In a venue where the atmosphere reminded that of the Pompidou Centre before its recent restoration –fresh, open, unpretentious– two exceptional visual artists presented a splendid performance for four consecutive hours on Tuesday, 14 December. One was the 46-year old Flemish artist Jan Fabre, a multitalented creator whose work ranges from the visual arts to playwriting, stage design and choreography. The other was the 58-year old Marina Abramovic, a living legend of the performance art. They appeared for one day only at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris before an international audience.


Clothed in medieval style metallic armor, the two artists embodied the archetypal figures of the warrior and the virgin in a cycle of episodes, writing with their bodies an essay on violence, war, sacrifice, atonement and forgiveness.


The event took place in an elevated, empty display case, a transparent, parallelepiped glass cage, whose surfaces were partly embedded with magnifying glasses. Thus viewpoints were created that allowed a distorted and multiplied perception of what was happening in the interior.


This unique artwork unfolded in 26 acts, each one developing a certain topic announced by an unidentified voice. The topics were repeated, enriched each time with new elements building up an abstract epic narration.


Topics included: “Saint George” –the enactment of the scene in which the saint on horseback crushes the monster; “Forgiveness-Repentance” with the warrior hitting himself on the glass wall, stumbling on it with the mask of his armor and pointedly with its tip shaped as a sword-phallus; and the “Pieta”, an ironic but also tragic metaphor of the well-known artistic subject where the persecutor-warrior holds the dead victim-virgin in his hands.


After having carried one another, having danced in their armor and embraced, one leaning on the shoulder of the other, the moment arrived when they removed their armor and revealed a perishable body and face. The second two-hour part held in store an unexpected climax: the “virgin” Abramovic incises the left arm of the “warrior” Fabre with a lancet. A small trickle of blood begins to flow. The warrior leaves the glass chamber. With indescribable pedantry he begins to draw a horizontal line with a pencil on the side wall. Collecting the blood pouring from the wound with a brush and dipping it every so often into the wound, he begins to write the word pelagius (purple) on the wall in calligraphic letters – an enigmatic allusion to blood, power and its representation. At the same time, in the display case, the virgin grasps a white cloth in which two animal hearts are wrapped and places them on the empty floor.


When the scene will be repeated with an incision on the warrior’s right hand, the virgin, motionless, will lift the bloodied cloth proclaiming in this way the end of innocence: if the virgin is not innocent any more then nobody is. Now everyone was guilty. Afterwards, while the warrior writes on the wall that you need a lifetime to become a young artist, Abramovic sings for 15 minutes: “Forgiveness is the/a duty”. The improvised song turns into prose that is repeated in every possible rhythm and manner, creating a broad range of emotional intensity: she sings it slowly and softly, she sings it angrily and viciously, she sings it exhausted and with tears in her eyes, ritually, quietly and dynamically like the voice of the conscience.


In the final 26th part, the warrior makes an incision in the right arm of the virgin. Taking from her blood with a brush, he writes the word “FORGIVE” next to the wound and then leaves the glass chamber while the kneeling virgin/Abramovic roams inside this glass environment filled with blood and spolia of armor, repeating “Art is a trip of humility”. Her voice is heard as if coming from another world, since the sound echoes distorted out of the sealed glass cage. Hurting – in real terms, after so much physical fatigue – and in tears, she continues, exhausted, to roam around and utter these words in every possible intonation and manner.




Blues in armor


For four hours Abramovic and Fabre undermined the idea of spectacle, succeeding in creating a reality that penetrated the skin of the audience, a spiritual but at the same time “earthy” partaking (methexis). Although the event contained violence, this is not what stole the show. The physical pathos was the medium during the process of atonement, self-consciousness and humiliation of the two artists. Just before the conclusion, when Abramovic, kneeling, says that art is a trip of humility, no one present could doubt about her honesty: first and foremost the artist herself stood there humiliated, plunged in inexpressible, far away from any hint of narcissism.


The “warrior” and the “virgin” embody the ethical history of humanity. In the face of the warrior co-exist the acceptable value of fight and the repulsive offense of violence, arrogance and brutality of war. He is at the same time the noble protector and the odious persecutor.


As a vehicle of purity, the virgin functions as the warrior’s innocent victim but also as the sacred figure to which the warrior turns to for his atonement. Her holiness is defined and measured by the brutality of the warrior. It is this complicity that was underscored when they danced together to a blues melody, embraced, in their armor.


Marina Abramovic and Jan Fabre made real art, that is to say sharp art, this kind that punches both the stomach and the head of the public. With outmost modesty, far from any prefabricated rhetoric, they overturned every one of our expectations and led us into a trip through the timelessness of the archetypes but also down a thorny path –a path with temporality, historicity – by asserting, in a suggestive way, their position regarding the violent events of the contemporary world.


We are thankful to them. Above all for reminding us, in an age of image accumulation and zapping through consumable emotions, how art can genuinely move us.


The videotaped performance as well as the objects that were used will be presented to the public until 6 February at the Palais de Tokyo. During the same time, works by Fabre will be exhibited until 29 January at Alpha-Delta Gallery, Pallados 3, Psyrri, Athens.


Published at the Art Supplement “7” of the Sunday edition of ELEFTHEROTYPIA, 9.1.2005