Imponderabilia: Re-enacting Abramovic

By Kate Barry

Imponderabilia was first performed in 1977 by Marina Abramovic and Ulay at Galleria Comunale D’Arte Moderna, in Bologna, Italy, for the duration of ninety minutes before the police shut it down. It was first created and performed during the height of second-wave feminism of 1970s, a time that brought about changes in mainstream society’s understanding of sexuality. It was a time dubbed the sexual revolution.

 

In North America this era brought feminist consciousness, public nudity, birth control, gay and lesbian rights, as well as ideas of “free love” (sex outside the institution of marriage), into a wider consciousness. I am reminded that many iconic performance pieces from this era employ nudity as a transgressive strategy, most notably Vito Acconci’s Trademarks (1970), Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. — Starification Object Series (1974) and Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975). 

In this essay, Imponderabilia: Re-enacting Abramovic, I share my experience reenacting the performance through a feminist lens that considers the significance of this ground-breaking work.

Abramovic’s performance Imponderabilia is ephemeral — it is about being in the moment and experiencing live art. 

In my personal experience, Imponderabilia is physical and sexy. It’s a performance where two artists stand naked in the main entrance of the museum, gallery or art-spece facing each other and creating a passageway of uncertainty between the audience and artists. 

If the audience wants to enter the gallery space their only option is to pass sideways through a small space between two naked performance artists.

In 2010, I reenacted Imponderabilia during Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, at Hart House, University of Toronto. The performance was organized by the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and presented in conjunction with the exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, curated by Barbara Fischer. I performed Imponderabilia for a total of five hours!

A diverse group of six artists of different genders, ages, shapes, sizes and racial backgrounds reenacted the piece. During Nuit Blanche we performed for one-and-a-half-hour segments, from 7 pm until 5 am. I performed Imponderabilia standing across from Gail Zamozniaka, a Toronto-based artist and yoga instructor. I also performed for three-and-a-half hours across from Francisco-Fernando Granados, a Guatemalan-born, Toronto artist and performance artist extraordinaire.

According to Abramovic, “the process is much more important than the result in performance art, everything is about process.” In this spirit, prior to the event, we went through an intensive two-day training process designed by Abramovic and led by two performers, who reenacted the piece during the 2010 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Artist is Present. 

The training process was designed to slow us down and bring us fully into our bodies. In one exercise, we wrote our names for one hour without removing the pencil from the paper. In another, we sat blindfolded in a park for one hour. During the preparation we were also asked to fast during the day. In the evening we were fed light, wholesome foods like fruits, vegetables, rice, water and herbal teas in order to purify our bodies. According to the Abromavic, the preparation for Imponderabilia trains the artist to be fully present in his or her body in order to gain a greater sense of interconnectedness with their performance partner(s), and the audience. [1]

What I learned from performing the piece is, Imponderabilia’s ability to utilize the artist’s physicality as a medium that allows for a questioning of patriarchal norms about sexuality. This experience confirmed that nudity is still a subversive and transgressive act! Since radical resistance to norms of Patriarchy depend upon destabilizing the status quo nudity can still be considered a tool of resistance and a revolutionary strategy that broadens one's awareness of sexuality, specifically its relationship to gender.

I think members of the public — like those at the University of Toronto campus — were more comfortable with the idea or the fantasy of nudity in relation to the female body. Since we are socialized to see naked female bodies in art and culture daily. One direct example of this was when I performed Imponderabilia with a male partner, nine out of ten passers-by would not face him, but instead faced me while making the passageway between us. I think this is because they are accustomed to the female nude in art & culture. 

Moreover the female body has a tradition of being mediated through social hierarchies. In the canon of art history for example, the female body is framed as an object to be looked at and consumed. Yet, when a real naked female body is positioned in a performance space it disrupts expectations and norms around beauty, age, race, ability and the objectification of female bodies. That is, a real body makes folks very uncomfortable.

While performing Imponderabilia problems arose because the female nude is no longer mediated through pop culture or art history. Instead the female nude is confronted face-to-face. The presence of the nude body in the Hart House performance space transformed the viewing experience from audience members looking at the body as object, to audience members encountering it as a real imperfect subject.

While hundreds of audience members passed through us many audience members could not bring themselves to pass through at all! Still others passed through with much hostility! (A woman around my age actually took a photo of my vulvic area! without consent!) This unknown territory of actual bodies unnerves and disturbs people.

Thirty-three years after Imponderabilia was first performed it continues to bring the politics of the body to the forefront by illustrating how audience’s relationship to nudity destabilizes the dynamic between artist and audience. That is, nudity in Imponderabilia is used as a strategy to disrupt patriarchal norms in mainstream popular culture demonstrating that it could still be used as a  feminist and revolutionary act of resistance.

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[1] Durng the training sessions we also created code-words for our safety, so that a volunteer, coordinator, security guard, or another performance artist who heard the code-word could intervene. And yes, I was paid and treated well.