Images: Yvonne Rainer, Film about a Woman Who (1974), Marina Abramovic, Nude with Skeleton (2002-5)

Yvonne Rainer writes a letter on November 9, 2011 to Jeffrey Deitch, the director of Los Angeles MOCA: 

I am writing to protest the “entertainment” about to be provided by Marina Abramovic at the upcoming donor gala at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It has come to my attention that a number of young people will be ensconced under the diners’ tables on lazy Susans and also be required to display their nude bodies under fake skeletons.

Rainer goes on to surmise about public humiliation of the performers and queries about the “generally exploitive conditions of the art world,” where young artists, and I would add “viewers,” are willing to do sometimes uncomfortable or compromising things for art, artists, and museums, or for their own sense of public persona within/against these “institutions.” Artinfo launched the story here. Her final letter, after attending a rehearsal, along with 50 signatories, including Douglas Crimp, bell hooks, A.L. Steiner, and Zoe Leonard, is here on Artforum website.

Hiring and training others to re-perform her pieces has been an important recent strategy for Abramovic’s exhibition of her works. She is producing a feature-length film about preparing for her 2012 MoMA exhibition The Artist is Present, which includes documentation of the four-day “workshop” called “Cleaning the House” to prepare the re-performers for their tasks in the museum. The participants, ostensibly aspiring performers and artists, were selected from a pool of applicants and surely paid for their training and work. If the funny and occasionally sadistic tasks had occurred in a factory with an immigrant labor force, I would probably protest, but here are often white, educated artists sleeping outside and counting grains of rice, willfully pushing themselves mentally and physically to capacity.

Rainer’s letter made me reconsider the “willfully” in such thinking. Is it willful or desperate? How are those two things related in the economy of newly minted struggling MFA’s? What is sufficient compensation for participants when compared with Abramovic’s artist fee or with the $10-25K table prices at the MoCA gala event? Does it matter how the performances are being framed (i.e. gala or retrospective show)?

One could narrativize participation in art as increased activation, as Brechtian realization, but in the service economy, we must simultaneously consider the commodification of human bodies and increasing subordination to the artist’s will. The painting hanging on the wall seems almost impotent in comparison to reality-TV-like invitations to join in the self-exploitive fun.   

I had never thought to compare the work of these important female performers until Rainer’s letter. Their dramatic differences  might best be revealed through an earlier text by Rainer, her 1965 “No” Manifesto:

No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator,
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.

Rainer’s “No” manifesto came from a particular historical moment, but her modernist, reductionist tendencies seem antiquated and even slightly controlling today. I think her letter reflects a certain simplistic refusal to deal with this experience economy, which, in the end, is probably what attracts most of Abramovic’s participants.