Abramovic: "the grandmother of performance art"?

In an exhibition for the Manchester festival that appears to be much more about the spectators than the performers, Marina Abramovic Presents, on at the Whitworth Art Gallery until 19th July, is a challenge to the ways in which we are all supposed to view art. By convincing a hall full of people to don lab coats, listen to a lecture outlining our irrefutable inadequacies as human beings, and spend ten minutes in silence slowly drinking a small cup of water, Abramovic (sometimes described as the “grandmother of performance art”) must have hoped she had cleared the air for any kind of stimulus whatsoever. Making us scream, stare at one another for uncomfortable periods of time, and march in unison across the hall was not too difficult for her, and will certainly provide good tools for a polemical video.

My mind was open to this approach from the outset, and the preamble from Abramovic was in many ways promising: I adore the adversity of art about which she spoke. I kept a straight face while staring into the piqued countenance of a perfect stranger for an eternity, and was careful not to break rank at any point during Marina’s opening lecture at all. My discipline ought to have been ample fodder for what was to follow. Then, I found out what follows.

After the hour-long lecture, the audience is ushered on from the lecture hall to encounter ex-asianpunkboy Terence Koh, who was apparently known in the mid-1990s for his eponymous website and “art-porn” zines. I have been informed that since 2004 he has been producing room-sized installations and performances, and from this I suppose I expected something akin to a Punchdrunk experience, whose projects have attracted no end of praise (and who are also at Manchester this year in force). However, the figure remained still and sedentary as if awaiting instruction from an absent sensei, then rolled onto its side, then moved a bit, then a little bit more, and so on. It was all to be far more minimal and contemplative than fun.

An Indian man lay on the floor of the next room in his underwear, scribbling on the floor and walls with a piece of charcoal. A few objects were left out for inspection. Moving away from the awkward crowd towards the stairs of the next room, a Stepford replicant was seen poised to jump, bringing to mind Mark Leckey’s Turner Prize installation about the uncanny quality of people who do not quite resemble humans. Eventually she did jump, and there again was the gist of her three hour performance.

I kept worrying that I must have a woefully short attention span, and that my reluctance to wander up to the performers and touch them was dreadfully English. I was too much of a vegetarian for Alastair MacLennan’s chopped pigs’ heads, and too anxious about my long-term hearing  to stand in the narrow stone staircase where Nico Vascellari was smashing a bit of rock to powder with a large hunk of metal. Neither did I collect much inspiration from Kira O’Reilly’s naked body falling slowly down yet another staircase, no matter how long we all stared at it with earnest professionalism.

It was at around this point that I formed a clear impression of what had been going on for the first of three or four more hours. I took more notice of other people wearing my coat, watched what they were doing, and caught a couple of onlookers smirking as I tried to examine a heap of animal skins that covered a prostrate Jamie Isenstein. There it stressed all too emphatically that we were mainly on display for one another, and were not being made to look very smart at all: convince a group of people to contrive appreciation from something which yields very little, and enjoy the spectacle which ensues from this process. Thanks, Marina, I had an alright time doing it.