A major challenge in representing historic performance art is how its "liveness" is often dulled through the traces of archival photographs, videos and other documentation. It reduces the artist and performers to the semiotics of the image—the very concept many artists, including the enduring Marina Abramović, seek to question. The Royal Academy of Arts' retrospective of Abramović in London (until January 1, 2024), however, has aimed to energise the archive with its large-scale photographs and videos tracing Abramović’s transgressive oeuvre, accompanied by the restaging of four of her iconic performances by younger contemporaries.

These performances, scheduled every day of the exhibition, raise a series of critical questions about whether it is possible to restage performance without the artist whose identity is entwined with the meaning of the work.

Abramović, along with Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Joseph Beuys, Ana Mendieta, and James Luna, are examples of artists whose identities are embedded in our understanding and experience of their performances. This is particularly true when considering the series of works Abramović created and performed with her creative and romantic partner Ulay such as Imponderabilia. This work was originally staged in 1977 with the pair standing across from each other in a doorway, ensuring members of the public who walked in the gap between them unavoidably rubbed against their naked bodies.

Despite this seemingly essential personal connection between the two eye-locked performers, Imponderabilia is one of the live works restaged in the RA retrospective by pairs of other artists, who are not noted as having any form of pre-existing partnership. Does this change our experience and understanding of the work? Absolutely. Yet the score is followed accurately by the performers and the physical experience for the audience participant is replicated.

This tension exemplifies the way in which live art amplifies truths that exist in our experience of any work of art. It articulates how the work changes over time because we, the viewer, and the context in which we live, change. But how it differs from other forms of art is because the index of the artwork has also changed due to the same dynamics of time.

Time—the material of performance—is also the reason artists are faced with the reality of the limitations of their natural lives and what that means for the life of their work when they are no longer able to perform it. The liveness of the work and the performer is equally entwined with its ending and the mortality of the creator. While performance art has been regarded by performance specialist RoseLee Goldberg and others as a defining aspect of 20^th-century art, its continued longevity draws from the pre-ancient lineage of ritual.

Ritual is concerned with the repetition of prescribed gestures, and it is carried over time through intergenerational knowledge-sharing and interpretation. Abramović, like other artists, is using this methodology to ensure the longevity of her performances. It is an essential component of her retrospective to give 2023 audiences the live experience of her performed works.

Four of Abramović’s performances are restaged as part of her retrospective: Imponderabilia (1977/2023), Nude with Skeleton (2002/2005/2023), Luminosity (1997/2023), and The House with the Ocean View (2002/2023). The performers were auditioned in February 2023 and selected based on their experience and expertise to restage these works. They then undertook training in the Abramović Method, an approach conceived by the artist that involves exercises to conjure "inner strength, concentration, and endurance.” The chosen artists are Alessio Bagiardi, Darcey Ball, Mads Bittmann, Antonio Branco, Tina Afiyan Breiova, Lorea Burge, CARU, Seamus Casey, Marie Close, Jia-Yu Chang-Corti, Valerie Ebuwa, Chiara Marini Ferretti, Agata Flaminika, Jose Funnell, Rowena Gander, Agnes Luck Galpin, Rob Hesp, Bartel Jespers, Benjamin Jordan, Francesca Kamil, Katarzyna Kuzka, Lidia Lidia, Sara Maurizi, Hannah Mason, Duarte Pinho E Melo, Loren McK, Kieram Corrin Mitchell, Mateusz Piekarski, Olia Poliakova, Yuyu Rau, Mahsa Salali, Laura Schuller, Leonardo Sinopoli, Agnieszka Szczotka, Madinah Farhannah Thompson, Jaya Twill, Rosalie Wahlfrid and Kam Wan.

Each one of these artists has their own distinct practice with some having links to their own websites on the RA’s exhibition website. At the time of their auditions, they would have endured the precarious years of social distancing with its widespread cancelling, rescheduling, and postponing of live works. Cultural institutions restructured; live programmes were dismantled; and the scaffolding on which contemporary live art was supported was— and continues to be—in a position of uncertainty. The pre-pandemic thriving performance scene in London has cautiously emerged again but with the lingering financial crisis meaning each performance is hard fought for by artists and institutions seeking to keep live art alive.

It is upon reflection of this contemporary moment that we see the achievements of Abramović’s retrospective and the artists who endured to stage her performances in London in 2023. It reveals the fundamental dynamics of intergenerational interdependence, which is the foundation of the performance community and crucial to the ongoing experience of historic works. Although the self-proclaimed "grandmother of performance art” is undoubtedly the superstar of the exhibition, she needs each performer for her art to live and likewise each artist is gaining experience, exposure, and financial remuneration (although how liveable the undisclosed daily rate remains to be revealed).

We also often regard Abramović’s oeuvre in terms of the extremities of her endurance, but each performer deserves equal respect for their own survival of recent times and dedication to continuing the Serbian artist’s performances. Their own bodies likewise re-perform the stamina needed in Abramović’s works. There has not been enough attention paid to the constellation of performers, the art workers who support them, and the complex choreography required to sustain a rigorous daily and hourly schedule of performance in Abramović’s retrospective. Without these monumental and intricate efforts, the exhibition would have been absent of the very essence of Abramović’s oeuvre—enduring liveness.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its Editors.)