SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ (2007)

SEVEN EASY PIECES by MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ, 2007, HD cam SR, 93 min.

In Seven Easy Pieces Abramović reeneacted seminal performance works from the 1970s, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The film is a reflection on performance art and body art outlining the body fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance as seen in the work of Marina Abramovic.

World Premiere at the Berlin Film Festival February 2007

The seven works were performed for seven hours each, over the course of one week: November 9 – 15, 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Seven Easy Pieces “the performance” was dedicated to Susan Sontag

Thanks to the following for granting permission to perform the works

BRUCE NAUMAN: Body Pressure, 1974

VITO ACCONCI: Seedbed, 1972

VALIE EXPORT: Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969

ANNE MARCHAND of the GINA PANE Estate:

The Conditioning , first action of Self-Portrait(s), 1973

EVA BEUYS and the Estate of JOSEPH BEUYS:
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare , 1965

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ Lips of Thomas 1975

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ Entering the Other Side 2005

Filmmaker’s Original Statement written in February 2006

The film of Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramović is about the performing body and how it affects viscerally the people who confronts it, looks at it and participates in the transcendental experience that is its primary affect. The ceremonial and meditative are the common responses to the weeklong series of performances that took place in November 2005 in the Guggenheim Museum in New York . From an art event to a social phenomenon, the seven performances became the talk of the town because it created among the visitors a sense of sublimation like prayer. The film attempts to reveal the mechanisms of this transcendental experience by just showing the performer’s body living the events inscribed in each pieces with details that outline the body fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance.

The fascination comes from the revelation of the physical transformation of Marina Abramović’s exposed body due to the rigorous discipline of being there on display each day for seven hours without any restrictive boundaries. The relentless progress of time is revealed each day by the acoustic of the building with its waves of crowd that roll like an ocean and marvel at the performer’s steadfastness with respectful silence. That the performer’s required discipline had to be so different from one piece to the next is one of the mysteries. How the attentive audience feed into the art and Marina’s aesthetics is what is explored. It is as if a monastic urge attracted the mystic among us viewers that were there to participate. And the film, by focusing on Marina’s minute changes and strains along the long seven hours of each piece, explores in a systematic way a body without limit and increases the awareness of how participatory body art is.

The film will be 90 minutes long and follows the linearity inscribed in the week event, from body pressure, audience participation and confrontation in the first three pieces to the ceremonial in the last four pieces as mapped out by Marina Abramović. It is only after the fact that the film viewer will realize how much the project concept enlightens us on aesthetics that privileged physical experience over reason, process over iconography and testifies to the power of audience participation over passive spectatorship

Babette Mangolte

February 2006