Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia
A retrospective exhibition of one of the world’s most famous art pieces, Marina Abramovic, which lasts at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade has generated a lot of interest, of a dual nature. While on the one hand the audience and numerous artists are warmly accepting and emphasizing its importance in relation to other contemporaries, others explicitly refuse to recognize her as an artist and place her work in other frames of social activity with negative connotations. Even when we add, on our terms, a large budget for the production of the exhibition, it certainly comes across as a condemnation rather than a criticism.
After visiting the exhibition, meeting Marina’s works and seeing the exhibition as a whole, I think the budget is completely justified and that the production exhibition belongs to the very top of the retrospective presentation of 50 years of her artistic experience.
Each exhibit testifies to the stages that her experience and need for expression went through. Marina is an artist. What constitutes a thorn in the eye of many critics, I think, is the fact that her art is borderline and an expression of discontinuity, which is why it is both new and essentially avant-garde. With the emergence of her mode of expression, great changes occurred in the observation of the work of art, shifting the focus from finished to continuous work, from permanent to ephemeral, in which the role of the artist is a testimony to co-time, that art is equal to the life of a man who is also transient. That is why her work excludes aesthetics, because aesthetics is a discipline based on traditional standards that imply continuity. But this fact, in my personal opinion, does not in any way diminish her art, it merely gives her a new interpretation.
Wondering why the whole term of thinking about her work gives me the notion of boundary, I understand why she had a great impact. Her art can be seen as either bizarre or ingenious, in any case it is highly suggestive because at any moment it involves the observer, the witness present. Her art emerges from it alone but is turned to the people, the observer, the witness. It is the need for others, for the reaction of a witness to her condition, to divide herself with others, perhaps to seek recognition for her current condition. One will call it hypnosis, and I am more associated with the psychological suggestion of the need for another as much as the other after it. It’s hard to deal with that fact. That’s why her art is also painful.
Considering, as a whole, the expressive state of her own presence in her work while going through Marina’s sensibilities of artistic, that is, life stages, my thoughts lead me to the diversity of works, what all one person can recognize and where the suggestiveness comes from and in today’s expression “creativity”. All in all, the retrospective exhibition of Marina Abramovic in the Museum at the mouth of the US and I was impressed by the rare need to return and think about her work, and I consider it to be one of the best exhibitions I have seen and experienced so far.
