In twelve years of creation, from 1976 to 1988, the performing artist couple Marina Abramovic and Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) explored a form of personal and artistic fusion. Their performances are breathtaking, both spectacular and physically very complex. They took them to the limits of the body, its strength, its resistance and its exhaustion. Sometimes they will even have been really dangerous and very often extremely painful. From 1976, they will be this couple who, through their performances, seek to become “a two headed body”. Two distinct individuals interacting towards a single entity, “a body with two heads” to use Abramovic’s words!
Around 1970, computer scientist Alan Kay anticipated in a famous drawing the new human interactions induced by the digital world to come. He will be disembodied, with bodies that have become useless. This drawing is practically a prophecy, infinitely ahead of the reality of computers at the time! Most of the features imagined for this Dynabook have now been realized, including wired and wireless connectivity.
Visionary performances
It was precisely in the 1970s that the digital era was invented and prepared. The word “computer” was chosen by IBM with the help of the French Latin philologist and theologian Jacques Perret. Reversely, and independently, Marina Abramovic and Ulay return to the elementary of physical interaction between two moving bodies.
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Like any physicist, I am a specialist in the description of interacting systems. The problem with two interacting bodies is the most basic: two planets, the Earth and the Moon, for classical mechanics, a proton and an electron to make a hydrogen atom in quantum physics. In both cases, there are two systems and a physical interaction that occurs when they come together. Considering the works of Marina Abramovic and Ulay on this basis may seem very strange. Yet that’s what I’m doing here. And I remain very surprised by the results of this comparison!
Silence ! Current performance
Marina Abramovic and Ulay see themselves as two interacting systems, but only through their two moving bodies. They deliberately suppressed an essential interaction between them: language. During these performances, they do not speak, they do not write. They eliminate this interaction which is at the heart of our exchanges in real life and obviously in the world of exchanges via smartphones. They also eliminate any form of representation on a support. No paint, no board and of course no screen. Marina Abramovic quickly stopped painting when she discovered the power of performing “here and now” in front of an audience. About the performance “Rhythm 10” in 1973, in which she frantically stuck knives between her fingers and thus brutally cut herself, she wrote in her autobiography Walk through the wallsin 2016:
“I had experienced absolute freedom – I had felt that my body was without boundaries, without limits; that the pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all – and that intoxicated me. I was drunk with the irresistible energy I had received. That’s when I knew I had found my medium. No painting, no object I could make could ever give me that kind of feeling, and it was a feeling I knew I had to strive for, again and again and again. »
Physical interactions between two bodies
I look at you, you look at me, we touch, we collide, we hit each other, we bond by attaching ourselves, we exchange air in a kiss until we faint, we cast shadows on each other… or we let’s do nothing except look at each other without moving. Often the performance lasts for long hours to find, through pain and fatigue, an intensity that is almost unbearable. It is very impressive !
Reading Marina Abramovic’s autobiography suggests creations thought without an overall plan.
And yet, with this video, you’d think they’d listed the possible interactions between two bodies, created a performance for each line, and pretty much exhausted the list. This idea first came to me during a visit to the Marina Abramovic exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 2023.
With this retrospective of twelve years of performances, all very physically involved, we are confronted in the space of two hours, and in a single place, with the incredible and renewed intensity of their collaborations.
Newton’s pendulum
In this performance, the two artists run towards each other, naked, and each time, they collide. For real, and of course they get hurt. And as always with them, obviously much by the will of Marina Abramovic. They repeat these races and collisions for an hour. Marina Abramovic described the genesis of this performance they produced in 1976: Newton’s pendulum was their inspiration.
Newton’s pendulum is a star of physics. Two essential conservation laws in physics are used to describe the movement of colliding balls, that of energy and that of momentum. Marina Abramovic describes how Ulay finds a Newton’s pendulum that they play with, and how that leads them to this performance. These explorers of physical interactions between bodies will then perform one after the other.
The Macintosh and the Great Wall of China
In 1984, Apple unveiled the Macintosh. With its graphical interface and mouse, it amplifies the transformation of our interactions with and through digital technology. During the 1980s, Marina Abramovic and Ulay fought to convince the Chinese authorities to let them explore the Great Wall of China.
In 1988, they set off from one side, walked about 2,500 km and met in the middle. During the weeks that this walk lasts, no contact between the two, but they know that they will cross paths. Another form of interaction is explored here. On the Great Wall of China, we are sure to cross paths. Only one possible path. It is enough to set the starting conditions in advance: where everyone is leaving, in what direction and when. So there is a close bond between the two, and they walk with the certainty of the encounter. For a long time now, electromagnetic waves have enabled the transfer of information, an instantaneous and permanent link between two people. Marina Abramovic and Ulay do without these waves. It is a bond between two humans, timeless, universal that they find in this walk. Deliberately without any technology. The arrival will also be the planned end of their relationship and their artistic collaboration.
“The artist is present”: two people eye to eye
In 2007, the first smartphone, the Apple iPhone, was released. It will invade the world and be a major vehicle for the transformation of humanity in the 21st century.e century through digital technology. Alan Kay’s program comes true, and the body disappears. In 2010, at MoMA in New York, Marina Abramovic offered this performance: “The artist is present”. It couldn’t be simpler. A table, two chairs. She sits motionless for hours, and whoever wants sits opposite her. No gestures, no words, just eye to eye. Everything was photographed. The faces speak for themselves: intense human interaction conveyed by the gaze alone, without contact, without any sound, without any movement.
This performance “The artist is present” was also a touching and disturbing moment of reunion between Marina Abramovic and Ulay, two decades after their separation.
With this exhibition of a relationship with another stripped of everything, Marina Abramovic puts us back at the heart of our humanity. Interaction “here and now”, silent, patient, between immobile bodies… timeless, universal physical interaction, before the technologies which have built the present world and transformed our lives.
