shit they do in Angsbacka, which is this tree-hugging hippie commune three miles north of Molkom in Sweden, and put it in a gallery, it could count as performance art. Not all of the shit, but some of it, like the tantric sex thing they do at the end could well count as an art piece, with a few modifications.

But Marina Abramovic's work is compelling, quite unlike other stuff I've seen/experienced so far. Mind you the only performance art I've ever experienced in real life was my own, and I'm just a crazy chick with friends that make that sort of art, and I did most of it drunk, so you can't possibly expect a very favorable review from me of the whole affair.

Her stuff however looks pretty painful. It's how performance art should be I feel. Personal, intimate, and genuine. I really like the one where she gets gallery viewers to use, on her body. a bunch of tools placed beside her. It's almost like being invited to take part in a psychological experiment. The one about the two naked people standing on either side of a narrow doorway so people had to squeeze through them is also pretty neat. It'll be sensational if they brought the work here to Singapore and allowed everyone, including children to participate.

Anyway, I will leave you with this photo. 

I think the best sort of performance art is the one you do for yourself in an intimate setting. It's a pity you can't see my back in it, but he had, while both of is were in an addled haze, talking at 100 wpm, drawn an entire map of some fictional land of wonder on my back.

Have you heard of the Museum Of Broken Hearts? It is a traveling gallery of photographs where people send the one photo that defined a relationship that meant a lot to them but is now no longer. I wish I hadn't lost it, but an ex left a bizarre photo of him tied up to the bookshelf in his girlfriend's red thong. With a jar of Nutella beside his face. With a dildo in it. 



More to come....