Estelle 1 Sean Estelle TDGE 3 Paper 1 Porter 5/3/11 The Artist Is Present Radical. Groundbreaking.

These are adjectives that any expert in their field would like to be described as. Marina Abramovic and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are both eminently qualified to have such adjectives describe them. Abramovic, often called the godmother of performance art, has been radically redefining the role of the artist in art-making and spectator relationships since 1971, when she started performing. Csikszentmihalyi has also completely redefined

the world of his field since he invented the concept of flow, or optimal experience, in the 1970's. As the concept of flow has been refined and layered, Csikszentmihalyi's theories have become more

and more applicable to the performative works that Abramovic subjects herself to; from her early, violent body works, through her long performance/personal partnership with Ulay, and into her present solo work that synthesizes those periods, the eight different elements of flow (and the enjoyment that comes from flow) manifest themselves. The first definition of flow that Csikszentmihalyi presents in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is as follows: The state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter... people will do it even at great

Estelle 2 cost, for the sheer sake of doing it. (Csikszentmihalyi 4) He first developed his theory in the mid-'70's through the observation of artists and their extreme concentration on the task at hand while accomplishing it- then their apparent disregard of the object once it was completed. He started asking questions about the intrinsic motivation behind these artists' (and other focused individuals') work; he then refined his areas of research into the quality of subjective experience that made a behavior intrinsically rewarding (Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi 5-7). From this research, he created a model of experience that he called flow his academic terminology was that of autotelic [rewarding in and of itself] experience (Csikszentmihaly & Csikszentmihalyi 8). Throughout the 1970's and '80's, Csikszentmihalyi and his team of researchers developed a very specific type of research known as the Experience Sampling Method. This method involves asking people to wear an electronic paging device for a week and to write down how they feel and what they are thinking about whenever the pager signals (Csikszentmihalyi 4) Using this and other research techniques, he created a whole system of thought that has influenced and continues to influence psychology, anthropology, and other cultural fields to this day. Marina Abramovic grew up in Titoist Yugoslavia in an affluent, culturally plugged-in family. From a very early age, she demonstrated

Estelle 3 a remarkable amount of self control and poise. She suffered from intense migraines in her adolescence; to combat these migraines, she would lie completely still and train her body to surrender to, and relish in the experiential nature of the pain until it went away (Westcott 25-26). As a member of the upper echelon of Yugoslavian

society, she was able to insert herself quickly into the art world of that culture once she showed interest and trained privately in her formative years. Initially, she tried to be a safe, academic painter to please her mother, but she quickly grew out of that through political action (like the mass demonstrations in Belgrade in 1968), and the opening of the SKC (a cultural center/contemporary art space) in 1971; James Westcott states in his wonderful biography When Marina Abramovic Dies that when the SKC opened...Abramovic would use the space to leap from painting to working with objects...and then her first performances (Westcott 38). Once she started performing, she never looked back. Throughout the '70's and onward, she pushed her body to limits that most people would never be able to go to, and all in the name of art. Csikszentmihalyi discusses in Flow eight elements of enjoyment. The first is that to be in flow, one must be engaged in a challenging activity that requires skills. Later in the book, he draws a graph with challenge as the y-axis and skills as the x-axis. He draws a channel up the graph that develops with a specific ratio of challenge

Estelle 4 to skills; the longer one stays in that channel, the more complex one's sense of self becomes (Csikszentmihalyi 74). Almost all of Abramovic's performances involve an extremely challenging activity that her specific skill set allowed her to accomplish better than most other people would be able to. When interviewed for the compilation Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art and asked whether she places primary value on having experience, Abramovic replied, [T]he experience for me is essential...I'm really going on my experience of performing now for thirty-five years. (Baas & Jacob 189). The next element of enjoyment that Csikszentmihalyi talks about is the merging of action and awareness. In Flow, it is described as people becom[ing] so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous...they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing(Csikszentmihalyi 53). Abramovic had a series of performances, the Rhythm series, where she embraced and tested this notion. In the first piece she did, Rhythm 10, Abramovic had 10 knives lain out on the ground. She took one knife and moved it between her splayed out fingers on the floor. As soon as she hit one of her fingers, she replaced the knife and moved on with the next one. Once she went through all ten knives, she stopped the tape recorder that had been recording all the audio of this, rewound it, and attempted to exactly duplicate the rhythm of

Estelle 5 the knives on the ground and the cuts on her fingers while listening to the tape. This violent action was a perfect example of performing an action where awareness would need to be completely focused on the action (the moving of the knife between the fingers) instead of on external stimuli, like the knife cutting her fingers. The third element is that of clear goals and feedback. This is one of the longer sections of the chapter on enjoyment, and for good reason. Csikszentmihalyi realizes this is a very broad statement for enjoyment. If the stakes of the goal are not very high, the enjoyment upon accomplishing that goal will not be very high either. At the same time, he also says, In some creative activities, where goals are not clearly set in advance, a person must develop a strong personal sense of what [he/]she intends to do (Csikszentmihalyi 55). This is extremely prescient to the mode in which the performance artist operates. Oftentimes, Marina would not know exactly how a performance would end. In Rhythm 5, Abramovic passed out in the middle of a burning star. She did not mean to put herself in that kind of danger, of course, but she did know the risks of the goal she was trying to accomplish. Csikszentmihalyi also talks about how feedback, especially the acceptance of both positive and negative feedback, is crucial to the creative act (or even any act in which one has invested psychic energy [Csikszentmihalyi 57]). When Abramovic and Ulay (her performance and personal partner for many

Estelle 6 years) performed Nightsea Crossing, a piece in which they would sit in the gallery and hold eye contact while doing nothing else the entire time an audience was there, they would often end up inflicting extreme pain on themselves in ways they did not think possible; Ulay would sometimes have to leave the performance because he would be in such pain. Abramovic would respond with letters that said things like, We are having an experience in a period of sixteen days. Whatever comes good or bad we are in it (Westcott 168). The fourth element is concentration on the task at hand. This is one of the tenets of enjoyment that is most obvious in Abramovic's work. In every single one of her performances, there is a concentration that is simply not present in today's culture at large. Abramovic provides us with an example of the potential of the mind's ability have extreme focus and concentration. The fifth element that Csikszentmihalyi discusses is something he calls the paradox of control (Csikszentmihalyi 59) He talks about how people that tend to enter flow-states that seem to have an element of danger do so because they are taking a calculated risk; they know exactly what is a variable and what happens if that variable changes. Abramovic dove into the depths of this during her Rhythm series. In Rhythm 5, when she passed out, she was upset at herself for the performance being interrupted then. So she imposed an element of control by working in possible unconsciousness as part of

Estelle 7 the the performance. In her very next work, Rhythm 2, Abramovic took two pills (at separate times) that help catatonic patients move, and help schizophrenics control their impulses. Each one put her in a state that she had no physical control over; however, since the audience saw her ingest a pill, they knew it was a side-effect that would go away, and so they did not interrupt the performance putting the control back in Abramovic's hands. This dynamic/question of who had control was something she would continue to play with and conceptualize as time went on. The sixth element of enjoyment is that of the loss of selfconsciousness. Csikszentmihalyi uses this concept to talk about union with the environment and nature around the subject performing the act that brings them to flow. However, in Abramovic's work, this concept is most obvious whenever one hears about the relationship that she and Ulay had. It was an all-encompassing, all-consuming relationship. They spent 24 hours a day together for years, performing and living the artist's life. For each of their performances, they would identify as Ulay/Abramovic (or Abramovic/Ulay), because they liked to think of themselves as transforming into one entity, one self, when they were performing together. Abramovic herself says, With our relation work we cause a third existence which carries vital energy. This third energy existence caused by us does not depend on us any longer but has the own quality, which we call 'that self' (Westcott

Estelle 8 148). This is the very definition of a liminal, third space that is the ultimate goal of flow and the loss of self-consciousness for a performer. The seventh and eighth elements will be combined since a specific performance of Abramovic's exemplifies them both so well. Those elements are: the transformation of time, and the chance of completion of the task. Both of these elements are fairly selfexplanatory: when one is in a flow state, time does not move by the tick of the clock, but rather on the schedule of the person in the flow state and how fast or slow the encounter that is inducing flow is happening. The ability for the task/goal to be completed is directly related to that. The specific performance that shows both of these elements so well is Abramovic's performance of The House with the Ocean View. In this performance, Abramovic lived in a 3-room house with the walls deconstructed, and each room placed flat against a gallery wall, for 12 days without eating or talking. She could sing (if she felt the need), shower, sleep (for no more than 7 hours), relieve herself, or establish energy dialogue with the audience (Abramovic 1). There was a metronome that always kept the time during this marathon of a performance, but eventually it just became a ticking. As Abramovic says, Can my purified self...change the energy field of the public?...it happened in The House with the Ocean View because I created space with no time (Baas & Jacob 190).

Estelle 9 There was no sense of time (for Abramovic at least); at the same time, she imposed very strict rules on the performance so that it could be completed. She knew what she could and could not do, and this helped her see ahead to when she would no longer have a strict system of rules set on her. Csikszentmihalyi ends the chapter that breaks down the different elements of enjoyment by talking about autotelic experience. He says that the key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself (Csikszentmihalyi 67). Abramovic's performances were never made as a competition against other performance artists, or a masochistic competition against herself. Abramovic's work deals in the transcendent, and the exploration into the limits of the body; that need for experiential art in her has shown to the world the true potential of flow. As Abramovic said when asked, Can you explain what you mean by 'transformed'?, she replied, Transformed [such that] the experience is so...profound...that you really understand reality in a different way because it opens up in front of you. Csikszentmihalyi himself could not give a better definition of flow.

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Works Cited Abramovic, Marina. Marina Abramovi : the House with the Ocean View. Milano: Charta, 2003. Print. Baas, Jacquelynn, and Mary Jane. Jacob. "Marina Abramovic." Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art. Berkeley: University of California, 2004. 187-94. Print. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Isabella Selega. Csikszentmihalyi. Introduction. Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 3-14. Print. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Print. Westcott, James. When Marina Abramovi MA: MIT, 2010. Print. Dies: a Biography. Cambridge,