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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...