1972-2021, fifty years of activity. Marina Abramović’s artistic career is on display at the new cultural center in Bergamo, created from the redevelopment of an industrial complex, with an anthological exhibition that retraces five decades and inaugurates the exhibition program of the space. “between breath and fire” is the title of the path of installations, photographic blow-ups and videos that can be visited at gres art 671 (all strictly lowercase), thanks to the impeccable curatorship of Karol Winiarczyk and the contribution of the Pesenti Foundation (Roberto Pesenti is president of gres). If for Gabriele Basilico the city is a body that breathes, for Abramović body and breath are one and the same, and this exhibition provides us with ample proof of this thanks to twenty-five works divided into four thematic chapters and fortunately without clumsy re-performances seen elsewhere and made with other people: the very intense art of Marina Abramović must be experienced either with her or without her (see the conceptual strength of one of the artist’s most important performances – not included in this anthology – The Artist Is Present). The strength of the large photographs and videos that reproduce some of the most famous performances is further magnified by the words that accompany the exhibition and that give us back the extraordinary impulses that are at the base of the creative energy of the artist of Serbian origin and American adoption.
Marina Abramović, portrait ©ph. PaoloBiava, courtesy gres art 671
There was talk of four thematic chapters: the element that lights up a scrupulous visitor is represented by the lack of real physical barriers between the different sections, so much so that some introductory panels are found on the imaginary border of the enormous hangar that is the exhibition hall. “Breath” is the first part and the relationship between biological necessity and the use of breath that the artist makes to connect interiority and the world is clearly evident. Thus we sense the female body immersed under a blanket of quartz (Dozing Consciousness, 1997), we see the artist endlessly pronouncing the words to be released into the world and retained in her memory (Freeing Memory, 1975), we see her again in the act of freeing her voice with continuous screams, sometimes almost inhuman, that transform the voice itself into a sound instrument (Freeing the Voice, also from 1975), and we imagine how capable she is of freeing her own body (in fact Freeing Memory and Freeing the Voice are two acts of the performative triptych that also includes Freeing the Body). A primordial act, the scream, is combined with a personal need, to verify which words the artist manages to save: they are not simple exercises in style, as her cerebral and physical effort is evident, which she gives to our gaze almost to the point of exhaustion. Apparently, but it is not necessarily so, a bit of peace can come to her in Stromboli (performance from 2002), the volcanic island where Marina Abramović creates a different stage of her project on the body and breathing: we see the artist’s face and imagine her body lying on the shoreline, lulled by the motion of the waves, recalling the continuous eruptions that are the hallmark of this place.
Marina Abramović. “between breath and fire”, installation view at gres art 671, Bergamo, photo A. Di Corbetta, courtesy gres art 671
The Aeolian performance is on the border between two fundamental elements of the Belgrade artist’s creativity: in fact, by moving a little, the observer finds himself in the second part of the exhibition, “The Body”. An incredible ability to maintain one’s self-control is the hallmark of the performance with the candle: Artist Portrait with a Candle – C (2013) reveals the artist in white and her finger resting on the flame completely blackened. The body is now at the limits of biological endurance of pain and the stresses it causes to the nervous system. These limits are powerfully solicited in the thematic series Lips of Thomas (begun in 1975), which in this exhibition sends us back the video of the cuts to the belly, necessary to form a pentagon, also challenging our ability to maintain the gaze and stimulating a spontaneous desire to intervene. The powerful osmosis between art and artist is at the heart of the 1975 performance showing Marina Abramović in the act of violently brushing her thick hair (simple and very effective title, Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful) and even more so in Dissolution (1997), in which we see, also with vibrant zooms on the epidermis, the artist’s back violently whipped by a whip that reminds us of the hair shirt of Franciscan memory. At the end of the performance, Abramović trembles: a superior and different state can only be reached through the energetic shaking of one’s mental and physical limits. Not violently on a physical level, but certainly disturbing on a mental level, is the miniature reproduction of the house overlooking the ocean (in reality a New York art gallery) that was the scene of the twelve days of fasting transparently visible from the outside (a not insignificant detail: the rungs of the stairs connecting the three rooms are made of knife blades). The performance is from 2002 and the static reproduction on display (accompanied by video frames) is entitled The House with the Ocean View Model.
Marina Abramović. “between breath and fire”, installation view at gres art 671, Bergamo, photo A. Di Corbetta, courtesy gres art 671
Recalling once again the concept already used before, the passage from the second to the third section of the exhibition is imperceptible. How, in fact, should the very famous Imponderabilia be classified? Among the works of the series “The Body” or among those of the following series titled by the curator “The Other”? In the opinion of the writer, in both definitions, because Imponderabilia uses both the body (nude, both male and female) and the inclusion of the other (the spectator who must pass between these two nakednesses placed on the door of a gallery in Bologna). It is 1977 and in the original performance Abramović and her partner Ulay make the public an essential part of the artistic moment, forced as they are (without other entrances) to choose to turn their clothed body to the chest of one or the other. The work is exhibited here in the form of a photographic print and video and it is indeed interesting to note the sense of estrangement of those who, among the users, become an element of the artistic creation. The artist from Belgrade reaches the height of tension and cruel, simple genius with Rest Energy (1980), a performance, summarized here in Bergamo with a photographic blow-up, in which she literally entrusts her life into the hands of her partner. The performance scene in fact depicts the members of the duo facing each other, with a (real) bow and a (real) arrow aimed at her heart and held back thanks to simple postural balance. The performance lasts four interminable minutes and is objectively magnificent: we know that she has no control over the situation and depends exclusively on her partner with whom she stares fixedly into the eyes, creating a real and tragic complicity.
Marina Abramović. “between breath and fire”, installation view at gres art 671, Bergamo, photo A. Di Corbetta, courtesy gres art 671
The video of the 2001 performance, Mambo a Marienbad, takes the artist back to her beloved Italy and precisely to the white rooms of the former psychiatric hospital in Volterra. Spectators must dance with ‘special’ shoes that hinder the fluidity of their movements, while Abramović arrives and dances naturally to the notes of a mambo that recalls a film by Alain Resnais. Insomnia (1997), part of a larger work, is the performance video placed frontally because here too the artist is in the act of dancing, no longer dressed in red as in the mambo but in total black in an undefined space.
Marina Abramović, “Seven Deaths”, 2021 © Marina Abramović, courtesy Lisson Gallery and The Marina Abramović Archives, photography by Todd-White Art Photography
The black vestal introduces us to the last section of the exhibition, which has as its title and constant references “Death”. A new and tormented Maria Callas, the artist welcomes us by taking on the unbearable lightness of a skeleton, thus recalling a Tibetan practice of contiguity with death and deceased people useful for acquiring greater empathy towards this natural and final stage of existence Carrying the Skeleton (I) (2008). But the true fulcrum of the exhibition lies in the last and multiple stage which illustrates, through surprising sculptural works in alabaster and video, the most recent creativity of Marina Abramović who, in a sometimes very baroque way, also thanks to the participation of the actor William Dafoe and constant references to the artistic technique of Bill Viola, shows us the seventy-five-year-old performer grappling with self-destruction and death to the notes of famous arias sung by Maria Callas. Seven Deaths (2020-21) is a performative collage in which there is no audience: in her current anagraphic maturity, the artist has evidently intended to do without one of the pillars on which her art has historically been based. The Tree (1972) is the last work that shows us a series of sonorous fronds that, simulating tree fronds, emit birdsong. The installation, originally conceived in full Titoist power, with a temporal and epochal leap connects to recent statements by Marina Abramović, increasingly physically linked to the non-human world due to an inextinguishable need for interior and global harmony.
Info:
Marina Abramović. between breath and fire
14/09/2024 – 16/02/2025
gres art 671
Via San Bernardino, 141 – Bergamo
https://gresart671.org/it
I am Giovanni Crotti and I was born in June 1968 in Reggio Calabria to be reborn in June 2014 in Piacenza, the city where I live. My income is guaranteed by digital consultancy, and I then spend it largely on art and letterature: I have been and am a content curator and organizer of cultural events for artists, galleries and institutional spaces, as well as a writer of exhibition reviews, creatives of every era and books.
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