Balkan Baroque
Our contributing author Naira Khananushyan revisits Marina Abramovic’s 1997 art performance and shares her thoughts on survivor’s guilt
Marina Abramović’s Balkan Baroque performance, presented twenty-five years ago at the 1997 Venetian Biennale, feels eerily relevant today - here’s why.
The artwork is instantly understandable. At the center of it is the artist herself, who sits upon a pile of some 1,500 cow bones that she unsuccessfully attempts to scrub clean whilst singing songs from her Yugoslavian childhood. The three digital screens behind her show her parents interviewed as well as Abramović herself in various settings. The scent – or, rather, the reek - is another prominent element of the performance that makes it almost impossible to stay in the room, yet “the grandmother of the performance art” was there for five hours daily over the course of four days.
The concept of towering bones is not new to the world of art and has often been toyed with – think of Vasily Vereshchagin’s The Apotheosis of War (1871). Originally a legacy of Mongols, who were said to make pyramids out of the remains of their adversaries, fascination with bones and skulls is evident in the unsettling interiors of Kostnitsa, an ossuary within Church of All Saints in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic. Like any war-borne art, Balkan Baroque feeds into our strange enchantment with grandiose violence, which is interestingly preserved even in our “civilized” age. This is largely due to the immediacy and broadcasting potential of the internet age, further amplified by our use of social media that powers the experience of collective war trauma like never before.
Today, the casualties of war unveil themselves on Instagram stories and live broadcasts, enhancing the so-called “doomscrolling”. We are saddened and repulsed, but we cannot look away. Abramović’s performance feels like a predecessor to this: the cow bones seem to never come to an end, the white dress inescapably soaks in blood in the process, and the stink continues to fill the room, no matter how many bones were cleaned off blood. “The whole idea [of]washing bones and trying to scrub the blood, is impossible.You can't wash the blood from your hands as you can't wash the shame from the war”, explained Abramović. Endless scrubbing – reminiscent of Sisyphean labor, is futile. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Can’t Help Myself 2019 Biennale entry could be seen possessing a similar concept, where the artist is replaced by a robot awkwardly trying to sweep blood-like liquid that seems to spread in spite of the machine’s best efforts.
Abramović, in fact, received the 1997 Biennale award. The footage from the celebration shows her being joyful, almost flirty – as if she hasn’t just returned from hell of her own making. This light-heartedness might make the onlooker wonder if her emotions during the performance were purely an act (as however implied by the genre), but this is where the performance most reflects our modern life. Survivors live again, and laugh again, and feist again – especially with the attention span of today. Though we cannot erase the experience, we can choose to leave the stinky room full of bones. Life triumphs.
