What is art?

Anyone who creates anything is an artist. Any creation is a piece of art, but good art is if it makes you feel something, if you think a little differently after observing it.

Marina Abramovic is a performance artist. Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.

She engages the audience in a strong sense of non-verbal communication.

In one of her performance art, invitation was open for a single member from the audience at a time to come and sit across a table, face to face with her, and she’d simply look up into their eyes, for as long as they were sat, and looked back down in the interval.

She wasn’t zoned out, she wasn’t daydreaming, she was a hundred percent present, to the intensity that the audience felt it. It is well worth noting that her presence of mind isn’t just for a few minutes but goes on for hours.

This particular performance art of hers got quite a few participants in tears, that was the power of her gaze.

“..there is nowhere to go except in yourself. It was shocking. But how simple it was” she says.

And this presence isn’t just in this performance, but also in another one where she laid down on a table, immobile. On another table she keeps 72 items like roses, thorns, a gun with a single bullet, feathers and such. There is a notice at the table which says that no one but Abramovic herself will be held responsible for what happens in the next six hours ( her performance period).For the first couple of hours the people in the audience were cautious but as time went by, the reaction from the audience got more drastic. Violent, inhumane actions were observed which came from just ordinary civilians, to the point where she was on gunpoint, violated, had had her clothes stripped off, bleeding.  She discovered if you leave it to the audience, they’ll kill you. She believed in her art so much that she was willing to go to the extent of dying.

Albeit, once the “performance” ended, she got up and slowly began to walk toward the audience. They immediately, literally ran away. The same civilians who originally came to observe a civilized art performance. No one dared to face confrontation.

Abramovic experimented along with the audience in a way. Neither of them knew what the outcome would have been. She has the ability to bring out extremes of emotions in people, love and violence, which I find incredible. It’s good art

Barbara Kruger’s art is verbal and visual. She took existing pieces and appropriated the art, mashed up meanings to create new ones. It seems to me like she was one the first to make pieces such as she did. Personally I couldn’t relate to it, although it was obviously relative to her generation. Her work is a lot different than that of Abramovic. Her’s doesn’t have that personal touch and that deep connection with the audience unlike Abramovic’s. Kruger’s work, I feel, isn’t timeless. I feel it was targeting the immediate generations problems.

To conclude, art is only art you find/ put meaning to it. If it spurs thoughts and discussions, if it spurs arguments and emotions, it is art. The art, isn’t important. The artist, isn’t important. What it makes you feel is what art is about.