Marina Abramović: Seven Deaths

Abramović has been obsessed with the famous Greek soprano’s music and myth since a youthful encounter with her voice proved culturally formative for the artist, while she also cites Callas’s heart-rending personal life and lonely death as chilling echoes of her own lost loves and near-death experiences. For all of the Seven Deaths in this immersive film installation, Abramović has paired a famous original Callas solo or aria and illustrated it with the theatrical moment of the protagonist’s grisly end, albeit adding a new twist or some fresh interpretation in each case.

For example, instead of being strangled by the hands of Othello, Abramović’s Desdemona is throttled by a snake in one scene; Tosca’s leap from the castle parapets is relocated to the roof of a skyscraper; and the ritual suicide of Madame Butterfly is replaced with the artist ripping off a hazmat suit and exposing herself to radiation poisoning. The jealous murder of Carmen outside the bullring – from Georges Bizet’s famous opera of the same name – is recreated with long-term collaborator, the actor Willem Dafoe, who stabs Abramović violently, despite her appearance in a full traje de luces (‘suit of lights’) normally worn by the male bull-fighter and Carmen’s love interest. In Cork Street, Abramović exhibited seven alabaster sculptures relating to these lethal vignettes, which are also self-portraits of the artist inhabiting different personae – herself, Callas, the jilted bride or the sacrificial paramour, among others – each facing their own emotional, operatic endings.

These shows and their themes coincide with the tour of Abramović’s ambitious live action opera, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which is travelling from its delayed 2020 premiere at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, to the Opéra National de Paris (1-4 September 2021) and then on to the Greek National Opera in Athens (24-29 September), while 2022 dates include the Deutsche Oper Berlin (8-10 April) and Real Teatro San Carlo in Naples (13-15 May). Abramović will be the first female artist to exhibit in the Royal Academy’s main spaces in 2023, for her major retrospective Afterlife, and will also be showing work across London this autumn, both in an exhibition at Colnaghi and across several public sites throughout the capital.

The earlier group of Hostage paintings here date from 1990. They are at first glance landscape paintings (but use a portrait format canvas) where the dominant representational motif is a field-margin line of poplar trees. This motif can’t help but recall Claude Monet’s series of paintings of poplar trees along the River Epte (figure 1), painted almost 100 years earlier in the summer and autumn of 1891. Monet may have been fascinated to communicate changing light and weather conditions as summer shifts to autumn, yet for Art & Language the motif – the trees actually occupied the edge of a playing field near their studio – engages with a particular highpoint within the history of modernism but is also an image that has popular appeal distinct and apart from its historical grounding, perhaps even in a way to undo its original radicality. Art & Language’s Hostage paintings don’t set out to commune with Monet’s paintings to replicate his observational processes as a basis for an exhumation of impressionism. Instead the motif, Monet’s example, is deployed among other similarly translated figures of speech within the assembled paintings to encourage a critical approach towards acts of production and reception.

To one side of many of these paintings is a band of colour. It emphasises the verticality of the landscape. It is an abstract, non-representational interruption to the view of trees. But it also situates or frames the trees, enables the viewer to approach the trees in a particular way. It is a bit like looking through a doorframe onto another view, potentially connecting us closer to the trees, to bring the trees into focus. The trees may be the subject of the painting, but now the action of sight – not so much what we see but how we see – is foregrounded. However, the paint around this block of colour is smeared and compressed by a sheet of glass that is screwed onto it. Paint becomes material, and the focus is now not really on the trees but on the paint surfaces and on the surface of the reflective glass that now controls our gaze. The painting becomes about capacities for ‘looking at’ and ‘seeing into’, and then how we read its surfaces. The studies for these paintings show odd, almost architecturally designed, letters overlaying the compositions – the letters spell out the word ‘surf’ and it is from these letters that the agitated paint under the glass is deformed. So, the glass is there as a means to de-forming the surfs, and not just as squashed blots. The glass is there not as the usual protective layer to the painting but, as a reflective surface, to render looking difficult so that the context of the painting’s installation or siting intervenes with any viewing of the work. The glass contributes to the painting by disordering it and how it may be seen.

Similar strategies occupied Art & Language in the mid 1960s when they made work that emerged as both parody and critique of modernist painting by disrupting the idea of the monochrome canvas as the furthest extension of the essentialist linear narrative of Greenbergian modernism towards an expression of aesthetic purity. In this respect, the example of Untitled Painting 1965 (figure 2; collection Tate) ties in well with these Hostage paintings and their essentially assembled nature. This painting from 1965 treats the monochrome as entropic parody. A glass mirror has been applied over an unpainted stretched canvas, the mirror held in place by clips, as you would a bathroom mirror. When looking at the work, what you see is the mirror, and then looking into the work you see the environment around the painting reflected back at you, not the material surface of the mirror itself. The blankness of the mirror’s monochrome surface – its silvering – becomes pictorial in such a way as to dislocate modernist perception, in which the site of the painting and the movement of the beholder – rather than the medium-specific autonomy of the artwork – become key. If modernist art was autonomous, self-referential and defined by its own conditions, the art that was ushered in by Untitled Painting 1965 drew its material, content and criticality from the world in which it existed and acted within – experience of such a painting is not singular and removed, but incomplete, fragmentary and shareable as being resolutely part of the world of daily experience.

To return to the surf. It is an abbreviation that first appeared in Art & Language’s work in the 1974 group of works that ironically took the collective title Dialectical Materialism (figure 3, 4, 5). These works encouraged the reading of text as image and vice versa, representing Soviet constructivist graphics, such as those by El Lissitzsky, as arrangements of the letters spelling surf. The return of surf in 1990 echoed a wider cultural turn to painterly gesture in the previous decade that Art & Language were debunking. Embedding the re-deployment of surf in the Hostage paintings aimed at denaturing the bellicose paintwork spawned by neo-expressionism and instead returning to a dialogic dialectical materialism between image and text, picturing and material, surface and ground, objectivity and aesthetic response.

As soon as you make a painting you may also be painting a picture, and in painting a picture something is depicted as it is painted. The depiction may be that of painting itself, or even paint – process and materials. It might be something outside of the painting, a depiction of something seen, remembered, imagined or invented. These depictions could well have different purposes, different ambitions in terms of what the portrayal is there to communicate. These Hostage paintings oscillate between the pictorial use of paint (particular arrangements of paint to depict trees, for instance) and its literal existence as paint. And yet, this is far too straightforward. Let’s step away and now think of these pictures not as paintings as such but as an assemblage, as collage – as both thing and critical activity (and in this latter regard, the action of critique through collage is the wielding of scissors and glue). To work in this way is as much about making paintings as it is to perform the making of paintings to certain ends.

The Hostage paintings from 1990 are here paired with a group of paintings from 2014 which have the collective title Sea Ghost. Effectively, these are Hostage paintings anagrammatically – hostages of Hostages maybe. Unlike the 1990 Hostage paintings, the appearance of these more recent paintings relates directly to the first group of Hostage paintings made by Art & Language in 1988. These appeared as if abstractions, and yet the abstractions were very obviously representations – or performances – of different kinds of painting. The blotches and scrapes of paint that covered each painting look like nothing less than the blotches of paint that appear on an artist’s palette over a period of time as they paint. Abstraction or denotation of the creative act? One source for these paintings was Camille Pissarro’s The Artist's Palette with a Landscape c.1878-80 (figure 6; collection Clark Art Institute) in which a landscape of fields and farmworkers with a horse and cart is painted on a palette with the representation emerging from the blobs of mixed primary colours along its top edge. The Hostage paintings figured a different kind of emergence of subject or meaning, the blotches of paint being just that – self-consciously painted images that rehearse the usually automatic activity of mixing paint. The blotches of colour are produced to signal a preparatory stage of the creative act, and to exist as a ground for the way in which the canvases are arranged compositionally. Each canvas is divided up by linear figures that evoke non-specific architectural plans of buildings. These figures were then themselves made up of slices of panel inserts that represent fragments of the coffered ceilings, clean walls and floors of an art gallery. So, what is suggested here is a collision between the activity and ground of the artist’s studio and the management of status and history governed by the art museum. Those slices of architecture recall the specific interiors of the old Whitney Museum of American Art in New York that provided the pictured setting for Art & Language’s paintings Index: Incident in a Museum (figure 7, 8, 9), made between 1985 and 1988. The Hostage paintings of 1988 in many ways conflate the Incident in a Museum works with an even earlier group of paintings Index: The Studio at 3 Wesley Place from 1981–3 (figure 10), and in doing so pose questions about painting – or, more broadly, culture – being held hostage by the institution.

The Sea Ghost paintings appear as if ghosted versions of the earlier Hostage paintings from 1988. The architectural fragments are not separate inserts into the canvas but just painted on the same surface. The abstracted effect of a porridge of creativity signalled by what was left behind on a palette, is depicted as being more exactly a contrived representation – the swirls of colour lie beside or coincide with drawn contours of what, if filled-in, would be more splodges of paint as a sort of paint-by-numbers approach, or a shadowing and ghosting of an earlier ‘truth’. The architectural plan that interrupts the ‘palette’ here contains not only fragments of views of the interior of a museum gallery but also slivers of quotations of previous work by Art & Language – but then each painting is entirely a type of indexical quotation that serves to interrupt history. Each Sea Ghost reflects ‘upon their own condition as re-described images of art’ communicating incomplete fragments of Art & Language’s propagatory and conversational practice. The fragments are assembled, combined and indexed as different voices thrown together into the fray of a now discontinuous history.

Over the last twenty years or so, Art & Language have stepped-up the usage of their thrown voices, ventriloquism, translation and re-description of their work as they pursue ways to fake their own histories as one way to point up and render any idea of stable histories to be both erroneous and deceitful. In 1999 two retrospectives of Art & Language, at PS1 in New York and the Tapiès Foundation in Barcelona, mounted the principal works together on one long wall rendering the career as a patchwork in which there was an absence of timeline, stylistic development and historical essentialism (framed neither by modernist autonomy nor postmodern contextuality). This ‘curatorial’ approach was then translated into their two-part work Homes from Home 2001 (figure 11, 12) in which supposedly vintage work was redescribed anew as self-parody and again presented as a patchwork on two billboard-sized walls. The compositions of each Sea Ghost painting similarly present particular works by Art & Language as fragmented travesty or parody taking their place within a now jumbled accounting of their own histories.

But this is not nearly enough. The paintings indicate a particular relationship between studio and institution that Art & Language have thrown a light on in different ways throughout a career whose concerns lie more with the conditions and frameworks that inform and maintain works of art than to the material objects themselves; the work of art being defined as a critical strategy, the creative act providing a site for and the means of investigation and scrutiny. The content of each Sea Ghost painting continues this ambition by destabilising the compact whereby institutionally governed histories ordinarily give a home, a place, and so confer and confirm status on art. Art & Language have always set out to disrupt such cosy arrangements where aesthetic and artistic value is pronounced on by disinterested guardians of culture, preferring instead a shareable, collective and so messy practice of an art of ideas. With both the Hostage and the Sea Ghost paintings, Art & Language present us with work to be looked at, decoded, used. If their work connects to histories of modernism – paintings that in Michael Fried’s words address themselves ‘to eyesight alone’ – it is so that their assembled performative impostures generate not just a looking at the work through the action of eyesight alone, but more essentially a seeing-into (or readings-in) that disable the patrician look of any modernist arbiters of taste in favour of a conversational critique existing in the everyday.

Andrew Wilson

London, February 2022