ABRAMOVIĆ’S BURDEN
When we talk about an artist we often speak in terms of the body of work: the breadth of ideas, the projects, the oeuvre. But for many, it’s just as important to understand their body at work. Such is the case for the artists I’m thinking about this week.
After visiting Japan Society with my family and seeing the first ever U.S. solo exhibition by Chiharu Shiota, Two Home Countries, I reflected on the resourcefulness of artists over time. How some artists are able to use the body, its experiences, its memories as the matter for expression. Shiota’s vivid installations braid national and personal trauma through humble materials; Her red string and photocopied paper do philosophically, what so many artists have attempted across decades in other forms.
On the mezzanine, a pair of bronze feet rests beneath an intricate weave of red thread. Nearby, a short passage recounts the artist’s battle with cancer. Instantly, the thread begins to suggest anatomy: tissue, blood, cells—the internal matter binding us together in their hardly explicable fashion. Indeed, her thread reveals the complexity of our bodily makeup and how illness adds to this lack of coherence. This struck me as the most interesting self portrait I had ever seen and in its anonymity, a sense of oneness.
The main installation extends this metaphor. A vast web of red string suspends wartime letters and diaries from WWII soldiers. Yes, there is a reference to collective national memory, even guilt as one navigates the canopy—the “thread” as story and so on—but what struck me was the deft move from the solitary disembodied feet to the shared body of history. A thesis which reminds us that the public is always constituted by the private.
It was here, perhaps surprisingly, that Chris Burden came to mind. Where Shiota allows illness and memory and personal experience to radiate outward, Burden let the traumas of the world work their way in. Shoot (1971), the archival video of a bullet tearing through his arm, mirrors the mediated violence of Vietnam-era America. Of course, the work’s force lies in the deft tension he creates between construction and reality. Legitimate injury was met with choreography. Here, Burden collapsed, just a bit, the distance between violence and spectator in an era of endless reproduction. As Susan Sontag reminds us, images of suffering do not simply document violence but “stage” it for consumption, altering our relationship to the event itself. Burden enacted this paradox: the work demanded both a wound and an audience, the act inseparable from its image.
If Shiota’s red thread pulls interior fragility outward into visible form, Burden inverts it—letting the world, its horrors, score themselves on the flesh, outside in, leaving behind images that are at once personal and universal. Trans-Fixed (1974) intensifies this logic through ritual. By having himself nailed to the hood of a Volkswagen, Burden transposed the iconography of crucifixion onto the machinery of postwar consumer, particularly Nazi, culture. The image insists that sacrifice is no longer tied to faith but to capital; redemption now mediated by industry. The audience heard the car’s engine roar while Burden remained silent with his arms outstretched. For Burden, the body was never simply his own; it was the surface where exterior forces, (violence, media, politics), left their mark. I can’t help but to think of Debord’s notion of the spectacle here. Burden creates images that exposed the collective hypnosis of mass media and the power of the image. Indeed, to look back on his work is to recognize an artist with clear instincts toward the numbing effect media can have with respect to violence. In this sense, and especially after an Instagram scroll today, his work reads more like a warning than a provocation.
There is striking intimacy and brutality in the images of both Shiota and Burden, this despite their reciprocal perspectives—inscape versus escape—on the body. Vito Acconci writhing under the ramp in Seedbed, or Gina Pane nearly immolating herself in The Conditioning, remind us of a wider milieu of artists who used trauma to expose forces that would otherwise remain unseen.
Marina Abramović, for example, sits between these poles. In her work, the body becomes a site where interior and exterior trauma collide through endurance and repetition. This was the premise of Seven Easy Pieces (Guggenheim, 2005): seven consecutive nights in which she re-performed five canonical works from the 1960s to 70s and inserted two of her own—Lips of Thomas (1975) and Entering the Other Side (2005)—treating each historical moment as something to be realized in the present. One piece she sought to include was Chris Burden’s crucifixion work, Trans-Fixed; he refused, holding that it belonged to its volatile moment. The refusal only sharpens the contrast between the two artists, for me. Abramović presses performance toward something which can be serialized often expanding beyond her own body to choreograph others; a move which subverts the purist’s ideas of performance art.
For all of these artists, the body hosts meaning in silence. I’m thinking here of Abromovic’s iconic sitting exhibition which became the focal point of the …Artist is Present documentary. These moments are everywhere. Performance artists, especially those listed above are perhaps more attuned to the divine. The mysterium tremendum as Huxley reminds. That is, there are opportunities to recognize the almost spiritual power in the presence of another at every turn. The other day I listened to a man describe a flight into some airport tucked into the mountains. His hands became wings, his body jerked in place as he mimicked the plane’s violent drops through turbulence. His face went pale as he channeled the experience without words. I watched his wife exhale deeply. Fingers spread, palms twisting, his torso pitched as if bracing for impact. The gesture conveyed the whole ordeal of the panic, the helplessness, the paranoia. All that to say, I watched this body tell a whole story long before language arrived.
