Ivan Lozano’s post about Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Tino Seghal, and the conservation of performance art is absolutely fantastic. [It’s built off the Performance Workshop Klaus Biesenbach held a couple of weeks ago, which was written up by Carol Kino in the NY Times.]
The idea of a single orthodox means of retroactively preserving or documenting or re-performing or whatever early performance art strikes me as unreasonable; I like the idea that artists can decide if and how they want their work to live on, whether if it’s as a score, video documentation, ephemera, or in Seghal’s case, unwritten verbal transmission.
Lozano hits the nail on the head with his awesome characterization of Abramovic [above]. And kudos to her for making a strong play for preserving her own work and for influencing the present and future of the medium. But one thing about her stone cold divadom that he doesn’t mention that came immediately to mind was her establishment of the Marina Abramovic Institute, which is charged with the preservation of performance art.
It reminds me of the Eric Carle Musem of Children’s Book Illustration, another ostensibly comprehensive history-writing institution which was founded by a practitioner–who wasn’t waiting for history to decide his place in the history books.
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the making of, by greg allen