Endurance Performance: Post-2008

The site of the boot camp, a former theatre and tennis club in Hudson, New York, will be renovated by Rem Koolhaas and his team at OMA into the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, a museum devoted to durational performance.¹⁰ The architectural plans were released in May 2012. This development is worth noting for its vision of an enduring spectatorship; where museum viewers will be asked ‘to sign a contract to stay a minimum of six hours. There is no penalty for leaving early, but endurance is rewarded.’¹¹The politics of a museum dedicated to endurance, wherein visitors are considered as participants who are also meant to sleep and eat in the museum itself, in addition to Abramović’s plans to develop a boutique hotel in the city, sparks a debate around the role of the project in fostering a gentrifying ‘creative class’ through a notion of bodily devotion.¹² ‘The concept is very clear’, Abramović states, ‘I’m asking you to give me your time, and if you give me your time, I give you experience.’¹³Announcing 24-hour opening times and individual attendants accompanying visitors on especially designed chairs,¹⁴ Abramović’s plans make one fear that, if they are to follow the path of the employment contracts used in her previous projects, experience will not only be the visitors’ reward, but also the remuneration to be expected from its workers.

Payment in the form of access to cultural capital presupposes a location within a class literate in cultural hierarchy. Moreover, performance labourers reflect the state of cultural workers and, by extension, of the middle class, consumers within an experience economy and salaried in immaterial currency. The experiential payment offered across the arts sector, such as unpaid internships, exemplifies Jeremy Rifkin’s analysis of late capitalism and the experience economy, where materialism is replaced by ‘paid for experiences’ and the economy runs on ‘contractual relations’ rather than industrial production.¹⁵Even ‘ownership can become an albatross’, Rifkin predicts.¹⁶ Rather, Abramović’s labourers illustrate that the increasing gap between those who own both material and immaterial goods and those who own neither is fuelled in part by labour that is compensated with ‘experiential’ non-monetary payment. The erosion of middle class labour conditions apparent in re-performance is only a mild indicator of the far more dire employment circumstances of traditionally ‘non-standard’ workers; namely women, migrants and the most economically disadvantaged.¹⁷ But even if prolonged poverty might not be at stake in the precarious employment contracts of re-performers, what they share with those forms of employment classified as ‘vulnerable’ is the perpetuation of ‘an injustice […] resulting from an imbalance of power in the employer-work relationship’.¹⁸

If performance art is shaped by material conditions, what effect does this labour relationship have in its current manifestations? I would argue that Abramović’s re-performances became a new work about the enduring body in North America shortly after the 2008 financial meltdown. In contemporary discourse on art and immaterial labour, many thinkers position artists as workers and their bodies as commodities, operating through the Foucaldian trilogy of ‘bureaucratic, administrative and cultural’ modes of immaterial art production.¹⁹ Rather than defining post-Fordist immaterial production as ‘free from hard work and exploitation’, as it may at times appear, Boris Groys argues that it presents new bodily demands. He discusses the production of the ‘working body’ in ‘The Artist Is Present’ as the ‘perfect illustration of modernised, alienated work […] in which seemingly nothing material is produced beyond bodies themselves’.²⁰ In contemporary art, the ‘modernised, working body’ becomes the readymade, he argues.

Under this analysis, Groys doesn’t distinguish between the work of hired performers and Abramović’s, viewing their bodies, like readymades, as interchangeable. Two lines of questioning are pertinent to this conclusion. Abramović’s work is popularly understood, and has defined the work of performance, as that of the artist’s individual physical sacrifice. How then, to value the endurance of substitutes? How does one assess the image of crucifixion in Luminosity (1997/2010), in which the performer is suspended nude on a gallery wall facing a bright light, and its attending masochism of ‘heightened being’ if the performer is being paid hourly?²¹Through the structure of payment alone, a new temporal element is introduced into the performance.

Abramović’s fierce dedication to finishing even the most physically agonising works is recast as financial survival in re-performance. The endurance called upon to complete Luminosity could be understood in this instance to be in the service of making a living, of getting the extra hour, the state of the ‘working body’ in the current economic climate. The reported instances of re-performers fainting, while understood in the context of Abramović’s work as the sheer physical stamina required of the performer, provided the impetus to renegotiate the length of shift times in MoMA’s contract.²² Performance art resonates with the historical conditions of its staging, this is part of its power. Many of Abramović’s works with her former partner Ulay, for example, Point of Contact(1980), were interpreted as expressions of feminist perseverance and militancy. The infamous instance of Abramović fainting while performing Rhythm 5 (1974) is an inextricable component of its legacy. The fainting of the re-performers then, makes up the reconstitution of the work in 2010; a year of fragile economic recovery, the continued erosion of employment conditions in the US and an unemployment rate of 10%. Beyond an argument about whether re-performances mar the original or if true performance can be replicated, it seems worth noting that such events appear under a set of specific contemporary conditions.

Abramović’s re-performances became a new work about the enduring body in North America shortly after the 2008 financial meltdown.Of course, Abramović is also paid for her work. This brings about the second consideration of Groys’s conclusion. By equating the ‘readymades’ or the body of the artist to those of the workers, Groys overlooks the construction of value implicit within them. Abramović, as a readymade, is worth substantially more than the other bodies at work in ‘The Artist Is Present’. The authenticity that determines her value is subsumed by a comparison to the readymade. Her body is not an assembly-line product, but rather carries the preciousness of an original. Groys does reintroduce a concept of bodily exploitation into immaterial labour and production, but a further materialist reading can be inferred. The actual salaries at stake and their expression of financial imbalance locate these re-performances within the current economic landscape; one presided by an increasingly uneven distribution of wealth.²³ Furthermore, Groys’s use of the term ‘readymade’ is particularly poignant considering the disproportionate impact of unemployment on assembly-line workers, the traditional handlers of the readymade.

What kind of suffering does endurance evoke then? Several of MoMA’s re-performers ‘humbly’ called for better employment conditions, noting ‘the many millions in this country out of work and facing economic hardship’.²⁴ The physical form endurance takes in the current labour market manifests in an ‘intensification of work – for example, cleaning more hotel rooms per hour, extending shifts or cutting breaks’,²⁵ paralleling the physical stamina idealised in Abramović’s re-performances. By conjuring the bodies of the disenfranchised masses at a time of continuing economic hardship, re-performance could establish new terrain for performance art, that is, if the range of its implications are incorporated into its critical reception.