Performative responses to space and  architecture

Within her performance-based artistic practice, spanning from the 1970’s until the present, the Belgrade-born artist Marina Abramovic has produced diverse work in different media, from artistic live performances to installations including sculptures, photos and video pieces. An important aspect of this practice is the artist’s consistent concern with establishing a direct engagement with audiences; as she claims in her essay Body Art, “What’s very important about performance is the direct relationship with the public, the direct energy transmission between public and the performer” (Abramovic, 2002: 27). Most interestingly, Abramovic does not wish to address audiences as part of a typical performer and audience-as-spectator structure, where the artist or the live work is preconceived and prioritized over the audience’s response. In her own words:

First of all: what is performance? Performance is some kind of mental and physical construction in which an artist steps in, in front of the public. Performance is not a theatre piece, is not something that you learn and then act, playing somebody else. It’s more like a direct transmission of energy…The more the public, the better the performance gets, the more energy is passing through the space. (Abramovic, 2002: 27)