The performance artist I’ve chosen is Marina Abramović, who focuses her work on exploring the relationship between the performer and the audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Researching her work I found that most of it had to do with her being what is described as a “passive object” where the audience was able to interact with her – with certain limitations of course. One rather scary performance was back in 1974 where she allowed people to do whatever they wanted to her with some 72 objects she had laid out. The end result was a lot of people being aggressive as time went by, actual violence being committed, and, when the six hours that she had made the time limit was up, and she herself got up, people ran away from her. From confrontation. It’s kind of scary to think that if you let people do whatever they want and do not have some sort of reprimand, that they will be invasive and violent – most of them anyway. Her more recent work in 2010 was much more tame, where she sat at a table, immobile, and allowed people to sit opposite of her. It was called “The Artist is Present” and, well, it was certainly an interesting experiment on the relationship between the performer and the audience.
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