The Serbian artist is the subject of two films, about his collaboration with Bob Wilson and a questionable method which bears his name.
by Renaud MAHART
We no longer present Marina Abramovic (born in 1946), any more than we present Robert (or Bob, depending on the case and eras) Wilson (born in 1941): both are Big names in the artistic avant-garde since the 1970s, versatile in the expression of their art, which has reached a vast audience. Their confrontation was both risky and inevitable: it was made in 2011 on the occasion of a show whose fabric is the life of the Serbian installed in the United States, The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic.
But how the Ego and the very strong personality of Abramovic, famous for his performances and his extremist happenings, were going to agree with the conceptual and poetic universe of the director-Plastician , Designer of the (essential) lights of his shows and also old dancer-known for his horror of naturalism?
Truth, it seems to have happened as a charm, if we believe the interested parties themselves, filmed as part of the documentary Bob Wilson’s Life and Death of Marina Abramovic (2012), by Giada Colagrande , on Netflix, as well as the British singer Transgenre Anohni, still known by her name and her kind of birth at the time of filming, Antony Hegarty, and the American actor Willem Dafoe.
For the occasion, Marina Abramovic was small and humble, but with this assignment of which she has the secret. She cries in front of the camera, rehashing her childhood wounds, tells her life as a martyrdom who has become holy after finding the way to freedom and happiness. No: not happiness, that she finds too boring and limited. She seeks further, in listening and self -control and the “return to simplicity”. Otherwise, she says, “we will get lost”.
disciples
Having become a guru, the Serbian developed the “Abramovic method” (challenged in 2010 by a long investigation by the New Yorker) and the spread thanks to disciples trained to carry the good word in the future, especially with the public Classical music. What Andreas Gräfenstein filmed for Marina Abramovic, Listening Art (2019), a documentary that rebroadcasts Arte.
The Abramovic doing only big things, we made the floor of the Alte Oper of Frankfurt a naked tray where part of the public comes, by dint of bodily relaxation, withdrawal from the surrounding world, parasitic noises And technological tools, prepare to make a vacuum to welcome the fullness of music.
All of this has the air of deja vu New Age, and the seriousness that surrounds the experience sometimes reminds of the hilarious parody made by the players of Documentary Now (on Netflix), where Cate Blanchett plays Izabella Barta, An artist (as sado as maso) with a strong accent who only makes the void by filling up by herself …
The problem is that when we hear the violinist Carolin Widmann Imperfectly playing an Eugène Ysaÿe sonata, we are quickly recalled to the real. On the other hand, when the cellist Nicolas Altststaedt plays a Sarabande from Bach, it is he who creates the mystery, the silence around him, that no preparatory relaxation can never equal.