your NYT cite becomes
http://tinyurl.com/dzj6d

I’ve mostly just been very disappointed that I wasn’t in NY to see the Abramovic performances. I don’t have enough knowledge of contemporary art-critical discourse around Abramovic and other artists from the that time period to know if her impulse might be, as you suggest, to give the work a new kind of centrality or attention. My sense is that this work *isn’t* over in art-world? Or is being extended in ways that we don’t have similar models for in writing-world.

The recent project is described here, http://www.artnews.info/news.php?i=3666&t=news: “the project is premised on the fact that little documentation exists for most performance works from this critical early period; one often has to rely upon testimonies from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given piece. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibility of redoing and preserving such performative work. ”

So there is something there, about the impossibility of carrying the work forward if there’s no object for its value to be attached to. Of course it can’t be exactly reproduced, given the specific forces and context for those initial actions, so I’m interested in how these recent performances address that critique of body art from the 60’s/70’s as always showcasing the young, beautiful female body. (this is lame of me but it’s easiest to quote the foulipo paper here: “they ae so beautiful and also so often individual and the at slides so easily into that wod nacissism again, it is so easily caught by the vey appaatus that it citiques,”)

Something that didn’t make it into our paper is how the photographs in Hannah Wilke’s “Intravenus Series” gesture towards/reenact photographs from one of her first projects, “S.O.S.: Starification Object Series” and how the radical difference of the body in those two projects, one young and beautiful, the other older and very ill, performs a kind of critique on the larger body of work Wilke was a part of. (Schneeman didn’t perform or record her naked body after a certain age, I’m not sure exactly when she stopped but I’ve never seen a photograph or heard a description of her being publicly naked as an older woman) So Abramovic’s reenactments seems as much an extension as a reenactment in that they demonstrate the procedure of aging. They perform a very different kind of body. (although the project isn’t framed in terms of the female body. It seems draped around a much larger category, ‘performance art’. And then the most physically risky examples of that category.)

I’m especially appreciative that this recent project by Abramovic is about reenacting a cluster of interrelated work, carrying forward a group and not an individual, although I wonder how it reads to other performance artists, if the project presents problems of canon-building – the NYT article on the performances would suggest otherwise, that many performance artists are uninterested in having their work reenacted. (whoa that’s a crazy long link be carefly I mean careful: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/arts/design/06kenn.html?ex=1132462800&en=86768f5f1fb653d7&ei=5070&8hpib)

Anyways I clearly don’t understand the formal constraint of a comment box because this one is way too long. So I’ll stop now but thanks for writing.

Stephanie

This is only nominally related to your talk, but I was wondering what you thought that Marina Abramovic’s recent project of reprising or covering [?] body / performance pieces of the past (Export, Beuys, and Nauman are the ones I know of), whether you thought that this might be designed to combat the perception that this kind of work is “over.”

Great points in the talk btw.