Theresa Smalec

Performance Studies
New York University
tks201@nyu.edu

 

Review of: Marina Abramovic’s Seedbed. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 10 Nov. 2005.

 

For seven days last November, Marina Abramovic engaged in a seemingly simple art experiment. The Solomon R. Guggenheim’s program straightforwardly outlines her weeklong endeavor: “In Seven Easy Pieces, Abramovic reenacts seminal performance works by her peers dating from the 1960s and 70s, interpreting them as one would a musical score and documenting their realization” (9). Myriad complexities unfold, however, as soon as one asks what it means to re-enact a performance that was arguably only supposed to happen once. Furthermore, a musical score is typically understood as written composition, where parts for different instruments appear on separate staves. By contrast, performance has historically been viewed as a profoundly embodied phenomenon, with no easy way to isolate its formal, sociopolitical, and site-specific elements.

 

I explore the tensions outlined above by reviewing a particularly fertile and perplexing example of Abramovic’s efforts to re-perform the score. Before turning, however, to address the factors that make her rendition of Vito Acconci’s Seedbed so oddly provocative, I must elaborate on the basic theoretical issues at stake in her larger project. Back in the 1960s and 70s, the rules of performance were threefold: 1. No rehearsal. 2. No repetition. 3. No predictable end.¹ Each of the earlier pieces featured in Abramovic’s 2005 program loyally followed these maxims. Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974), Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), Gina Pane’s Self-Portrait(s) (1973), Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), and her own Lips of Thomas (1975) shared a commitment to performance’s one-time insurgence. Because there were no dry runs, no one knew how things would turn out, not even the artists. And because these precarious acts were never repeated, many people argue that it has since become very difficult to pass on the knowledge they shared to new audiences. Indeed, the question of how to rebuild the genre’s ephemeral modes of transmission is integral to the museum’s account of what motivates Abramovic: “The project is premised on the fact that little documentation exists for most performance works from this critical period: one often has to rely upon testimonies from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given piece” (9).

 

Yet as usefully urgent as Seven Easy Pieces seems to be, the artist’s proposal to research and re-do the works of her peers threatens the cardinal rules that have long defined this art form as singular. Peggy Phelan explains her sense of the non-reproductive ontology of performance in Unmarked (1993):

 

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance . . . . The document of a performance then is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present. (146)

 

Part of Abramovic’s challenge to Phelan’s ontology comes from her never actually having witnessed most of the actions whose scores she would reenact. Her engagement with the remnants that survive of these works is not merely “a spur to memory,” because she has no first-hand knowledge to reactivate. Rather, her plan to use archival remains to literally reproduce acts that were previously “live” suggests that performance can be transmitted across timeframes. Phelan insists that performance’s affective and authoritative power thrives solely in the here and now: “Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time and place can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward” (149). Contrarily, Abramovic locates its ability to endure and inspire new audiences as residing in the copy: “Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibility of redoing and preserving such performance work” (9).

 

In an unlikely way, then, Abramovic’s embodied experiment appears to support the counterintuitive theory that Philip Auslander puts forth in “The Performativity of Performance Documentation” (2006). Her implicit understanding of Acconci’s documentation as a mode of composition (a musical score that can be replayed) corresponds with Auslander’s sense of the document as self-consciously arranged for a future audience. In an effort to challenge the traditional way in which the relationship between performance art and its documentation is perceived, he initially distinguishes two categories of artifacts, “the documentary and the theatrical” (1). The documentary type is based on the premise that “documentation of the performance event provides both a record of it through which it can be reconstructed . . . and evidence that it actually occurred” (1). Historians and scholars tend to assume that the event” is staged primarily for an immediately present audience,” whereas the document” is a secondary, supplementary record of an event that has its own prior integrity” (4). By contrast, the theatrical type refers to performances such as Cindy Sherman’s photos of herself in various guises: acts that “were staged solely to be photographed or filmed and had no meaningful prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences” (5). In these theatrical cases, “The space of the document (whether visual or audiovisual) is the only space in which the performance occurs” (2, emphasis added). Auslander’s radical goal is to extend this internal performativity to the documentary class of documents, as well. Drawing on J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, he posits that such artifacts “are not analogous to constatives, but to performatives: in other words, the act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such” (5).

 

Figure 1: Marina Abramovic performing performing Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on November 10, 2005. Photograph by Kathryn Carr. © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

 

The documentary is, of course, the category concerning both Phelan and Abramovic. While Phelan says that the documentation of live actions is “only a spur to memory” (146), Auslander and Abramovic reject this accepted view, albeit in distinct ways. On the one hand, Auslander refuses to treat the document as an “indexical access point to a past event” (9). He argues that many early performers (especially Acconci) stage actions “to be documented at least as much as to be seen by an audience” (3). In short, it is only through self-conscious, selective, and forward-looking acts of documentation that events such as Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) become available as performances for future audiences. The reason we recognize them today as performance art is that they exist as documents: “In that sense, it is not the initial presence of an audience that makes an event a work of performance art: it is its framing as performance through the performative act of documenting it as such” (7).

 

Conversely, Abramovic embraces the documents of Acconci’s Seedbed as entry points into the past. Nevertheless, she departs from the standard belief that such artifacts are inferior to the inter-subjective exchanges that take place between a performer and their initial audience. Her willingness to put herself in Acconci’s place anticipates Auslander’s hypothesis: “Perhaps the authenticity of the performance document resides in its relationship to its beholder rather than to an ostensibly originary event” (9). Yet even as her aim to “re-perform the score” hinges on the copy, and not on any ontological privileging of the live, she ultimately unsettles Auslander’s conclusion about where the affective force of performance resides. According to him, “our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity” of these classic works comes from “perceiving the document itself as a performance that directly reflects an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are the present audience” (9). Meanwhile, Abramovic dislodges the issues of presence, power, and authenticity from the static archive, and relocates them to the volatile site of her female body. Her embodied perception is, in fact, the medium and mediation through which a present audience translates Acconci’s aesthetic project and sensibility.

 

So can it be done? Apart from the philosophical tensions involved in videotaping one’s present tense repetitions of the so-called inimitable past–thus doubly embracing the reproductive economies that performance allegedly eschews–Seven Easy Pieces raises some daunting methodological concerns. For one thing, how does a female performer “pull off” a male performer’s endurance piece about masturbation? In Seedbed, a legendary fusion of performance and sculpture, Vito Acconci lay hidden under a wooden ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery. He masturbated eight hours a day, three times a week, all the while vocalizing his fantasies about the visitors walking above him. He spoke to those who entered the gallery as if they were lovers, imagining his sexual relations to them. Audiences could not actually see Acconci masturbating; nor could he see them. Nevertheless, they could hear him becoming aroused as he addressed them through a microphone, murmuring things like, “You’re pushing your cunt down on my mouth,” or “You’re ramming your cock down into my ass” (Saltz 2004). A loudspeaker situated on top of the ramp projected his words and sounds. In “Learning from Seedbed,” Brandon LaBelle argues that this ramp created “a hidden space, embedded in the gallery as an anomaly, and yet acting as an ‘amplifier’ for the desires of an individual body seeking its social partner” (2006).

 

Acconci’s larger goal was to involve the public in the work’s production by establishing an “intimate” connection with visitors. He followed the footsteps of those who traversed the space, encouraging patrons to view their audible movements as part of an amorous exchange: “I am doing this with you now . . . I’m touching your hair . . . I’m running my hand down your back . . . I’m touching your ass” (Kirshner 17). Whether or not he succeeded in creating a mood of reciprocity is highly debatable. British critic Jonathan Jones depicts Seedbed as “an aggressive, alienated act,” arguing that its “social and aesthetic disjuncture goes to the heart of 1970s America” (2002). Indeed, even Acconci recalls feeling disturbed after putting himself in the place of several audience members who lingered outside the gallery after his performances, wordlessly staring at him: “What can you possibly say to a masturbator?” (Bear 94). Some people (including the artist) found the piece unsettling and even hostile. Inviting strangers to share one’s innermost fantasies in public was, indeed, a radical act that also marked an era of sexual freedom. Acconci’s goal of covering a conventional gallery with semen was even more audacious from a sociopolitical perspective.

 

But why would Abramovic revive Seedbed in 2005, now that both public intimacy and transgressions of art space decorum seem fairly passé? Today’s strangers forge connections with the click of a mouse, becoming “intimate” in a mind-blowing spectrum of ways. Many artists (including Ron Athey, Karen Finley, and Chris Ofili) have since smeared bodily fluids across the cultured venues of America. How does a female performer position herself in relation to various forms of visceral transgression that have “come” before her own? Indeed, the very title of Acconci’s seminal project suggests the obstacles facing a woman who seeks to re-perform his score. Can we still call it Seedbed if a trail of “seed” does not remain on the gallery’s floor “bed?” The question of what else one might dub Abramovic’s rendition remains elusive, since women’s sexual emissions are not typically recognized as substantial. Years before she began rebuilding this piece, the artist explained her fascination with it during an interview with Janet A. Kaplan. “What’s interesting about masturbation is that you are producing something. There is a product. But what does a woman produce in masturbating?” (7).

 

Though known for pushing the limits of physical potential, Abramovic did not re-perform Seedbed “as if” she were a man. For Acconci, the act of releasing semen was not only symbolic proof of his imagined union with viewers, but also the literal fruit of his labor: “I masturbate; I have to continue doing it the whole day–to cover the floor with sperm, to seed the floor” (Diacono 168).[2] By contrast, Abramovic seemed less concerned with performing productivity; hours often passed between her ostensibly traceless orgasms. She did, however, engage with Acconci’s focus on output in terms of gender. What types of seedy and/or verdant results might a woman provoke by playing with herself inside the highbrow Guggenheim? What sorts of interpersonal exchanges could her acts of self-stimulation yield?

 

The question of historical accuracy thus became central to my experience of Abramovic’s Seedbed. Mindful of the artist’s stated intent to interpret the traces of past performances as a musical score, I soon noted stark deviations that led me to ask if this plan was not fraught with institutional obstacles beyond her control. In what did the project’s authenticity lie if the scene of her reenactment looked nothing like existing photographs of Acconci’s original? Upon closer scrutiny, however, I began to perceive Abramovic’s visual departures as tactical, as deftly designed to expand an audience’s sense of what it means for a female performer to inhabit faithfully an overtly masculine opus. I now turn to analyze the multiple levels on which she transgressed–and fruitfully transformed–the aesthetic and sociopolitical arrangements found in surviving accounts of Acconci’s embodied composition.

 

First, there is the element of space. Even as the dimensions of Acconci’s installation were the same ones Abramovic used (22 feet wide, 16 feet long, and 2 feet high), his Seedbed took place within a carefully confined perimeter. The ramp that at once concealed his body and revealed his performed desires was sharply angled, obliging visitors to move above him on a slant. He later acknowledged that this sculptural element placed him in a position of psychological dominance, even as he was literally below his spectators: “Already with Seedbed, I was part of the floor; a viewer who entered that room stepped into my power field–they came into my house” (Bomb 1991). Although he’d claimed he’d intended the piece to enact mutuality, in an ironic twist Acconci produced the opposite effect instead, assuming the role of a patriarchal homeowner who lays down the foundational rules for his guests to follow.

 

Meanwhile, with its domed ceiling and spiraling ramps, the Guggenheim’s towering rotunda feels strangely cathedral-like. Russian Orthodox icons lining the walls add to its formal solemnity, and spectators poised on several levels foster a mood of surveillance. Many viewers take notes, pointing or staring at others below. This panoptical structure diffuses the flow of power more than the structure Acconci described did. His house had only one host, but the Guggenheim’s public nature allows multiple sets of eyes to roam over and to possess one’s body. In contrast to Acconci’s semi-erect slope, Abramovic’s architectural intervention is level with the floor; its gently raised surface seems unobtrusive, even “feminine” somehow. If one didn’t know that this subtle inner ring comprises the structural heart of Seedbed, one could easily overlook it.

 

The work is also occupied with sound. Apart from a single loudspeaker, there were no visual distractions in the Sonnabend Gallery during Acconci’s masturbation, obliging viewers to focus on the male artist’s sonorous voice. Meanwhile, I barely reach the third tier of ramps when I can no longer hear Abramovic. The massive rotunda, coupled with the din caused by patrons, easily drowns her out. Surprised by this contrast between what the archive describes as the primacy of Acconci’s audible presence and the muted nature of Abramovic’s self-assertions, I join the line to access her interior. It is only then that I realize the extent to which her hushed intonations fashion the give-and-take bond that Acconci sought to achieve. There are, in effect, two performances going on here. One performance absorbs Abramovic into the museum’s rubric of display, allowing us to view her installation as one of many exhibits–no more and no less interesting. By contrast, a second performance subtly commands our attention, obliging us to move closer and to listen more carefully. Without forcing herself upon us, her whispers invite us to intuit privately what we cannot grasp within the clamorous public caverns of the Guggenheim. In this sense, Abramovic enacts the paradoxical both/and position that Auslander disallows. Where he insists that the “pleasures available from the documentation . . . do not depend on whether an audience witnessed the original event” (9), her Seedbed effectively generates two sets of pleasures, and two performances. One performance relies on conventional documents. Through select photos, videos, and audiotapes of this show it will attain symbolic status in the cultural domain; this is the framed performance that future spectators will know. The second performance is her unruly engagement with Acconci’s original, and the subversive ways in which her use of his documentation deflects–as opposed to “directly reflects” (Auslander 9)–his aesthetic project and sensibility. While it might not require “being there,” the palimpsest of pleasures that emerges from her simultaneous recital and revision of Acconci’s musical score does require a different mode of transmission than the ones Auslander privileges: the visual and audiovisual.

 

Figure 2: Marina Abramovic performing performing Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on November 10, 2005. Photograph by Kathryn Carr. © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

 

At six p.m., I finally reach the base of Abramovic’s inner circle. A security guard lets people in one by one, as others depart. Even here, there is mediation. Not unlike Acconci’s ramp, which became a fellow performer in his piece, the Guggenheim takes on an authoritarian role in Abramovic’s reenactment. As a result, her personal architecture becomes something of a sanctuary, whereas Acconci’s left no place to hide. Inside her inner circle, I’m struck by how bright it feels under the spotlights, how warm it seems in the presence of Marina’s luxuriant voice: “I don’t want to ask your name, or who you are, or what you want. I recognize you have the same heat, the same desire.” Under normal circumstances, such dialogue sounds patently false. Inside her circle, however, it seems specific and sincere. For the first time that evening, I sit down, allowing the forceful vibrations of Marina’s syllables to enter my body. She abruptly asks, “Where are the steps? I need to hear steps.” Several people stomp or tap their heels. “I’m coming,” she replies, “just for you.”

 

Though Abramovic fantasizes about sucking cock, it’s oddly unproblematic to imagine that she’s coming just for me. Later, I will overhear two young men express disappointment in the content of her fantasies. One says, “They’re fairly feminized in a fairly stereotypical, heteronormative way.” The other agrees; “Has she made love to a woman yet?” In the moment, however, I am unconcerned with whether or not she obeys these perfunctory calls for “diversity.” “I’m going to come,” Marina promises, “I need you to tap on the tip of my pussy. Yes, faster, faster.” The next sound I hear is a pleasurable howl, “Ohww! Ohwwww!” Clichés about women as animals enter my mind, yet Marina’s orgasm paradoxically disarms my self-consciousness. All around me, people smile and seem happy for her. Next is the hollow sound of rattling. We chuckle, astonished to realize it’s a toilet flushing. She tells us she always has to pee after coming, and resumes masturbating.

 

The circle seems a space of true reciprocity. Abramovic is not antagonistic towards audiences, as certain viewers accuse Acconci of having been. Although Acconci implicated spectators in his performance, he described their contributions as passive: “I use the viewers as an aid, I build up sexual fantasies on viewers’ footsteps” (Kirshner 17). Abramovic takes a different approach, insisting that our footsteps are not enough; we must actively immerse ourselves in shaping our contact with her: “Close your eyes and keep them closed. Forget you’re at the museum. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be ashamed. Give to me all that you desire.” I set down my notepad, devoting myself to her carnal imaginings. In doing so, I have no sense of being used or coerced; my efforts are wholly voluntary, and surprisingly pleasurable. Ironically, though, the Guggenheim’s institutional arm subverts Marina’s hypnotic voice. Just as she invites us to “Let time stop,” a guard steps in and informs us that our time is up: time for the next twenty people to have their turn. Will Abramovic (or anyone else) notice our expulsion in the footage provided by the museum professionals who document the event? What will she (and future audiences) think? In the space of the document, our exile is likely illegible; in the space of the live event, however, it feels like a temporary betrayal of her aesthetic project and sensibility.

 

The museum’s insistence on protecting the artist censors other facets of peoples’ interaction with her. Contingency is constantly kept at bay, even though unforeseen risks were vital to early performance art. At one point, a man starts vigorously rubbing his groin against the edges of the inner circle. As Marina climaxes yet again, he drops to the ground on all fours and luridly yells, “Does that excite you?” Security immediately rushes in, commanding him to leave. What’s uplifting is how onlookers protest this encroachment: “You don’t understand the performance!” “Are there rules against making noise?” Eventually, the guards relent: the unruly man is permitted to stay. We’ve won our little victory against the sanitized machine.

 

Throughout the performance, Abramovic ponders her role as a woman, an artist, and an embodied translator: “Vito said he produced semen when he did his Seedbed back in the 1970s. But what do I produce? I produce moist [sic] and heat under you that your semen can just drop on.” Her repetition unsettles performance scholarship’s overly simple equations between vision, reproduction, and commodity. For Phelan, the notion that a live event can be recorded diminishes its psychic and political agency: “Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility . . . and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and unconsciousness where it eludes regulation and control” (148). Yet despite the volumes of film and audiotape preserving Abramovic’s adaptation, what I will remember is precisely what cannot be captured: the visceral exhilaration I felt as Marina came. And while the forces through which Seedbed fulfilled me cannot be archived or seen, they might indeed be “copied” and passed on to others in politically meaningful ways. We, too, can give seemingly faceless strangers our time, forging relations of caring attention through our erotic and intellectual curiosity.

 

Many people might stigmatize Seedbed as a self-indulgent and colonizing act, or claim that its architecture permits a hidden manipulator to live out fantasies at unseen others’ expense. Abramovic acknowledges this predominant vision and reworks it. Her rendition makes it hard to imagine violating those about whom we fantasize. If we allow ourselves to masturbate about those “others” whom our culture instructs us to hate, can we engender tender interest and cautious desire in place of suspicion and rage? This may be a valuable risk to take in our violent age.

 

Notes

 

1. Abramovic made this remark about the rules of early performance art at “(Re)Presenting Performance” [Symposium], Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 8 April 2005.

 

2. Diacono provides an Italian transcription of what Acconci said and did during Seedbed. Kinga Araya, an Italian-Canadian scholar, translated Diacono’s text into English for the purpose of this publication.

 

Works Cited

 

• Auslander, Philip. “The Performativity of Performance Documentation.” PAJ 84 (2006): 1-10. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/performing_arts_journal/toc/paj28.3.html
• Bear, Liza. “Excerpts from Tapes with Liza Bear: The Avalanche Interview 1972.” Vito Acconci. Eds. Frazer Ward, Mark C. Taylor and Jennifer Bloomer. London: Phaidon, 2002. 94-99.
• Diacono, Mario. Vito Acconci: Del Testo-Azione Al Corpo Come Testo. New York: Out of London Press: A. H. Minters, 1975. 168.
• Jones, Jonathan. “See Through, Vito Acconci (1969).” The Guardian: 23 Nov. 2002. <http://arts.guardian.co.uk/portrait/story/0,,845513,00.html>. 27 Aug. 2006.
• Kirshner, Judith Russi. Vito Acconci: A Retrospective, 1969 to 1980: An Exhibition Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Mar 21-May 18, 1980. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1980.
• LaBelle, Brandon. “Learning from Seedbed.” <http://www.errantbodies.org/standard.html>. 12 Aug. 2006.
• Phelan, Peggy. “The Ontology of Performance.” Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. 146-66.
• Prince, Richard. “Vito Acconci: Interview with Richard Prince.” Bomb 36 (Summer 1991).
• Saltz, Jerry. “Vito de Milo.” Artnet.com 2004. <http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/jsaltz/saltz4-28-04.as>. 25 Aug. 2006.
• “Seven Easy Pieces: November 9-15, 2005, 5 PM-12 AM.” Guggenheim Guide: Exhibitions/Programs, September 2005-January 2006. New York: Guggenheim Museum: 9.