Rachel Esner · Sandra Kisters Editors The Mediatization of the Artist CHAPTER 9 In Bed with Marina Abramović: Mediatizing Women’s Art as Personal Drama Marcel Bleuler This chapter discusses the documentary Marina Abramović. The Artist is Present (dir. Matthew Akers, 2012) in regard to its strategy to mediatize performance artist Marina Abramović and to the narrative it creates around her work. The ilm traces the artist’s retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2010, which was a blockbuster event, attracting almost one million visitors. As part of her MoMA show, Abramović staged a three-month live performance entitled The Artist Is Present, which is at the heart of the eponymous ilm. For the performance, the artist sat immobile on a chair in the large atrium of the museum for seven hours a day for the entire duration of the show. An empty chair was placed in front of her for the visitors, who, one by one, could take a seat and look into her eyes for as long as they wished. No other interaction with the artist was allowed. Thus, there was not much happening in the event. Abramović just sat there, in austere motionlessness. Nevertheless, the performance provoked intense emotions in the visitors. From the irst day of the show, pictures of the performance spread M. Bleuler (*) Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Zurich, Switzerland © The Author(s) 2018 R. Esner and S. Kisters (eds.), The Mediatization of the Artist, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66230-5_9 131 132 M. BLEULER over the Internet, showing visitors who were apparently touched by their silent interaction with the artist. Blogs such as Marina Abramović Made Me Cry—a portrait collection of viewers who started to cry while sitting with the artist—still keep these images in circulation today.1 In the three months the show lasted, these pictures charged the performance with the expectation that the sitting artist touched or even transformed her audience.2 In fact, the documentary The Artist Is Present indicates that by the end of the show, a veritable hype had been generated around Abramović, manifest in people camping overnight in front of the museum for the opportunity to sit with the artist on the last day of the performance. Abramović herself tried to explain this hype by scientiically proving the psycho-neurological impact of her performance.3 By contrast, I claim that the hype primarily originated in a scarcely graspable narrative around the performance, spread over time and through different media, which inluenced the public perception of the event. Based on the notion of a “layered perception,” art historian Mechtild Widrich shares this view of Abramović’s performance. In the viewer’s experience, she argues, the artist’s performance fuses with formerly perceived documents and narratives, such as the aforementioned pictures of crying visitors on the Internet. According to Widrich, the viewer’s perception is the result of an accumulative process, provoking a response that originates not only in the live experience, but equally in aspects that are not present in the event itself.4 1 The photographs that blogger Katie Notopoulos collected for Marina Abramović Made Me Cry were all shot by Marco Anelli, who has been a regular photographer of Abramović’s work since the 1990s. Accessed December 8, 2015, http://marinaAbramovicmademecry.tumblr.com/. 2 While the depicted reactions certainly formed the public image of the performance, it can also be speculated that they conditioned the reactions of the visitors; see Mechtild Widrich, “Ge-Schichtete Präsenz und zeitgenössische Performance. Marina Abramovićs The Artist Is Present,” in Authentizität und Wiederholung. Künstlerische und kulturelle Manifestationen eines Paradoxes, ed. Uta Daur (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), 147–66. 3 As part of her retrospective show in Moscow (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011), Marina Abramović together with neuro-scientist Suzanne Dikker and media artist Matthias Oostrik visualized the brain waves of the participants in the setting of Abramović’s sitting performance. The experiment, entitled Measuring the Magic of the Mutual Gaze, was announced to be a “Neuroscience Experiment”, but no results have so far been published. Accessed July 16, 2016, http://www.suzannedikker.net/art-science-education/? 4 Widrich, Authentizität, 148. 9 IN BED WITH MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ 133 Widrich’s concept bears similarities with ilm scholar Roger Odin’s “semio-pragmatic communication model,” which takes into consideration the role of seemingly secondary aspects that, in spite of not being actually part of the artwork, are constitutive for its reading.5 Here it will be claimed that such an approach is crucial for the analysis of The Artist Is Present, since the performance was dominantly framed, if not overshadowed, by the media-hyped persona of Marina Abramović. The challenge of the approach, however, lies in the dificulty of reconstruction. Although Widrich convincingly analyzes which layers beyond the live event added to the public perception, her analysis cannot be comprehensive, since it is impossible to locate all aspects that potentially added to the viewer’s experience. Widrich resolves this problem by rejecting the idea that the layered perception is a merely subjective and individual process. In contrast to Odin, whose semio-pragmatic model is underpinned by the postmodern paradigms of contingency and plurality, Widrich argues that, in the mist of uncountable potential layers, a public consolidation of the perception takes place. Thus, applied to Abramović’s performance, there is a speciic set of pictures and narratives within the vast scope of references, reports, and imagery that determine the perception of The Artist Is Present. Matthew Aker’s documentary can be seen as both evidence of this speciic set of pictures and narratives, and as a crucial agent in keeping the consolidated perception in circulation after Abramović’s show was over. Being a basically afirmative ilm, it does not dissect the hype around Abramović’s performance, but rather reproduces it. Consequently, it also reproduces the public response to The Artist Is Present. With its narrative construction, the ilm accumulates a dramatic framework for the non-action performance, almost forcing an emotional reaction to take over. What is touching about the account, however, is not the performance itself—the austere act of sitting still for seven hours a day for three months—but the igure of the artist, or, more precisely, the personal narrative against which the ilm suggests reading the performance. As is be argued in this chapter, the ilm creates what can be called a biographical reading, presenting the performance not primarily as a demanding piece of body art, but rather as a personal drama. In doing 5 Roger Odin, De la Fiction (Brussels: De Boeck and Larcier), 10–11. 134 M. BLEULER so, the documentary differs markedly from the mediatization strategy found in Abramović’s own documentation videos, which refuse any personal dimension.6 Rather than displaying such detachment, Aker’s documentary falls back into a particularization of the performing artist, focusing on her persona and constructing a highly stereotypical and gendered narrative, which precisely counters the claims inherent in the tradition of body-art in which Abramović’s work is rooted. By pointing to this discrepancy, I do not wish to imply that the ilm corrupts Abramović’s own interests or intentions. Marina Abramović generally keeps strict control over the ways in which she and her work are mediatized. Thus, there is no doubt that she approved of the documentary’s construction, for she would otherwise have stopped its production or dissemination.7 Rather, the discrepancy between the mediatization strategy of The Artist Is Present and that of Abramović’s performance videos helps to understand Abramović’s image strategy and its ideology. THE UNANSWERED NEED TO BE LOVED Aker’s The Artist Is Present is a hybrid between an educational introduction to Abramović’s work and an atmospheric reportage. In the irst half it follows the artist as she prepares the retrospective of her work and the three-month performance, providing some background information. By including archival material and some talking heads it traces Abramović’s career, which goes back to the 1970s when she started off as a bodyart artist in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia. It gives an overview of 6 Such a detachment from any personal dimension can be observed in almost all of Abramović’s performance documentation. See for example the video compilation Collected Works. Marina Abramović (1996), DVD, produced by A MonteVideo/Time Based Art/ A&U Production (NL), or the comprehensive documentation Marina Abramović. The House with the Ocean View, ed. Amy Gotzler (Milan: Charta, 2003). 7 There are many rumors about Abramović bringing other artists who perform or depict her work to trial. In some cases—as with the French ilmmaker Pierre Coulibeuf— the trial and verdict became public; accessed December 8, 2015, http://itsartlaw. com/2011/03/13/Abramović-victory/. In various public talks, Abramović emphasized the importance of keeping control over the presence of her work in the media: see, for example, the recording of an informal conversation at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 2011: accessed December 8, 2015, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iIL7stvnvBs. 9 IN BED WITH MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ 135 the work she did from the late 1970s to the late 1980s together with her former lover and artistic partner Ulay (the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen), with whom she produced, so-called, relational works, often painful bodily performances that were internationally recognized. Following their break-up, Abramović resumed work as a solo artist. She stayed in the realm of body art and became more and more known for demanding performances that required extreme self-command. Since the turn of the twenty-irst century she has become a highly acclaimed artist, breaking through into mainstream culture, posing, for example, for the fashion magazine Vogue and appearing at international red carpet events. By giving insights into her career and by following Abramović during the preparation of her MoMA show, the ilm creates an informational framework for the viewers to position her sitting performance, which is the focus of the second half of the ilm. In this way the documentary follows the rather conventional pattern of education ilms. What is important about this particular framework, however, is that it does not primarily provide information about Abramović’s work and its historical background, but rather, and above all, that it traces the artist in her private realm. Several seemingly spontaneous takes create an informal and intimate impression of the artist as a private person. In the irst few minutes, for example, we see Abramović during a break in a photo shoot, dressed up as a sexy vamp. She holds up a Polaroid of herself and asks the ilm team behind the camera if she would have any chance of inding a lover if she posted the picture on the Internet. From the start, the ilm presents Abramović as a desirable and, more notably, desiring single woman. This “private Marina,” in spite of being a ilmic igure, appears surprisingly authentic. Abramović seems to open up completely before the ilm’s audience, and she becomes increasingly emotional as it goes on. During the installation of her retrospective, for example, she bursts into tears when she recalls her intense relationship with Ulay and the loss of their love. In another scene she refers to her therapist, who has urged her to deal more consciously with her childhood and the wounds resulting from growing up with a mother who, as Abramović herself puts it, never loved her enough. In line with the concept of a layered perception, these insights inluence our reading of the MoMA performance shown in the second half of the ilm. The viewers, who have just learned about Abramović’s personal story and her inner emotions, inevitably project this same vulnerability onto the artist when she is shown sitting 136 M. BLEULER motionless in her chair in the museum atrium. The ilm creates an aura of a lack of love surrounding the artist, creating a dramatic background to her otherwise strong and self-determined appearance. This lack of love emerges particularly against the past fulillment she experienced with Ulay. The ilm gives a lot of space to their love story and break-up, culminating in an extensive scene in which they inally meet again. They are shown going to Abramović’s private home where she cooks dinner for Ulay. As Abramović herself comments in this scene, she is more than ready to fall back into the role of the housewife, caring for her partner. The loss of the love of her life and the gap he left in Abramović’s life becomes a crucial dramatic element of the ilm’s narration. This becomes evident when observing how it refers to an earlier performance, Nightsea Crossing, which Abramović repeatedly staged together with Ulay during the 1980s. In Nightsea Crossing the two artists sit motionless in chairs opposite each other, placed in a museum or a gallery space, just looking into each other’s eyes. Thanks to its similar setting and protocol, the piece can be seen as a model for Abramović’s solo performance at MoMA. In the ilm, however, this reference is not presented in terms of a historical background, but as evidence of their intense relationship. From the reference to Nightsea Crossing, the ilm leads directly to the MoMA performance The Artist Is Present. As Abramović is shown taking a seat and waiting for the irst visitor to sit with her, curator Klaus Biesenbach comments in a voice-over that here the audience takes the place of Abramović’s former lover. By placing Biesenbach’s comment at its beginning, the ilm prompts the viewer to perceive a personal dimension in The Artist Is Present. We suddenly realize that by sitting alone in the monumental setting of the museum atrium Abramović is, in fact, confronting the loss of the love of her life and is waiting for a new counterpart to come. Due to the ilm’s narrative construction, Abramović’s austere performance appears to be more of a personal drama than a demanding piece of body art. In this sense it produces a biographical reading as opposed to an art-historical one. Abramović’s discipline and endurance are not primarily placed in the tradition of body art, but are presented as a reaction to her problematic childhood and her broken heart. The underlying logic of the ilm’s narration is rather simple; Abramović’s artwork, it implies, is a metaphor of her unanswered need to be loved. 9 IN BED WITH MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ 137 ARTISTIC PRACTICE AS SUCH This construct stands in stark contrast to Abramović’s own documentation practice, in which she isolates her artistic practice from any narrative framework, especially from the personal. Paradigmatic for this strategy is the documentation of her early performance Rhythm 10 (1973), consisting of a series of photographs and a verbal description.8 For Rhythm 10 Abramović had jabbed a series of knives between the splayed ingers of her left hand, changing the knife every time she cut herself. The photographs show the performance within a strictly limited ield of vision, focusing the viewer’s gaze solely on the activity. The pictures give no clue as to the context of the performance, nor do they show Abramović’s face as she endures this painful activity. Even the accompanying verbal description withholds any aspect that would go outside the action.9 The concise description only provides information about what Abramović did in her performance, reducing it to a bodily act outside of any context. Even if the description is written in the irst person, it presents the performance as completely detached from any personal, emotional, or social dimension. No framework is created against which to read the work. This isolating mediatization strategy can be found throughout Abramović’s oeuvre up to the beginning of the twenty-irst century, creating a homogenous, concise image of her performances. It is, however, not merely her signature style. Rather, it appears to be speciic to the mediatization of early body art, rooted in the late 1960s. One of this period’s most important documents, bringing this strategy to the point, is Chris Burden’s video Shoot (1971). The video shows the legendary 8 The photographic and verbal documentation of Rhythm 10 can be found, for example, in the MoMA exhibition catalogue: Marina Abramović. The Artist Is Present, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010). The video of Rhythm 10 is included in the Collected Works DVD, cited above. The photographs, the verbal description, and the video have been presented in various exhibitions, such as Marina Abramović. Objects Performance Video Sound (1995), Museum of Modern Art Oxford, curated by Chrissie Iles. 9 “I turn on the irst tape recorder. I take the irst knife and stab in between the ingers of my left hand as fast as possible. Every time I cut myself I change the knife. When I’ve used all of the knives (all of the rhythms) I rewind the tape recorder. I listen to the recording of the irst part of the performance. I concentrate.”; accessed December 17, 2015, quoted from http://arteperformativa.tumblr.com/post/36811495090/ rhythm-10-1973-performance-60-min-museo-darte. 138 M. BLEULER performance in which Burden was shot in the arm in a gallery space. It lasts only about four seconds. We see Burden standing in front of a white wall; he gets shot and walks away, nothing more. The video does not allow us to trace any context or emotional dimension. We cannot, for example, infer Burden’s agitation before the shooting, nor can we understand how much he was injured, how much the shot hurt. The cruel act is not dramatized but rather presented as such, in its purest form, as someone being shot in his arm. Once again, no framework is provided, nor does the documentation allow for any empathic reaction to take over.10 A similar mediatization strategy can be found in the context of the studio performances and body-art pieces of artists like Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, or Gina Pane.11 The documents tracing their work produce no visual or narrative excess. Instead, the performative act is presented as such, detached and acted out beyond any institutional or social framework. It can be argued that this isolation of the artistic act corresponds to the claim of “self-possession”, associated especially with early body art (and criticized as “naïve essentialism” in the aftermath).12,13 In this context, however, what is important is the elimination in these accounts of the emotional and, especially, of the personal, mirroring the desire to achieve a certain universality. This becomes evident in the documentation of Abramović and Ulay’s performance Relation in Space (1976). As with Rhythm 10, the documentation only provides the information we need to understand what was going on in the piece. The verbal 10 Of course, Burden’s video is not mere documentation but an artistic project in its own right. However, also in the case of Abramović, it would be wrong to categorize her documentation as secondary material. Abramović strictly directs the mediatization of her performances, up to the point of restaging a performance for the camera to achieve a documentation that matches her aesthetic ambitions; see Marcel Bleuler, “Deutungsvorschrift? Die ilmische Vermittlung bei Marina Abramović und Pierre Huyghe,” in Theorie2: Potenzial und Potenzierung künstlerischer Theorie, ed. Eva Ehningerand Magdaleny Nieslony (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), 239–62. 11 As Abramović states herself, these artists strongly inluenced her artistic practice at its beginning; see Amelia Jones and Marina Abramović, “The Artist as Archaeologist,” in Perform, Repeat, Record. Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathield (Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 543–65. 12 Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire (Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 1998), 91. 13 Amelia Jones, Body Art/ Performing the Subject (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 22. 9 IN BED WITH MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ 139 description, however, goes one step further in eliminating the personal. Instead of speaking from the artists’ perspectives, it says only: “Two bodies repeatedly pass, touching each other. After gaining a higher speed they collide.”14 Thereby detaching the performance completely from the involvement of Abramović and Ulay as individuals. The artists’ bodies are not presented as speciic subjects nor even as a personal matter, but as proxies or mere living material. There is therefore a considerable discrepancy between the mediatization of Abramović’s performances and the documentary The Artist Is Present, which creates a biographical framework against which to read her MoMA performance, implying a personal dimension to the work and prompting the viewer to relate emphatically with the artist. “MACHINERY OF PROJECTION” Looking at this discrepancy more closely, it is helpful to refer to the concept of “spectatorial process” in Peggy Phelan’s critical discussion of the depiction and documentation of performance art. Embedded in the highly theoretical performance-studies discourse of the 1990s, Phelan argued repeatedly against the production of any visual account of such works, as she saw the emancipatory potential of performance, and the model of subjectivity this art form suggests, in its ephemerality.15 By appearing and then immediately disappearing, performances suspend what she designates as the viewer’s “appetite for possession.”16 The impossibility of repetition, Phelan argues, renders it impossible for the viewer to objectify and fetishize the performing subject, or to ind resemblance and psychic assurance by producing “the Other” as “the Same.”17 By contrast, documentary imagery and visibility are described as “a trap,” provoking “voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possesion.”18 14 Quoted from the catalogue raisonné published on the occasion of the MoMA exhibition in 2010, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 92. 15 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance (London/New York: Routledge, 1993); and Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London/New York: Routledge, 1997). 16 Phelan, Unmarked, 6. 17 Ibid., 3. 18 Ibid., 6. 140 M. BLEULER It may seem a daring endeavor to use this theoretical background to critically differentiate the mediatization strategy found in Abramović’s oeuvre from that of the documentary The Artist Is Present. For it is clear that in both cases performances are presented for repetition, which implies that both accounts turn on “the machinery of projection, identiication, and (inevitable) objectiication.”19 Furthermore, Abramović’s practice was never informed by the Marxist-feminist criticism that forms the background of Phelan’s argument. By producing visual documentation of her performances Abramović, from the beginning, had given into what Phelan calls “the economy of reproduction”.20 Moreover, the fact that her often-naked body is depicted in dozens of pictures and videos— notably without revealing the social institutions that constitute its gender—disqualiies her work, from a feminist standpoint, by playing into the hands of a “phallocentric dynamic of fetishization.”21 However, a differentiation can be made here between the two mediatization strategies with regard to their ability to attract the viewer’s projection. Even if in her own documentary videos and photographs Abramović’s body is unarguably exposed for objectiication, the accounts do not allow the viewer to empathize with the artist or for an emotional identiication to take over. By excluding the personal from the videos and by giving a strictly informative account, the viewer’s desire to ind resemblance is curtailed. By contrast, the documentary The Artist Is Present adds precisely this mechanism to the spectatorial process. The narration almost forces the viewer to relate emotionally with the artist and, consequently, to project emotions onto her performance. Furthermore, the ilm not only presents Abramović as a desirable woman who, notably, wants to be possessed, it also conlates her status as a highly acclaimed artist with the down-to-earth need to be loved. It thus undoes the distance that her standing could create with her audience, presenting her as basically “the Same.” Roughly speaking, The Artist Is Present allows its viewers to either objectify Abramović sexually, or to possess her emotionally by identifying and empathizing with her personal story, the drama of becoming such 19 Ibid., 163. 146. 21 Amelia Jones, Body Art/ Performing the Subject (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 24. 20 Ibid., 9 IN BED WITH MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ 141 an empowered artist out of an unanswered need to be loved. Providing these two possibilities for projection—which, one could argue, are in fact intertwined—is an effective strategy for covering the differing desires of a broad audience. Strictly speaking, however, it only works at the cost of negating Abramović’s empowerment as such, for her achievement in the art world is implicitly marked as a compensation strategy. EMPOWERMENT AS A COMPENSATION STRATEGY It is a popular pattern in the mediatization of female artists to implicitly consider their artistic practice as a compensation strategy. This can be seen, for example, in the ilm In Bed With Madonna (dir. Alek Keshishian, 1991), which documents the singer’s Blond Ambition tour from 1990. With a construction similar to The Artist Is Present, In Bed With Madonna combines the documentation of Madonna’s tour with insights into her private life. These insights often appear highly choreographed and enacted. All the more striking is that the singer is presented as someone who “is ishing for affection,” as one of her crew members says. Similar to the documentary on Abramović, the ilm implies that Madonna seeks to be desired and that she is driven by an unanswered need to be loved. The ilm suggests that with her powerful performances, Madonna compensates for the love she never received from her mother, who died when she was a child. This logic becomes explicit in an alternating scene that cross-edits Madonna alone by the grave of her mother with Madonna in full action as a celebrated star on stage. With this construction, the ilm suggests a connection between the lack of love Madonna had experienced in her childhood and the empowerment she achieved as an adult. More or less explicitly, both ilms imply that female artists perform to compensate for a love deicit. And, more importantly, they thus imply that the artists do not actually intend to be empowered per se, but that their empowerment is a means to attract attention in order to, eventually, gain love. The paradoxical logic of these ilms is that the female artist only becomes a subject because she wants to be objectiied. Now, why do I feel so skeptical about this logic? To be clear, I would be open to—although not too interested in—a ilm that suggests changing the perspective on artistic production by approaching it not as a professional practice but as a personal compensation. But this does not seem to be 142 M. BLEULER the mission of The Artist Is Present nor of In Bed With Madonna. Rather, these movies serve an appetite for sensational stories, presenting the success of these female artists as something particular and multilayered, instead of just acknowledging it and proceeding to looking at their artistic work. Everyone enjoys a sensational story but, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, this risks reproducing questionable stereotypes and ideologies, in this case about the status of female artists in the art world. To put it plainly, the fact that the two ilms present the women’s success as a sensational story, marks this success as an exception. And, more importantly, they do not simply acknowledge this exception, but try to get to the bottom of it, as if there was an urge to ind an explanation for the rare case of an empowered female artist. No ilm about a male artist would seek to explain his success through the revelation of a personal drama behind his empowerment, not unless he came from a marginalized social context or if he otherwise differed from the white, heterosexual, male artist. As part of this ideology it seems that successful female artists get stuck with the need-to-be-loved narrative (which is effective, as it allows the audience to either objectify or to identify). It is almost startling how the traits of this narrative can be uncovered in various contexts; for example, in the documentary series Art Safari (Ben Lewis, 2003–2006), a television show by the British art critic Ben Lewis. Each of its seven episodes portrays a contemporary artist, among them only one woman, namely Sophie Calle. The ilms create a speciic (stereo)type for each artist: Gregor Schneider, for example, is presented as a weirdo; Wim Delvoye as a witty entrepreneur; and Santiago Sierra as a political activist. The type created for the only female artist is the woman who needs to be loved. Although Sophie Calle has indeed been working on the topic of romantic relationships, making her own break-up the subject of the project Take Care of Yourself (2007), in Art Safari it is Lewis who projects a romantic need onto the artist. At the beginning of the episode he explicitly claims that the only way of approaching Calle is to lirt with her. Consequently, he decides to bring her lowers on their irst meeting, and he is shown writing her letters throughout the episode. His approach to Calle is presented basically as a continuous lirt. By behaving in this way Lewis strongly implies that the female artist desires to be loved. And, just as in the ilms on Abramović and Madonna, we ind an explanation for 9 IN BED WITH MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ 143 this desire. Art Safari presents her father’s lack of interest as Calle’s initial motivation to produce art at all. It was, as she states herself, the only way to get his attention. Thus, Art Safari also implies that with her artistic production the female artist compensates for a love deicit. Of course, this reading of Art Safari is cut rather short. However, it is striking that Lewis can only think of sexualizing the only female artist within his selection of seminal contemporary artists as a way of approaching her. Although he does so in a, let us say, polite and ironic manner, he nevertheless evokes the traits of the double projection described in regard to The Artist Is Present: the female artist can either be objectiied sexually (since that is the reason for her becoming an artist anyway); or possessed emotionally (since the drama of not being loved enough allows for identiication). ABRAMOVIć’S IMAGE STRATEGY Clearly, this stereotyping mediatization is not only the fault of the male directors. Just as Sophie Calle obviously plays her part in Lewis’s sexualizing approach, rejecting him elegantly and allowing him to keep trying at the same time, Abramović equally consciously participated in the narrative The Artist Is Present creates. On the one hand, this becomes evident by her sticking to the script of the sometimes obviously staged scenes. On the other, Abramović must have approved of the documentary’s construction, for she would otherwise have refused to cooperate. Thus, in some sense the mediatization of her as an artist driven by the need to be loved could be considered as her own image strategy. This might seem suprising considering that her own performance documentation is trimmed to withhold any such personal dimension. Looking at the broader context of her work’s display, however, it becomes evident that the inclusion of private insights is a recurring element. In her retrospective at MoMA in 2010, for example, there was a separate gallery displaying various documents about her personal and professional background, among them pictures of Abramović’s childhood in the former Yugoslavia, of her as a young woman, and of social events in the art world in which she took part. The display in this speciic gallery broke with the otherwise extremely symmetric and strict aesthetic of the exhibition. The gallery was clearly marked as an additional section in its own right, inviting visitors to browse through Abramović’s personal history. Even if separated from her artworks, the documents illed in the 144 M. BLEULER gap created by the emotional detachment of the videos and pictures of her performances, nourishing the visitors’ appetite for projection. This gallery at the MoMA show corresponded with a separate book chapter entitled Photo-Album at the end of the oeuvre catalogue Marina Abramović: Public Body, from 2001, edited by Germano Celant. With an even more exclusive focus on personal insights, this chapter created a vivid image of the “private Marina.” We can trace her as a grave-looking child, as a young woman travelling to performance-art festivals, meditating together with Ulay, and, eventually, as an attractive middle-aged woman in the company of unnamed men. The private nature of these pictures—one even shows Abramović at a summer resort, dressed in a bikini and embraced by some former lover—is striking. It is dificult to negate the voyeuristic appetite these pictures evoke. At the same time one must question why Abramović makes such an effort to mediatize her performances in an isolating and impersonal manner, while simultaneously exposing her desiring persona. There are only two explanations for this seemingly contradictory strategy. First, one could argue that the discrepancy in the mediatization of Abramović points to her genuine understanding of body art. Maybe the artist really regards her performances as a means to gain mastery and to counterbalance a life that she otherwise experiences as lacking and unsettling. Maybe Abramović’s practice is in fact a compensation strategy. Second, perhaps Abramović is not so “pure” after all, and does aim to inluence the reading of her artworks by creating a sensational framework. Indeed, one could argue that the narrative of the single woman driven by an unanswered need to be loved is simply the logical continuation of the third part of the larger story that has framed and, most probably, also boosted her career. The irst part of this story features Abramović entering the international art world from socialist Yugoslavia (a background she has emphasized up to today), implying a political and social gravity—ergo: sensation—in the Western context. In part two Abramović has arrived on the international art scene. She inds personal and artistic fulillment together with German artist Ulay, and is bound in what Chrissie Iles calls “one of history’s great love stories,” comparable to the relationship between Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.22 In part three Abramović has been expelled from paradise, but instead of giving 22 Quoted from the ilm Marina Abramović. The Artist Is Present. 9 IN BED WITH MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ 145 up she tries to ind her way as a middle-aged single woman, wounded by the experience of deprivation and loss, producing all the more powerful artworks. I would like to argue that the inclusion of private insights into the presentation of her work is a strategy to change the narrative and further map out the third part of the story after Abramović and Ulay’s breakup. In fact, it can be observed that the private insights started to appear when Abramović resumed working as a single artist, creating a new artistic identity in the aftermath of her and Ulay’s “relational works.” From the mid-1990s onwards private pictures become part of various exhibition catalogues, providing a new framework against which to read Abramović’s performances.23 Indeed, seen from an economic perspective, by mediatizing her practice in a way that allows for a multiple projection Abramović has become far more successful than her former partner. While Ulay’s work has ended up in a niche, Abramović touches a mass audience. However, she does so at the cost of reproducing the stereotype of the incomplete female artist, whose work is a means to compensate for a love deicit, and at the cost of distracting from her artistic practice as such. But precisely this distraction might be crucial. For her practice could also attract rather cynical reactions, were it not for the framework that creates a sense of gravity and meaning around it. For, in the end, it is just a woman sitting in front of an empty chair. And, as the ictional character Carrie Bradshaw commented on one of Abramović’s similarly austere performances in the TV series Sex and the City, “There are depressed women all over New York doing the exact same thing as her, not calling it art.”24 23 Private photographs are included in the following exhibition catalogues on Abramović: Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Chrissie Iles, eds., Marina Abramović (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 1996); Toni Stoos, ed., Marina Abramović: Artist Body (Milan: Charta, 1998); and Germano Celant, ed., Marina Abramović: Public Body: Installations and Objects 1965– 2001 (Milan: Charta, 2001). 24 Quoted from the 86th episode (season 6) of the TV-series Sex and the City (USA, 1998–2004), in which Abramović’s performance The House with the Ocean View (2002) was re-enacted.