Hungry for Love
Imp Kerr, Booborama, 2006
By ANA CECILIA ALVAREZ
With art that hopes to go too far, who gets to ask for forgiveness instead of permission?
MOCA L.A. commissioned Marina Abramović in 2011 to direct the museum’s yearly gala benefit. Guests, including Hollywood A-listers, would not be merely entertained; they would be intimately, at times uncomfortably, involved in what Abramović called her living manifesto. The gala’s centerpiece featured professional performers acting as human tables. For this they were paid a pittance. After auditioning, performer Yvonne Rainer drafted a public letter denouncing Abramović’s economic and physical exploitation of cultural workers, writing, “both artist and institution have proven irresponsible in their unwillingness to recognize that art is not immune to ethical standards.” She continues:
Ms. Abramović is so wedded to her original vision that she—and by extension, the Museum director and curators—doesn’t see the egregious associations for the performers, who, though willing, will be exploited nonetheless. Their cheerful voluntarism says something about the pervasive desperation and cynicism of the art world such that young people must become abject table ornaments and clichéd living symbols of mortality in order to assume a novitiate role in the temple of art.
Abramović’s gala went forth as planned. Yet Rainer’s doubts about performance art’s moral responsibility persist. Performance, grounded in the conscious pretense that one acts in a space temporarily removed, is morally ambiguous by definition. But this state of exception does not make the ethics of performance unquestionable. Art is not performed in vacuum.
The question is not simply what ethical standards we should hold art to, but instead who sets those standards and who can ignore them. Who gets to ask for forgiveness instead of permission?
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Factions within factions. An intriguing read.
