After a lot of ongoing hype about the current Yoko Ono retrospective at the MoMA in New York (through Sept. 7), I have been getting a lot of questions regarding whether her art, or rather performance art in general, really is ‘art.’ Many of the questions stem from the fact that people only look for objects and the superficial ‘beauty’ factor at an art exhibition. The truth is that performance art is something that comes alive only once, that you cannot purchase or measure, that you sometimes cannot even document. These are a few of the reasons why it has been marginalized from the canon of art history and many art institutions, and why conventional people refuse to accept its integration and place in art. We have become so used to headlines of Christie’s and Sotheby’s extra orbital sales for a Monet or a steel doggy balloon by the “artist” Jeff Koons, that it becomes challenging to understand that there is art out there which cannot be bought or touched. We need to continuously be rethinking what the true purpose of art is and try to understand its effects. Marina Abramovic, perhaps the most influential contemporary performance artist there is, pushes the notion of what art is to the limit. Marina stands alone and naked in a room holding a hairbrush and a comb. She combs her hair; she looks out into the nothing. “Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful,” she declares heavily through the air, her Serbian accent fragmenting each syllable of that sentence, her proclamation settling unnervingly in your mind. As time goes by, you realize that her banal action is violent and forceful; her scalp is bleeding. There is a frustration in the way she urgently braids her sentence with her actions. The repetitions of words have a likeness to a chant in a cult and something dreadfully awkward. It is an irritable action that carries an even more irritable meaning. She painfully declares that art must be beautiful and the absurdity of her actions and agonizing words refute that idea completely. Doesn’t art have to bare an existence, be disturbing, ask questions, and prophetically bare truth? These should be the principal qualities that one seeks to find in works of art – they do not exclude beauty, but can rather be accompanied by it. Through the irritable way with which she recites the words and viciously combs her hair there appears to be a relationship created between beauty and pain. Her shortness of breath and blank, perhaps lost, expression whilst she talks of beauty reminds of us the danger of obsession and the lack of depth it brings. Becoming fixated on the notion of pure aesthetic sophistication can even make you neglect it when it appears due to how particular and confined one’s mind can get. She actively highlights, through her blood and sweat, the actual process of trying to reach that beauty, trying to reach that impossible ideal and standard. She exposes the process that the Greeks and others concealed in an attempt to uncover what it takes to strive and attain beauty. She is a female in the nude who is concerned with beauty, but who doesn’t seem to be beautiful yet. We get a sense that she is working towards a standard, which is what differentiates her from the endless pool of Venuses that Western art recognizes on its canvases. The discussion of female beauty and the aspect of seductive, beautiful figures that have been continuously displayed in the nude for the male viewer to gaze upon is something important to note. Most female nudes in the history of art yearn to seduce you in a tender, hopeless, and submissive way through their beauty – think of Tiziano’s Venus of Urbino or Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus. Marina is revealing the agony and futility of the obsession with beauty in her performance and she makes you aware of how other aspects of art, such as the fact that it should make you think, are terribly significant and easily neglected. The beauty industry is a dangerous one in which girls and boys alike get trapped into thinking that beauty is the maximum and only goal to aim for, and this mindset has consequences, as Beyoncé depicts in her song “Pretty Hurts.” What is even more distressing is the idea that we expect others to judge us on that sole factor without looking beyond. So whether it is meeting someone new, or encountering a new canvas or installation in a museum, next time you look try to think about her/it/him with a different mindset from the one that we all fall into when looking at a fresco by Raphael, a Canova marble, Eva Longoria, or Leonardo Dicaprio circa 1997. Her art makes me rethink what I value and how I interpret things, and she highlights a problem in our society by making us feel uncomfortable. This work makes us (well, at least me) want to fight back against society’s superficial obsession with beauty and to reevaluate the way we have been valuing paintings and such for years. She’s challenging us. That’s art. “Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful” – Marina Abramovic, 1975 This article was written by Anita C. Bonomi. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/picture-galleries/2010/march/22/documenting-the-performance-art-of-marina-abramovi-in-pictures/?idx=16&idx=16