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.
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