The Story of Marina Abramovic and Ulay (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The Story of Marina Abramovic and Ulay (2020)

sydney-yaeko.com

50 pointsNaOH42 comments

Having ć symbol stand out because the font does not support it is a story way too familiar to anyone from Balkans

Could be a fonting error, could be being really aggressive about not ignoring slavic diacritics. Considering the topic of the article, I say it could be either.

If it were the latter, why would it be misspelled in the title at the top of the page?

Isn’t that the soul cooking lady from the Podesta files?

Edit: yup looks like it

The fact this is the top comment shows that HN is healing.

Yeah, not so much. Half a decade ago there would be some interesting commentary on her performance art. Now it’s just Reddit tier meme comments and “it’s dumb and I think anyone that likes her is dumb.”

Her performance art consciously courts controversy, so it wouldn't be fair to the artist to ignore this aspect of her work. Anybody who wants the discussion to avoid the controversies is being dumb and quite frankly doesn't understand art!

What aspect? I doubt any of the shallow dismissals are even vaguely familiar with her work.

Certainly it’s possible to critique her, but I’m not seeing any of that here.

The woman goes out of her way to play on taboos like cannibalism, but you think you're doing her a favor to ignore it? Please.

Again - perfectly fine to critique her methods, attention-seeking, etc., preferably after taking the time to understand why she is doing this.

But I don’t see any of that here. Just mindless “it’s dumb.” Very similar vibes to the angry atheism cultural trends 15 years ago.

Mindless "it's dumb" when she's literally posing with decapitated goat heads, fully aware of their centuries-old symbolism?

My reaction to your response is that your moral compass has the sensitivity of a glass thermometer that fell off the wall.

Do you have an actual point to make?

I don’t personally care for her work, at least the more recent stuff. Her older performances were more interesting. But I’m not evaluating it morally, and I don’t really see how it being “demonic” is equivalent to it being dumb.

Your problem is that you see "demonic" as an aesthetic choice; but Marina and others like her completely believe what they are doing is real and has weight. The people accused of engaging in the occult are frequently offended by those who claim it is merely aesthetic.

A video of Abramovic preparing for one event shows her smearing pig blood on walls while writing cryptic instructions, including, “Mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk, drink on earthquake nights.”

In one photo, Abramovic holds a bloody, skinned goat head—a symbol associated with Baphomet, a pagan idol tied to Satanism. Another image depicts her standing behind a model posed as a “dead” body, naked with her internal organs spilling out. Abramovic’s hand gestures in these photos are said to align with occult practices.

- https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/zara-announces-new-creepy-...

If that's not demonic, Satanic, and occult, what would you ever call demonic, Satanic, and occult? Does every demonic person need to self-identify as such? Is this a game of "she's not because she says she's not"? Believe people when they tell you what they are.

Pretty strange for sure.

Not clear to me how that has anything to do with my comment. Thanks for the reminder not to engage with bizarre comments, though.

I call it being an edgelord, and it’s a great way to get attention, and it worked because we are talking about it.

I first learned of her from her Netflix documentary, long before the Spirit Cooking thing, and she came across as a pretentious twit to me. I'll say I did have some respect for her commitment. I'm admittedly someone who doesn't "get" performance art, though.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/marina-abramovics-spirit-cooking/

For decades, I have successfully used reverence for Marina Abramovic as an attribute to filter out persons with whom I am incompatible.

Say more.

Is it like "The Slavoj Žižek game" except with Marina Abramović instead of Slavoj Žižek?

https://medium.com/the-hairpin/the-best-time-i-pretended-i-h...

that is one of the most pretentious things ive ever read

Perhaps you mean that as an insult, but IMHO that's what makes it funny.

Some of the references regional or are dated, since it is from 10 years ago.

It also requires some ideological bubble where people care too much what other people know and think. Otherwise someone would never bother that kind of an educational talk with a stranger.

I played kind of the same thing a little while ago. I and a friend wanted to watch a movie, "Blast of Silence" it was called. We met in the bar two people, one of them I knew, the other one asked what we were about to watch, I answered "Blast of Silence", pronouncing it completely wrong (our mother tongue is some sort of German), she thought I made a joke and I told her with a completely straight face that I didn't learn English in school as I was going to a very basic school. I had to completely rely on the subtitles. She was a little bit embarrassed to have brought it up. moral of the story: you have to play dumb convincingly then you can have a little bit of fun

Yes, it is, and that's the irony, making it meta, which makes it the very kind of pretentious bullshit it is critiquing, which makes it brilliant, which also makes it bullshit, which is amusing. It's great satire.

A version of this I've experienced before is when someone's trying to "pill" you on some ideology that you've already examined and tossed aside. They keep trying to educate you on it. Like the problem is you don't get it. You can't even get across that no, in fact, you do get it, and you don't accept it.

A decent red flag to detect typical New-Yorker intellectual fart sniffers.

Someone should make a site for literature, music, art, etc. that uses a filter to exclude anything from New York.

I mean it's not like everything from New York is bad, but even the good stuff there is eclipsed by the sheer volume and assumed gravitas of pretentious crap. (Apparently there's now a whole scene there of right-wing pretentious crap too, so this is by no means a political dig.)

It'd be kind of like Kagi's "small web" switch. Show me the great painter of incredibly moving scenes in some college town in Michigan who lives in a borderline squat and can't pay her bills or the indie hillbilly trip-hop crossover band in Oklahoma doing something original and actually good.

The net was supposed to be all about this but algorithms have kind of ruined it by algorithmically promoting attention bait, like an automated version of the pretentious gravitas machine but with even worse taste.

That would be amazing. Idk if you're hating on NYC but yeah, artists go there for career exposure so it would be interesting to somehow gain easy access to all of those who haven't sought exposure through the main institutional channels

I'm not really hating on NYC so much as the pretentious gravitas machine that seems to be permanently stuck on early-mid 20th century avant garde tropes and derivatives of them. There just happens to be a crapload of that in New York, and a ton of people who want to be in and around that scene, so much so that an anti-NYC filter would be useful.

Years ago I lived in a little town called Asheville, NC. I've heard it's not as good as it used to be but back then... the sheer number of unbelievable artists that nobody had ever heard of and were living at or near poverty was staggering. I miss strolling through downtown and stopping into galleries and routinely seeing pieces that were moving. I really wish I'd collected more of it or at least taken notes and written down names. The place was also covered in graffiti far more interesting and clever than most of Banksy. I photographed a little of it. Should have photographed more.

Apparently there's a number of small towns and medium sized cities with concentrations like this, because seldom can artists genuinely committed to their own visions afford to live in a place like NYC. The reason you saw a lot of genuinely innovative art there once was that it was cheap because it was dirty and crime-ridden. Now people like that go to little towns, medium sized cities in the interior, and the middle of nowhere.

I do think going to NYC can be actively harmful though... there's been two musicians I genuinely loved who made incredible original visionary stuff in places like Ann Arbor MI and Mississippi and then moved to NYC and their stuff became dull atonal ambient click-noise junk. Cause that's avant garde, I guess.

Tangentially...

I've heard there is now a quietly but explicitly well-funded detachment of far-right and "alt-right" New Yorker artists and intellectuals making right-wing coded pretentious crap. (Most pretentious crap is left-coded but it does not have to be.) Maybe this is what will finally kill the thing I'm talking about.

Excellent, I will be copying you, and hope we meet. JK, seriously curious how this works out at an art-opening.

Dollars to donuts the only thing standing in the way of you having a mutually meaningful conversation with anyone in this set of people is your low effort filter.

People who say stuff like this are just signaling. Same exact thing as the people that “don’t care about fashion” yet wear the same hoodie jeans uniform as everyone else.

You’re not wrong in general but I happen to be dead serious. I’m a little closer to the art world professionally than many, YMMV.

Curious where you’re finding these people.

Walk Through Walls: A Memoir https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/288046/walk-through-walls-by... also covers her relationship with Ula.

Easy read, personal & entertaining. Highly recommended.

Also if you’re interested in this type of art, look up Tehching Hsieh, who was an inspiration to Abramović. He did some really cool stuff and only got recognition in the last 15 years or so.

These self-proclaimed conceptual artists entire 'work' consists of doing stupid and pointless things in public to get money and attention and then act pretentiously about it. In other words, they invented the concept of influencer 30 or 40 years before it was mainstream on the internet.

She's always been so cringey. Like when she let people beat her up and called it art.

The world became a much more fun and interesting place for me when I stopped rejecting things on the basis of cringe.

Good for you. Have you seen her performance art?

I saw a docco about her and found it entertaining and interesting. I haven't seen her work in person, have you?

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