The artist is present

“I believe the highest form of art is music and then performance is the second highest because it’s mostly immaterial,” she says. “Immaterial art is the strongest because there’s no obstacle (between viewer and performer); there’s just energy, and I believe in energy.” Marina Abramović.[1]

There is something disturbing about such statement. Is it everything about obstacles? What obstacles are there between an object and its viewer? And isn't there any energy present between them? What she considers as a strong immaterial transition of energy is really just the transition that has always taken place from the art object to its audience. In every case, the perfomer, to a certain extent, is in itself a traditional form of object, either dimensional or tridimensional, which can be compared to the presence of a painting or a sculpture. So, the energy that she "discovered" through performance art is, therefore, present throughout all of Art History. Isn't it?

But to understand the energy that she refers to, I highly recommend to watch the movie Marina Abramović: The artist is present, about her retrospective exhibit at MoMA in 2010. In her highlighted performance, a complex interaction takes place that raises key questions on whether it is all about the artist's energy or the viewer's who simply can't handle not the human part but the star's projection, to some point noted in Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics.

[1] LIPSKY-KARAZS, Elisa, “Once upon a time”, Harper’s Bazaar, 02/07/2012.