Week 12 - Artist - Abramovic - Althamer

 Marina Abramovic

She sets out to tell a story about art and the world with contemporary artist Marina Abramovich, who seeks to awaken the individual consciousness and change the world. However, I will talk about the awakening of individual members responsible for the beginning and completion of all social changes. Just as an idea is a start to change the world, I believe that an individual's awakening under challenging times can become a driving force for more tedious actions to break through the crisis. 

Marina Abramovich is one of the most revered performance artists of the 21st century worldwide. Her work <Artist Is Present>, one of her works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MoMA in 2010, was selected by critics as representative of the new millennium.

In that work, Marina sat motionless from the morning when the art museum opened until the door was closed, sitting face to face with the audience and communicating in silence. It was a performance that lasted 716 hours, and the number of people who visited MoMA was 8.5 million, more than New Yorkers. It was said that she drew the entire city into the work. Face to face with others in silence, write your name as slowly as possible without lifting your arm for an hour, and spending time in a space where sound is blocked. When Marina was doing her retrospective at MoMA in 2010, she also had a workshop on the same program with 35 performance artists who would reenact their past shows. She did not speak and eat for five days, washing in the cold dawn river in the early spring, sitting on a chair in a room of silence, or staying for long periods with headphones to block out all sounds. The megalopolis of New York was buzzing as the changes of individuals led by one artist spread. 

Pawel Althamer

Pawel Althamer is well known as a sculptor. He produced works of enormous scale, such as the portrait nude Balloon, which inflated like a balloon reaching 21 meters tall. This work adds a futuristic new imagination to the social environment the artist is facing. Some tasks cannot be viewed as separate objects, such as the <Common Task> project. In <Common Task>, people jointly pretend to count down and launch their virtual residence into space.

Being dependent on several different participants and that creates absurdist situations and images. The work guarantees a loose and fluctuating structure and practically valuable and unexpected results. <Common Task> has a critical common ground with other group projects he has recruited prisoners, children, and the disabled. For each project, the artist selected co-creators who supported a broad commonality. Even if these have a dominant adverse effect and are counterproductive, they consciously overlook the most pressing issues.