The Art of Silence and Stillness

Following the gaze of Marina Abramović

Gates and Portals – Marina Abramović, The Energizers (2023) © Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.

‘Australia is so much a part of me. It’s the beginning of all my best work. You know, it was your Australian desert that transformed me.’ Marina Abramović interview with Tim Douglas, 2013.

This essay explores the concepts of ‘silence’ and ‘stillness’ in the work of Marina Abramović, specifically in relation to her current Exhibition Gates and Portals at Modern Art Oxford. It begins by exploring the origins of these themes, drawn from Abramović’s experience with Indigenous communities in the Western deserts of Australia. It traces the influence of this formative experience and its manifestation as intersubjective gaze in her early work with Ulay ‘Gold Found by the Artists’ (1981) at the Art Gallery of NSW and her consecutive solo work The Artist is Present (2010) at MOMA, New York. Finally it observes its transmutation in her current exhibition Gates and Portals (2022) at Modern Art Oxford in which the artist is no longer present and her methodology of silent concentration is relocated with the gallery visitors and trained facilitators. In this current exhibition, the audience’s gaze turns inward as they leave behind mobile devices and external distractions and are led by the facilitators to witness silence and stillness within themselves. This writing draws on my own experience as a Performance Facilitator in this exhibition, and reveals some first hand insights and observations.

The Western Desert

In 1979 Abramović and her partner Ulay were invited to Australia for the European Dialogue Biennale of Sydney. As described in her bibliography Walk Through Walls (2022) what compelled her most of all was the idea of going to the outback and finding out about its 50,000-year-old Indigenous culture (Abramović & Kaplan, 2018, p.121). Their first attempt to spend ten days at the end of this initial trip was unsuccessful, but they were to return the following year with a full research grant from the Australian Visual Arts Council to spend six months in the outback with Indigenous Australians. Abramović and Ulay spent their first month mapping and photographing The Great Victoria Desert region with Phillip Toye, an activist lawyer in Aboriginal land rights (Ibid., p.125). They were granted permission to visit Indigenous territory that was ordinarily inaccessible to travellers, and Toye introduced them to members of the Pitjantjatjara^[1] and Pintuptu^[2] people (Ibid.). From then onwards, thirty-four-year-old Abramović and thirty-seven-year-old Ulay were on their own.

It was during this extended stay with Indigenous communities that Abramović encountered the practices of silence and bodily presence which were to permeate her subsequent work. After spending ‘hours a day in stillness and meditation within the expanse and searing heat of the desert’, Abramović experienced ‘a sense of mental transcendence, a heightened perception and a reconnection with her body and with the environment’ (Kaldor, 2015, p.8). She later revealed that all her ideas about ‘being present’ originated here in the Australian desert stating: ‘You look at this landscape, and there is this story, and it’s not that it happened in the past, it’s not something in the future. It’s happening now. It is always now. It has never “happened.” It is “happening.” This was a revolutionary concept to me – all my ideas about existing in the present came from there’ (Abramović & Kaplan, 2018, p.128). It was this early transformative experience that influenced the next four decades of Abramović’s work. It was her experiences of ‘not speaking’ and ‘not moving’ which informed the seminal series Gold Found by the Artists (1981) at the Art Gallery of NSW (Abramović & Kaplan, 2018, p.135) in which Abramović and Ulay sat opposite each other across a table in stillness and silence for eight hours over sixteen days (Ibid., p.136). Displayed on the table separating them were objects which represented their time in the desert including 250 grams of gold found in the outback, a gold boomerang and a live snake (Ibid.). The title was both literal and metaphorical as Abramović described ‘our experiences with the Aborigines had been “pure gold”. We had discovered stillness and silence’ (Ibid., p.135).

Gold Found by the Artists (1981), Art Gallery of NSW. © Marina Abramović & Ulay/Bild-Kunst.

This intense ‘closed circuit’ of intersubjectivity between Abramović and Ulay is reconfigured in her subsequent solo work The Artist is Present (2010) at MOMA. In this infamous performance a motionless Abramović remained silently seated at a table, across from which numerous visitors sat in an empty seat for a time of their choosing. For eight hours a day over three months, each visitor met her mutual gaze as she lowered and raised her head evoking an intense relational exchange (Ibid., p.309). More than 1500 people sat with Abramović, one of them being Australian writer Heather Rose who sat with her on four occasions. Rose observed in her novel The Museum of Modern Love (2016) that ‘There was just this enforced solitude of the gaze, the visitor who remains silent, the unspoken connection between two faces, two minds’ (Rose, 2018, p.86). This type of collaborative practice echoes the modernist tradition of relational aesthetics in which art holds at its critical centre the realm of human interactions and relations. This intense emotional exchange could be seen as a ‘proposal to live in a shared world’ and ‘tighten the space of human relations’ (Bourriaud, 2009, p.22).

It is mindful to note at this point that the Indigenous concept of presence, and subsequently ‘time’ differs distinctly from our linear Western temporal construct. Within an Indigenous ontological framework ‘being present’ is seen as being part of an ongoing system of existing and belonging ‘simultaneously’ known as The Dreaming (tjukurrpa)^[3]. Although difficult to clearly articulate this concept through our Western epistemological lens, Fred Myers posits that ‘It represents all that exists as deriving from a single, unchanging, timeless source’ (Myers, 1991, p.52). What is significant about this concept is that it denies the linear progress of time in favour of an existential timelessness.

The Artist is Present (2012), Museum of Modern Art, New York  © MoMA

The Abramović Method

As we move forward to current work, this intense dialogue between performer and protagonist is about to change as Abramović declares she is becoming ‘an obstacle to her own work’ (Judah, 2022). The audience’s gaze is now turned inward as she states ‘my relation to the public is changing […] I will be like a conductor in the exhibition space but it will be the public who take the physical and emotional journey’ (Balkin & D’Urso, 2017, p.95). As a result, the Abramović Method has evolved which proposes Abramovićs ‘presence’ as a teachable method based on a series of exercises. These exercises are based on Abramović’s own preparation for durational performance and form part of the Marina Abramović Institute’s Cleaning the House Workshops^[4].

Prior to our engagement as Performance Facilitators in Abramović’s current exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, myself and twelve others were trained in the Abramović Method between the 13th and 20th September 2022 by Billy Zhao. The purpose of these workshops were to introduce us to a steady state of internal silence and stillness in preparation for leading visitors to their own internalised silence. An example of the tasks performed included walking slowly for two hours, holding mutual gaze for thirty minutes and writing our names slowly for one hour. As equivocally stated by Abramović: ‘People don’t understand that the hardest thing is doing something which is close to nothing. It’s demanding of all of you, because there’s no story anymore to tell, no objects to hide behind, there’s nothing’ (Akers et al., The Artist Is Present, 2012). I found the workshop experience compelling and experienced the separation from everyday demands and distractions as a relief, it allowed time to simply ‘be’. The more challenging aspect was the duration of time spent on each task. It was then that my body began to rebel with headaches, discomfort and general irritability. However, I did find that when I left the workshops and entered back into the mainstream of life, I was moving more slowly and purposefully; there was an internal stillness that remained with me.

These practices of silence and stillness draw heavily from Abramović’s extensive engagement with multiple forms of spiritual wisdom including ‘Tibetan Buddhism, Brazilian Shamanism and the beliefs of Indigenous Australians’ (Modern Art Oxford, 2022). The audience’s silent internalised gaze embodies the Tibetan Buddhist philosophies of silence^[5]. In Buddhism silence is a method of stilling the mind and seeking the truth, it is said that Buddha attained enlightenment in his deep meditation with silence (Li, 2019). Similarly in the Yoga Sutras, Sri Swami Satchidananda, explains the concept of silence and stillness as ‘Yogas Chitta Vrittis Nirodha’ (Patañjali & Johnston, 2019) or put simply by Susanna Barkataki ‘the calming of the fluctuations of the mind in order to find unity within’ (Barkataki, 2020). Claire Harris suggests, in her interview with Abramović, that by putting on the headphones to experience silence, she is ‘hoping that visitors will mentally re-align themselves to some of these Tibetan Buddhist practices’ (Abramović et al., 2022. p.57).

This engagement with silence is analogous to the work of some other artists such as John Cage who have also explored Eastern philosophies. Specifically, his three movement composition 4’ 33’ (1952) in which the audience is immersed in four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Art critic Young Woo Lee observes that this performance ‘places listeners in the unfamiliar role of opening their ears to random, ambient phenomena and listening to themselves and the environments in which they are immersed’ (Lee, 2000, p.145). This internalised silence is conveyed differently by painter Agnes Martin who similarly spent formative years in the desert of New Mexico and explored Taoism and Zen Buddhism (Guggenheim, 2022). Although Martin’s approach is critically very different to Abramovic’s radical intersubjectivity, Martin herself states she painted with ‘her back to the world’ (Laing, 2015), her interest was in creating an experience that is ‘wordless and silent’ (Marvelly, 2022). It seems their overarching philosophies resonate as Martin concludes that ultimately ‘the goal of the artist was to express a sense of oneness between self and world’ (Spence, 2015).

Gates and Portals

This method of foregrounding the embodied engagement of the audience is at the heart of Abramović’s current exhibition Gates and Portals (2022) at Modern Art Oxford. The artist herself is no longer present, instead the gallery becomes an active ‘field of intersubjectivity’ (Bourriaud, 2009, p.23), as Abramović declares ‘My function in this new kind of performance situation is to show you what you can do for yourself. […] I am completely shifting the paradigm, changing the rules’ (Kaldor, 2015, p.11). This would conform to Claire Bishop’s observations on delegated performance in which ‘the exhibition space becomes a site of production rather than display’ with its hallmark being ‘the hiring of non-professional performers rather than the events being undertaken by the artists themselves’ (Bishop, 2012, p.219). In this performative exhibition, the visitors become both audience and performer, whilst facilitators become artists by proxy as Abramović cedes her physical presence to the newly trained recruits.

Central to this exhibition is leaving possessions, including mobile phones, behind in lockers and being silently guided through the gallery space. The participants are led slowly by hand into the first room to stand in a copper ‘Energizer’ tower with eyes closed, followed by a similar time facing the gallery wall. This gradual withdrawal focusses the visitor’s gaze internally and can be both liberating and challenging. The second room takes visitors more deeply into this internalised state as they are seated, blindfolded and headphones replaced for an extended duration. After spending time in blindfolded silence, the participants are then moved towards the final room in the gallery and blindfolds removed. This final room is dominated by a large black framed portal studded with glowing selenite crystals (Abramović & Kaplan, 2018, p. 345). This final space transitions visitors from a led-experience to one where they can move through the portal and experience silence on their own terms before readjusting to the clamour of the world outside the gallery.

Reflections

It is interesting to reflect on how a spiritual experience, which draws on 50,000-year-old Indigenous cultural practices and varied Eastern philosophies, translates into 30 minutes in a gallery space? And perhaps most importantly, to acknowledge that we can only comment with partial understanding at best through our own limited lens of Western epistemology? Firstly, we need to acknowledge the very different context in which these foundational ideologies now reside. The current ‘experience’ exists in an enclosed exhibition space as opposed to a vast open desert landscape. The silent presence associated with connection to land and environment is gone. As elucidated by Indigenous scholar Brian Martin the Indigenous ‘cultural ideology’ is an ideology that is created through real conditions of existence, and not imaginary relationships with them (Barrett et al., 2013, p.202). The gallery experience is contained within the gallery walls and within the participants body. It is no longer in relationship with the ‘outside world’ or, critically in Indigenous terms, in relationship with ‘country^[6]’. Secondly, the overall presentation of a ‘constructed’ experience within the gallery space consolidates this disconnect. Australian Indigenous culture eschews our ideas of representation as creating a separation between culture and life, it challenges us to look at the world as a ‘complete whole’ (Barrett et al., 2013, p.203). It would be a transgression to suggest this exhibition translates the Indigenous cultural experience in any real terms, but we can perhaps consider its conceptual origins and essence. As suggested by Brian Martin ‘Instead of assigning an ascribed value to a culture’s practice, the Western world needs to acknowledge the importance of how this practice plays a vital role in marking the relationship between Indigenous people and expressing identity’ (Barrett et al., 2013, p.203).

Despite these conflicting origins, contexts and ideologies, Abramović has, however, successfully re-contextualised her desert experience in a contemporary space. As Abramović observes ‘There is a need, a social need, for environments that allow people to stop, breathe, look away from their screens, and contemplate’ (Kaldor, 2015, p.1). The intimacy of this work reminds us of our individual presence alongside others, giving us a moment to reflect, and a rare space to stop and be present. It could be that the value of the experience lies beyond the gallery space, as we reflect on that moment of silence and embodied connection. In this respect the gallery space becomes a space of ‘affective learning’ and encompasses Dewey’s educational philosophy that ‘all genuine education comes through experience’ (Ansbacher, 1998, p.38). As we are engaged in this unique participatory experience we can perhaps learn something about ourselves whilst acknowledging the cultural ideologies from which the experiences were derived. The audience’s experience is wholly subjective, but this unique participatory artwork succeeds as a work of art in its call to register a fleeting ‘sense of presence’. The vast majority have commented that ‘unplugging from social media’ has been a beneficial experience. As one visitor reflected ‘I stood in silence and was given permission to be still. I will remember what it felt like when I am not in a still space and need to be’ (Modern Art Oxford, 2022). As recognised by Nicolas Bourriaud: ‘The common point between all this that we include within the umbrella term “work of art” lies in its ability to produce a sense of human existence’ (Bourriaud, 2002).

Bibliography

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Footnotes

^[1] The Pitjantjatjara are an Australian Indigenous people of the Central Australian desert near Uluru.

^[2] The Pintupi are an Indigenous people of the Western Desert of Australia whose traditional land is in the area west of Lake Macdonald and Lake Mackay in Western Australia.

^[3] The Dreaming, also referred to as Dreamtime, is a term devised by early anthropologists to refer to a religio-cultural worldview attributed to Australian Indigenous beliefs.

^[4] The Cleaning the House Workshop is a five day workshop developed by Marina Abramovic to improve individual focus, stamina, and concentration.

^[5] Silence (mona or tuṇhibhāva) is the quality of being quiet, at peace and without noise. Buddhist psychology sees a direct connection between verbal silence and mental silence.

^[6] Country is the term used by Aboriginal peoples to describe the lands, waterways and seas to which they are connected