I rediscovered my individuality complex at the Marina Abramović exhibit

I very vividly remember my first point of contact with Marina Abramović's art, because it (of course) occurred on the Internet, at a time when my young, impressionable mind was (of course) in its spongiest and most malleable state. I was (of course) making sure to feed it well - with a just about endless stream of brain rot-inducing conspiracy theory videos ever so sporadically interspersed by Minecraft Survival Let's Plays. Sometime during one of my usual perusals of Lady Gaga is a Clone/Satanist/Reptile (PROOF) clips and the sort, I stumbled upon a comment containing a name that I had heard once or twice before. This (of course) led me down a rabbit hole - and next thing you know, approximately-twelve-year-old me was watching Spirit Cooking.

To help illustrate what my developing brain was exposed to, I'll tell you a bit more about this upload because, sure enough, it is still up. And though new comments have long since buried the old, the comment section is still just as I remember it. Basically, Spirit Cooking is a ten-minute clip of Abramović painting what appear to be instructions on the walls of an Italian gallery - in pigs' blood. The description (of course) offers little more context than that, but the commenters are (of course) ready to help me out. How do we know this is pigs' blood and not the blood of little children that go missing every year? they ask. This is not art, this is a Satanist ritual, they say. For good measure, there is obviously some mention of the global elite, some Bible verses, some pleas to turn back while you still can, et cetera. Though Abramović has (to my knowledge) always adamantly denied ties to Satanism, this fact seems to matter very little in shaping the public discourse around Spirit Cooking - and even less in dampening its connection to all kinds of conspiracies. In fact, it was very difficult for me to find anything about the piece that was not related to the controversy surrounding it.

Looking at my surname and that familiar suffix at the end, you may think that I would have already known something about the life and work of Marina Abramović, or that I would have at least made an effort to learn about her at a more age-appropriate time. I have to disappoint you - I never really did. Ascribe it to a lack of trying, to how unrefined my taste in art is, or to how little I may be in touch in my culture - in a way, you might be right. However, what comes to my mind first is a memory of shame. Taking into account my watch history at the time (and my age), you can imagine what kind of effect this clip had on me - but for reasons I was not yet able to articulate, I was all the more impacted by the fact that such an evil and strange woman had come out of my country, the same country that I was from, and was now famous for such heinous acts. I felt as if everyone else would make this connection too, and it made me deeply uncomfortable - as if I were being claimed by her, invited to her blood dinner where the global elites feast together with the primitive Balkan world. The image of the little doll-like figure in the corner of the room, and the words With a sharp knife cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand / eat the pain bleeding from the gallery wall remained etched into my little sponge-psyche for years to come.¹

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While there was most definitely no Spirit Cooking at her exhibit at the Stedelijk, when faced with such an overwhelming explosion of body and the bodily in one place, I certainly did feel something cooking within my spirit (sorry). Videos upon videos on endless loop showcasing the limits of the physical, hyperbolized and tested and then tested again and again and again, turn Marina (often with her then-partner Ulay) into the prototypical. This could be anyone's body, I think. It could be mine. This could be anyone's relationship, I think. It could be mine. In a series of photographs, she takes medication that makes her muscles twitch uncontrollably, then medication that tranquillises her. In another, she is passed out as a star-shaped fire burns around her. In yet another, her face is expressionless as people touch her, cut her, and take her clothes off.

As I am engulfed into sound and image and shoulder brush and primary colour, I realise that I am experiencing a sort of inversion to what twelve-year-old me felt watching Spirit Cooking for the first time - a frantic search for similarity, a desperate likening, a justification. I find myself so attracted to the idea that there is some kind of secret understanding between Marina and I - that yes, her body is the prototypical body, but that it is somehow most prototypical of mine. That when she is posted in front of the camera saying words as they come to her mind, I am gaining something from it that people who have to read the subtitles would never be able to parse. And much like the commenters feeding my sponge-brain the secret inner workings of the Satanist elite, I believe that it is I who is privy to the true meaning of Marina Abramović's work.

At the same time, there is a pointlessness looming in the back of this crazed attempt and it does not escape me how futile it is. No amount of familiar newspaper clippings, black-and-white photographs and letters written in Cyrillic cursive can blind me to the abundance of differences between Marina and I. From her life in Yugoslavia - which had, by the time I was born, long since merged with borrowed and new ideas of politics, identity and, by extension, the body - to her life in the capital, generational differences and the conception of the spiritual her (especially later) art hinges on. As I walk through the Stedelijk trying to claim her body as mine, I am acutely aware of how irrelevant it would be to me that she used to look a little bit like my aunt. If I were not two thousand kilometres and a couple of cultures away from what I've loved and struggled with calling my own, the thought would probably never even cross my mind. And it's probably just because of the eyebrows anyway.

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I recently sent a close friend in Serbia a blurb from the museum wall, titled The Communist Body. It describes how Abramović's work has been shaped by her Yugoslav upbringing, and "her perception of Balkan identity as bound up in extremes of violence and eroticism". I sent it to her because I was so touched by the text, feeling as if it described my relationship to where I am to a T. To my surprise, my friend adamantly disagreed with its basic premise - she was bothered by this idea of the Balkans, felt that it was stale and contributing not only to discord within the region, but also to a negative perception of us within the wider (Western) world. I wondered how I would feel about the same text had I not moved to the Netherlands. Would I also feel a need to move past this narrative? Would I be ashamed of how I am perceived by the omnipresent entity of the vaguely Western comment section?

Though I believe it to be true, I am still not sure whether my relationship with my body has been shaped by my upbringing. However, it definitely seems to have shaped my relationship with the body of Marina Abramović. As I cling on to the traces of my great aunt's face in her sombre expression, in a country I will forever be a stranger to, I wonder: if I tried to unbind my idea of the Balkans from its extremes of violence of eroticism, what would be left? Of her work, of its impact on me? What would be left of me?

¹I've since (hopefully) grown a few neurons which sometimes attempt to collaborate and produce an Independent Thought and as such, I've tried to find more context about the piece and all I can say is, if you try to do the same thing yourself, do not under any circumstances type "reddit" at the end of your query.