MARINA ABRAMOVIC/THE DbD EXPERIENCE: CHANCE KNOWS WHAT IT'S DOING!

Abstract

[...] the book would have benefited from setting Abramovic's work within the larger context of women artists investigating the explicit body in performance, including Ana Mendieta, whose emphasis on place and work with natural elements resonates with Abramovic's own. DbD is very much a product of Rosenthal's extraordinary biography and range of influences; it retains the discursive flavor and power of that pivotal transitional period in which the tides of the high-modernist avant-garde shifted to abstract expressionism and then to performance art.

MARINA ABRAMOVIC. By Mary Richards. Routledge Performance Practitioners. New York: Routledge, 2010; pp. xi + 153. $30.95 paper.

THE DbD EXPERIENCE: CHANCE KNOWS WHAT IT'S DOING! By Rachel Rosenthal, edited by Kate Noonan. New York: Routledge, 2010; pp. xi + 130. $36.95 paper.

Artists' commitment to the ephemerality of performance, coupled, in many cases, with the lack of funds needed for extensive documentation, has complicated the history of performance art of the 1970s-'90s. Theatre and performance historians, and artists themselves, are now reexamining key works from this period, filling in the documentary gaps with analyses of influences, techniques, and thick descriptions of artists' creative processes and individual pieces. Both of the volumes reviewed here contribute meaningfully to that effort.

Mary Richards's book Marina Abramovic is part of the Routledge Performance Practitioners series, which provides valuable overviews of selected innovators in theatre, dance, and performance. It includes a lengthy discussion of Abramovic's life, thematic elements in her work, influences, analyses of pivotal performances, and some of her practical exercises. It is one of two books published on Abramovic this year; the other is James Westcott's biography When Marina Abramovic Dies (2010). The two volumes work well together, with Richards's book serving more as a primer that is especially useful for basic background information.

Abramovic's biography is particularly rich. She was born into a privileged family in Montenegro, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in 1946 and benefited from the relative freedom the country enjoyed under Josip Tito. Abramovic's mother was a prominent curator and member of the arts community, and Abramovic drew much from her influence. Abramovic was a politically engaged artist early in her career, presenting pieces that challenged the repressive regime and calling for greater freedom of expression. She is best-known, however, for her endurance pieces, which are evocatively summarized in the book. A representative example is "The Onion" (1995), in which she consumed an entire onion, burning her mouth in the process. Her partnership with the artist Ulay (Uwe E. Laysiepen), which began in 1975 and ended in 1988, generated memorable and well-documented works, including "Nightsea Crossing" (1981-86), in which they sat perfectly still at opposite sides of a table for the duration of the performance space's opening-sometimes as long as seven hours. Their final performance was "The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk" (1988), wherein each walked toward the other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China. Richards provides valuable descriptions, background, and artists' commentary on these pivotal pieces, and includes key biographical details about their collaboration.

Richards is especially attuned to the spiritual dimensions of Abramovic's work, describing her ability to focus her own "electromagnetic field" (53) in her durational performances and "charging" the performance space with her presence (107). Abramovic's later politics, however, are presented more obliquely. For example, Richards notes a 2003 piece "criticizing the UN" (77), but is not more specific. Did Abramovic, who "reconnected" to her "largely suppressed (or ignored) sense of Serbian/ Montenegrin national identity" (77) during this period, address Serbian and other atrocities committed in the Balkans during the 1990s? Abramovic's perspective on this tragic period in Balkan history would be an interesting counterpoint to the more mystical discourses both she and Richards see as informing her work. On a related note, while there is relatively little theoretically informed analysis of Abramovic's pieces here, what there is does not benefit from a grab-bag approach that includes references to Victor Turner, Michel Foucault, Theravadin Buddhism, and Australia aboriginal practices, among other seemingly incompatible discourses. In fairness, some of this is a function of the secondary sources that Richards cites, but the overall impression is one of interpretive dilettantism. If the larger issue is that Abramovic's work challenges conventional interpretive taxonomies, which it certainly may, the book would have benefited from stating this up front. In addition, some more judicious editing to minimize repetitions and consolidate references to key works and influences would have helped the reader.

This volume raises larger questions about the increasing canonization of performance art and artists, and particularly the ways women performers enter documentation. One example is the discussion of Abramovic's influences. Richards includes John Cage and Yves Klein, as well as the "hardship art" of Chris Burden and Gina Pane, but there are some surprising omissions, most notably Hermann Nitsch, whose psycho-spiritual ritual endurance events can be seen as the Dionysian counterpart to Abramovic's visceral though comparatively more formalist approach to the body in performance. The relative brevity of references to Pane is also emblematic of the problem; as Richards correctly notes, Abramovic was so impressed by her work that she restaged one of Pane's pieces. Yet there is little discussion of Pane herself or of her performance career, so she remains a potent though unexplored figure.

Likewise, Richards makes only brief mention of Yoko Ono's work, particularly "Cut Piece" (1964), which provided a valuable early template for the intersection of gender, risk, and vulnerability that we see in Abramovic's performances. Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh's endurance pieces are also not discussed; their "Year of the Rope" (1983), in which they were tied together by an eight-foot rope but never touched each other, was pivotal in the emerging conversation about durational performance and collaboration. Finally, the book would have benefited from setting Abramovic's work within the larger context of women artists investigating the explicit body in performance, including Ana Mendieta, whose emphasis on place and work with natural elements resonates with Abramovic's own.

Abramovic has been called the grandmother of performance art, but this title is arguably much more appropriate for Rachel Rosenthal, who was presenting "Instant Theatre," borne of her immersion in Zen Buddhism and her work with Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and others, in the late 1950s. The "DbD" in her book The DbD Experience, edited by Kate Noonan, stands for "doing by doing," as well as for Dibidi, Rosenthal's late, lamented pet cat to whom the book is dedicated and who functions as a kind of "familiar," Rosenthal's spiritual partner. The book blends elements of autobiography, manifesto, and instruction manual into a print translation of her DbD workshops. It is organized topically, reflecting the day-by-day breakdown of sessions and exercises. The DbD Experience will be especially useful for theatre historians interested in a condensed and applied version of Rosenthal's rhetorical program, including her widely known commitments to animal rights and ecology.

In The DbD Experience, Rosenthal offers her own biography/memoir as prelude, with a summary as theatrical as it is disarming: "I am laying out this background to establish that I grew up half spoiled rotten, snobbish, self-centered, willful and male-identified, half neurotically nervous, over-sensitive, lonely, confused, and with no skills whatsoever involving human relations" (3-4). Her early training included virtually every high-modernist element of the midtwentieth- century art world, from working with Hans Hoffman and Erwin Piscator to close relationships with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as Cage and Cunningham. DbD is very much a product of Rosenthal's extraordinary biography and range of influences; it retains the discursive flavor and power of that pivotal transitional period in which the tides of the high-modernist avant-garde shifted to abstract expressionism and then to performance art.

The three-day DbD workshop, as represented in the book, focuses on improvisation; the exercises, along with the instructions (be suspicious of "ideas," strive for "freedom"), will seem familiar to those with improv training. As in Richards's analysis of Abramovic, a formalist-spiritual rhetoric infuses the entire experience and is articulated in Rosenthal's description of the artist's commitment to a "freedom" that is not "chaos" (57), her quasi-Stanislavskian organization into "units" and "levels" (58), and her insistence on the redemptive potential of collective spontaneity (25). Occasionally, the rhetoric of DbD also exposes contradictory pulls in the practical management and execution of this improvisational freedom. Letters from former DbD participants, included at the end of the book, sometimes reveal these contradictions, as, for example, when a former student writes that although her own "sense of Standards killed . . . spontaneity," she nevertheless felt the strong "desire to NOT DISAPPOINT RACHEL" (122-23). Additionally, the volunteers who assist Rosenthal throughout the weekend are labeled "slaves of love" (36), a designation that seems particularly jarring when read against Rosenthal's expressions of regard for her animal collaborators, which are described as artists in their own rights.

Rosenthal has been designated a "living cultural treasure" by the city of Los Angeles and has remained at the very center of West Coast experimental theatre and performance for half a century-an important corrective to a still-pervasive New York bias in too many histories of performance art. The DbD Experience does not fully capture the sheer virtuosic force of Rosenthal's solo work, yet this long-awaited book will no doubt stimulate new interest in her career and reinforce her importance as one of theatre's grande dames onstage and in the classroom.

Taken together, both of these books provide valuable insights into more than these key figures themselves: they fill in the broad outlines of performance- art history and criticism, ensuring a place for women auteur performers as teachers, priestesses, channels, and divas.