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.