Seven
Easy Pieces
Film
Comment Vol.43 No.6, New York, 2007
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online)
(...)
Starting with her interpretation of Bruce Naumann's Body Pressure (1974), Abramovic
presents herself as an object obeying instructions outlaid in Naumann's original
text. Her body obscured by coveralls, Abramovic's voice and its orifice render
this event palpable. As she presses herself against a large glass pane, we
witness her breath steaming the glass, plus her accrued frottage of spittle.
Occasionally we hear her solemnly intoning Naumann's instructions, but this
is overwhelmed by her grunts and growls directly onto the close-miced glass
pane.
Here in one stroke is how performance art - despite its uncreditable historicist dressage - constitutes a type of meta-cinema. Between the voice-over and the growl-under, Abramovic's audiovisual presence straddles the polar fields between Merle Oberon's demurred tone in Wuthering Heights (1939) and Amber Snow's orgiastic suffocation in the Assploitation series (c. 2006). Seven Easy Pieces holistically presents Abramovic as body, corpse, object, ghost, instrument - yet always in precisely confronting ways, and always positioned at the precipice of scripted verbiage becoming vocal viscera.
