During a recent trip to Florence I visited the current exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi. It’s a retrospective titled ‘The Cleaner’, is dedicated to the revolutionary performance artiste Marina Abramovic and runs from 21st September 2018 to the 20th January 2019.
The exhibition itself is revolutionary too since it’s the first time that a woman is the protagonist at the Strozzi and that protagonist is literally strong meat to take. In other words, the exhibition is not for the faint-hearted.
What is a performance artiste anyway? Marina uses her body ‘without limits and boundaries’ to express her artistic concepts. There are over one hundred works illustrating her pioneering career which now spans over fifty years and there are over thirty performers contributing to the exhibition.
One enters the retrospective, or rather squeezes, between two nude performers who act as a sort of caryatid-like door frame. They re-enact (for each of Marina’s performance acts has been carefully choreographed and documented) ‘Imponderabilia’ dating from 1977 and which was closed down by the police when it was inaugurated in Bologna in 1977. How times have changed!
The Strozzi’s renaissance rooms each hold a different aspect of this incredibly versatile artiste who graduated from Belgrade Art College. Luminosity, for example, has a nude (or naked?) performer on a cycle saddle suspended on a wall for thirty minutes under a gradually more intense light. Is this a metaphor for our life’s loneliness and its inability to react truthfully towards other humans?
(Performer removed for this shot)
It’s also a metaphor for Marina’s life when, after an intensely artistic and physical relationship with German artist Ulay, separation takes place. This phase leads to perhaps Marina’s masterpiece. From opposite directions of the Great Wall of China, Ulay from the Gobi desert, Marina from the Yellow Sea each one walks a distance of 2,500 kilometres to meet in the centre for a brief greeting and quickly depart. The film illustrating this experience moved me greatly.
The cramped Citroen van which Marina and Ulay made their home is also part of the exhibition in the courtyard of the Strozzi palace:
As a Serbian the horrific wars tearing the former Yugoslavia apart affected Abramovic passionately. Her performance reflection on this tragic period of human history was to clean a huge pile of bones of their blood and viscera to form a new blanched ossuary.
Death is physically embraced as a filthy human skeleton in ‘Cleaning the Mirror’. Marina tries to clean it with a brush but merely transfers its dirt to her own body which becomes increasingly grimy.
One also becomes a performer together with others. In one room there’s a task of separating rice from lentils and counting them. I confess I gave up after an hour.
Do not miss the part of the exhibition in the basement of the Strozzi (Strozzina). It illustrates the early life and times of Abramovic and her studies in Belgrade where she rebelled against the academic concept of art as being the pursuit of beauty and where she first envisaged self-mutilation as an artistic expression.
It comes as no surprise that at the end of the exhibition one is somewhat exhausted – drained, in fact. This is why it’s useful to make one’s way to a bar for a stiff (no pun intended) drink afterwards.
The power of the exhibition was unfolded in the weird dreams I had that night; nightmares, in fact which evolved as a huge canvas illustrating the enigmatic battle between life and death, self and the other, body and spirit, the unreality of everyday reality.
PS ‘Strozzi’, besides being the surname of the Florentine family who built the palace in the fifteenth century, also means ‘strangle’. Be warned. This is an exhibition which can strangle your hold on what you think is reality; it truly cleans out your mind.