distance

Leave your house with a pair of scissors and 9 envelopes. I want you to find a place that is crowded and familiar, somewhere you recognise that is comfortable. We are going to play with this. Find a partner. A person. Your teacher, your friend, a friend who is no longer a friend, anything, anyone will do, really. It can be one of the passerbys on the street, but you need something or someone who can respond to you. (Someone with something to offer and that could be almost anyone or no one). Have them the scissors and offer some of your hair, in exchange for a secret. How much they cut is up to them, where they cut is up to them. Ask them, as they are cutting, what is their greatest shame - I am sure there are many. If they insist on none, ask them of their greatest sorrow, greatest burden. There will be a few of these. If you so wish, tell them one of yours also.

Break away. Before you do, tell them you will yell this into the world. They have made their secret yours. What you do with it is up to you. Place your cut hair into the envelope and in turn, hand them this piece of yourself. Take two steps back, take five, take as many as you want or as you need, in any direction you fancy, until you feel you are a comfortable distance now from this person and their greatest hatred, sorrow, or burden, but as you stretch this distance, I ask you to hold this secret in your mind. Right at the front, pressing against your temporal lobe, yearning to escape in all of its unease.

When you are ready and far apart from one another, scream it out, vomit this secret into the air in the howls of your voices. People will look at you, that is fine, too. They will think it is your secret, but you know better. Exhale out this sorrow. You do not feel empty. There is no lightness that will encase you gently. It is not your burden you have unloaded after all, it is theirs.

You are done when you have no more envelopes.

“Rhythm 0” - Marina Abramovic, 1974

When a performance artist closes the distance between the viewer and themselves, they are turning that distance into an object. Something that can be touched, dismissed, stretched and moulded into whatever it is they wish it to be. Into a weapon, a pillow, a cave, into which you are left screaming your deepest desires. Into a void, into which you can no longer see yourself, or anybody else on the other side.

Marina Abramovic has closed the distance between what it is to perform and be performed upon, what it is to be viewed and to view, and almost recklessly, if not daringly, brings her performance art into life to expose what it truly means to be human. To understand that we are always, at once, viewing and being viewed. That we are active whenever we are passive, and that we hold in our hands more responsibility than we could ever deserve.

Never before has a nervousness encased me, and a great unease and disgust at ourselves, when I witnessed a gun being pointed to her head. As I observed her being gradually stripped into half undress, and finally, as she too, shed her skin into true nakedness.

I will tell you, as many surely will, that the true boiling point finally hit when somebody threatened to shoot her. It was chaos, a depressing mayhem. As anarchy always is. Without a point to direct our energies, humans become agitated. There must be a place to send it all. All of our frustrations, our rage, our sorrow, our confusion and disenfranchisement - even if it must be to those who do not deserve it.

We did not need Abramovic to show us this, but we also needed her to show us this. We only listen, after all, when something that is face is shown to us in a most outrageous manner, let alone in the most outrageous manner by an artist.