Marina Abramovic's Performance: Stresses on the Body and Psyche in Installation Art (original) (raw)

2003, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Among the most prolific, accomplished, challenging, and disturbing of international performance artists, Marina Abramović has also become a key figure for those of us interested in the intersection of performance art, installation work, and video aesthetics. In addition, her work has significant implications for feminist and psychoanalytic theories, raising as it does new dimensions to our ongoing inquiries into the dynamics of the gaze, the body, and the psyche as related to textuality and reception. After a brief overview of Abramović's career, this essay will concentrate on the theoretical implications of her work with emphasis on a particular installation drawn from a 1997 work entitled "Spirit House." This installation, presented at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, excerpted from that five-part piece a triptych called "Luminosity," "Insomnia," and "Dissolution." 1 Through analysis of this triptych installation, I hope to indicate a new