Marina Abramović: 512 Hours, Serpentine Gallery

The 11th June 2014 marks an important moment not just for London’s cultural calendar, but for art history. Why?  Three words and three digits: Marina Abramović: 512 hours. 

As performance art’s most famous proponent, Yugoslavian born Marina Abramović has helped define this genre over the past 40 years.  This summer she will be expanding her global rule with her first ‘durational’ performance in London, 512 hours, where she will hold the fort for 64 days at the Serpentine Gallery. The concept is simple. Marina will be present from opening to closing time for 6 days a week. There will be no script, no plan, just the artist, the audience and a few ‘every day objects’ around which live narratives can develop.

Abramović began her career in the 70’s crafting a language for performance art that focused on endurance. She sought to question the limits of her own body, and its use as an artistic tool. In 1974 in her native Belgrade she invited visitors to do whatever they wanted to do to her, using a collection of 74 objects that included feather boas, knives, and even a loaded pistol. The result was quite bloody but not fatal. The following year a nude Abramović slowly drank a bottle of red wine, carved a five point communist star into her abdomen with razor blades, and violently whipped herself to then lay for 30 minutes on a cross made of ice. 

Despite their sensationalism, these acts did not defy purpose. But whether it was to stab at cold war communism or to poeticise vulnerability and self-sacrifice, it was in Abramović’s execution of these performances that she harnessed a unique charisma. Whether through calculated balance, honest emotion, or emblazoned passion and determination, her spiritualistic approach to performance continues to set her apart as the self-titled ‘grandmother’ of performance art. 

In 512 Hours, Abramović pares down performance to its bare essentials:  ‘I want to find out what really happened if nothing is happening’.  It fits neatly into a gradual trajectory of simplification.  In her recent retrospective at MoMA New York, The Artist is Present, she invited visitors to sit facing her in silence, one on one, for as long as they wished. For the Serpentine show, the narrative is less predisposed.  More authority is given to the visitor, blurring the lines between performer, audience and participant.

This is undoubtedly the art event of the year and it is not an opportunity to be missed.  With Similjan Radic’s space-age Pavilion opening outside the gallery two weeks later, there is one thing we can be certain of: Summer belongs to the Serpentine.