A year ago there was a gif pic pop up in the Chinese internet .The pic its video called “The Artist Is Present” It was made a lot of people cried about their are love story. Whom are the casts？ They are both artist Marina Abramovi公式 and Ulay. They were both lover and co-workers. Art and same dreams pushed those two young people met and flowing in love in the past. They are made a lots of good action arts together. And Made as Marina called the mother of action art. Whats the part moved me the most？ Not moment when their are meets again in the “The Artist Is Present”
It was when their apart from the action art“The great wall”Its totally showing off how its sexual relations begin and finished. Sometimes they are no harm from outside. Just the timing was being away. And its the only and nature way. It also bring us a question about “whats being a whole way of both love and life？”
In her first performance in Edinburgh 1973,Abramovi公式 explored elements of ritual and gesture. Making use of twenty knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the Russian game, in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of one's hand. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had set up, and record the operation. After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body the pain and the sounds of the stabbing, the double sounds from the history and the replication. With this piece, Abramovi公式 began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. “Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do.”
To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramovi公式 developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her. Abramovi公式 placed on a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, olive oil, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.
Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained passive) people began to act more aggressively. As Abramovi公式 described it later: “What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.”“I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”
In 1976, after moving to Amsterdam, Abramovi公式 met the West German performance artist Uwe Laysiepen, who went by the single name Ulay. When Abramovi公式 and Ulay began their collaboration,the main concepts they explored were the ego and artistic identity. This was the beginning of a decade of influential collaborative work. Each performer was interested in the traditions of their cultural heritages and the individuals desire for ritual. Consequently, they decided to form a collective being called “The Other”
Rather than concern themselves with gender ideologies, Abramovi公式/Ulay explored extreme states of consciousness and their relationship to architectural space. They devised a series of works in which their bodies created additional spaces for audience interaction. In discussing this phase of her performance history, she has said: “The main problem in this relationship was what to do with the two artists’ egos. I had to find out how to put my ego down, as did he, to create something like a hermaphroditic state of being that we called the death self.”
