Will you make it through the door of the Royal Academy, where two young people currently face each other, naked, like a pair of human gateposts? Not if you are too tactful (or too portly), afraid of grazing their bare bodies with a sharp buckle or zip. But there is a secret bypass into the next gallery that allows you to watch footage of the original and more startling performance of this artwork, in any case, and avoid the keyed-up RA queues.
Imponderabilia was first staged in 1977 by the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović (born 1946) and her German partner Ulay. A television monitor shows mortified visitors in overcoats pushing rapidly between the eye-to-eye artists. What’s lost today is not just the potential for shock or social embarrassment but the intense emotional connection between Abramović and Ulay. The stand-ins hired for this lavish retrospective resemble, by contrast, detached and slightly fragile models.
Indeed the whole show stands in relation to Abramović’s 50-year career roughly as a postcard to an actual living world. It is composed of mementoes and reproductions. You might imagine that would be true of almost all attempts to revive any long-ago performance art, but there is something peculiarly uninvolving about this show, and it is not just to do with the restaging of the work.
The solo performances from the 70s, shown here on slide and screen, are horrifyingly dangerous. Abramović takes a knife and stabs between her fingers, so fast she cuts herself, whereupon she calmly resumes with a new knife. She lies on beds of ice, incises a five-pointed star into her stomach with a blade, hangs from the gallery wall.
In arguably her most famous performance, Rhythm 0 of 1974, she presented an array of objects to participants, inviting them to do as they would with her (a precedent set a decade before by Yoko Ono, in her marvellously moving Cut Piece, now on screen at Tate Britain). A replica table is laid out at the Royal Academy: chains, scissors, whips, a rose, an apple, a loaded gun, which one man held to Abramović’s neck. She advanced the possibilities, to be sure, but her courage was incomparable.
To fortitude she added duration: 12 days living without food in a museum; weeks walking the Great Wall of China to say a final farewell to Ulay; 700 hours sitting across a table at MoMA in 2010 from the many thousands of visitors who couldn’t tear themselves away from the forcefield of her famous gaze. From Lady Gaga to James Franco, Abramović was much attended by celebrity, although you wouldn’t know it from the film of strained and occasionally tearful New Yorkers, who had queued for hours, projected here in the opening gallery.
No matter how long you stay with these faces, little changes; and this goes to a central dilemma. All is tension without variation. In a suite of black and white period films in the vast central gallery, Abramović slaps Ulay and he slaps her back, over and again (but not hard); they kiss ad infinitum (but not tenderly); they yowl and shriek at each other without letup. Nothing is building, and everything is dwindling in significance by the hour.
There is one work here that sets the standard by which almost everything fails, and it is Rest Energy, the bow and arrow film from 1980. Abramović holds the bow while Ulay pulls back the string, taut, with the arrow aimed straight at her heart. If either of them gave an inch, one of them would die in this appalling and mutual standoff. Abramović hits on a brilliantly complex and frightening metaphor.
The artist has said that she has no secrets, that biographical interpretations of her work are welcome. But the gallery that tells of her parting from Ulay is so explicit it feels deeply bleak. The Chinese walk is on film, of course, being an endurance test of mind and body. But still there is a scene of ordinary grief, of tears and sadness and awkward silences that feels too intrusive to watch. Ulay died of cancer in 2020.
It all turns to bathos in the next gallery. You are urged to lean against a chunk of obsidian (face to the wall: Abramović’s preferred position, of late, for obedient viewers) “until” you feel its power. Obviously what you actually feel is its coolness, like a marble forehead roller, and the impatience of people behind you waiting for a go. And there is more of this new age voodoo: bronze seats fitted with twinkling crystals; films of the artist lying by the healing waves of the ocean; one of her recent “portals”, which is just a large doorway fitted with illuminated “crystals” like Santa’s lights in a Christmas grotto. Some of the sculptural objects in this show are so kitsch as to beggar belief.
One of the four live “re-enactments” by the beautiful people trained in the Abramović method involves a young woman immersed in a bath of dried chamomile flowers. Another woman lies on an altar-like shelf with a skeleton on top of her naked body. She is precisely imitating an Abramović performance from 2002, but not half as well. Below is a lifesize film of the artist, breathing so much more melodramatically that the skeleton itself starts to tremble.
How daring she was: that is one lesson of this show. And how strangely accepting audiences have become over time; the temptation to laugh, recoil or refuse, even just to ask why on earth she was inflicting all this violence on herself was everywhere resisted the day I was there. But more disappointing is the character of the later work.
How to comprehend the absurd The Levitation of St Therese (2009), in which the artist, clad in black couture, hangs above the pots and pans in some upmarket kitchen? Or why the 1,500 bloody cattle bones she washed, and washed, in the 1997 performance Balkan Baroque at the Venice Biennale have now been faked up here in a parodic polyurethane heap. Or why she appears seated on a white stallion holding up a giant white flag in The Hero (2001), to the mournful sound of the old Yugoslavian national anthem, in a film (also available as an NFT) that dwarfs the small glass case of her father’s possessions in the gallery below? Vojin Abramović fought the Nazis in the second world war, and something is clearly being expressed about the death of memory through his fading passport and old pencil sharpener, and perhaps about surrender over victory (though what?). But what really strikes is the overshadowing: the way Abramović once again fills the frame.
It is one thing for Abramović to make her own performances. After all, the artist’s self-exposed body, under all kinds of torment and duress, has been her principle medium for decades; the identification is total, autobiographical, understood. Abramović’s endurance art starts, as it often ends, with herself.
To see her understudied at the Royal Academy is therefore something quite else. For me, the most disturbing sight was that of the hired performer in the final room – a young woman, naked, pinioned high on a wall, arms almost imperceptibly moving round, to the tick of a metronome, like a human clock.
Her suffering was visible, both during the ordeal and afterwards, when helped down a ladder by an assistant, buttocks scarlet from the pressure of the pummel on which she was balanced – and which was revealed only at the end. During her 30-minute ordeal she seemed to be spreadeagled, at the vulva, on a single dark probe. Six million years of evolution, and all of civilisation, to get to this.
